In 1948 Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley produced the first semiconductor transistor at the Bell labs. This breakthrough crowned with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 was only the first step of the ongoing digital revolution. The information unit (BIT) was based on semiconducting materials (IT) and the successive development going through the microprocessor integration (Nobel prize in year 2000) opened the way for discovering new materials out of the silicon laboratory, IT from BIT. In this talk I will shortly illustrate the milestones which brought us from early electromechanical computing machines till nowadays highly connected smart devices and describe the attempt started with the work of Fermi, Pasta and Ulam to discover and invent new matter states out of the computer laboratory.
In 1948 Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley produced the first semiconductor transistor at the Bell labs. This breakthrough crowned with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 was only the first step of the ongoing digital revolution. The information unit (BIT) was based on semiconducting materials (IT) and the successive development going through the microprocessor integration (Nobel prize in year 2000) opened the way for discovering new materials out of the silicon laboratory, IT from BIT. In this talk I will shortly illustrate the milestones which brought us from early electromechanical computing machines till nowadays highly connected smart devices and describe the attempt started with the work of Fermi, Pasta and Ulam to discover and invent new matter states out of the computer laboratory.
