More, better, faster: the growth of computer chips

Notebooks, smartphones, Blu-ray players -- name a gadget, and it probably wouldn't exist today without the integrated circuit.
Not only did the IC give rise to the modern consumer electronics industry, but it has also kept that industry moving at breakneck speed, allowing for cheaper, smaller and more-powerful chips to be produced year after year with dazzling consistency.
So, it's easy to forget that it's only been five decades since Texas Instruments' Jack
Kilby demonstrated the first working IC, a discovery that earned him a Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000. While that device started out as nothing more than a single transistor with a smattering of other components on a thin slice of germanium, its silicon progeny now contain hundreds of transistors in a space the size of a single red blood cell.

That was from Wired, which also has a neat slideshow