Jean Hoerni

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planar_process
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hoerni



Jean Hoerni developed the planar process, while working at the Fairchild Semiconductor, the planar process was a semiconductor industry used to build individual units of a transistor, and in turn, connect those components together. This is the process of how modern integrated circuits are built. They would eventually just take a piece of metal, and lay it over the entire device, and let it wire itself, so they do not have to manually wire it. Thus, making it easier, and run faster then it would if you would have to manually wire it.

This process that he invented made the chips in the computer smaller, but they would be able to hold more capacity of knowledge. Now, instead of computers being the size of an entire room, they can be set right on your lap. This process allows us to take our computers everywhere instead of just in one place. If Jean Hoerni would not have invented this process, we might still be using these ginormous computers, and we would not be able to advance into the future, thus creating difficulties in advanced learning, and web surfing. This would have impacted the lives of many teenagers, and younger adults, because we have more Internet knowledge, and computer knowledge, than most older adults.