"Computer chips are an almost invisible part of our modern lives, and yet they make much of what's "modern" in them possible. Even the tech-averse among us depend on their hidden capabilities. From DVDs, medical scanners, and today's fuel-efficient automobiles, to space travel, cable television, and those annoying musical greeting cards, microelectronics have come to define the information age." "How did this revolutionary technology emerge, and how did it happen so quickly? In Microchip, Jeffrey Zygmont draws on extensive research and countless interviews with seminal engineers to trace the fascinating story of the chip through four decades of invention, improvement, and, ultimately, proliferation." "This story begins with the ambitious (and later Nobel-prize winning) Jack Kilby, on his way to a new and more promising job at Texas Instruments. Knowing that circuits had to be smaller, faster, and cheaper in order to manage more complex calculations, Kilby came up with a brilliant idea: to integrate all the circuit's parts inside a solid chip, thereby paving the way for more miniature electronics. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the same idea occurred almost simultaneously to Bob Noyce, later to become famous as a founder of Intel. The ensuing patent battle unleashed a competitive, cutthroat race to develop next-generation chips, as companies realized that to stay afloat, they had to set the pace of innovation. Stragglers wouldn't survive." From that fateful year of 1958 to the present, Zygmont follows the evolution of the chip - as much a human story as a technological one