by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA Laboratories in 1962. MOS technology enabled Moore's law, the doubling of transistors on an IC chip every two years, predicted by Gordon Moore in 1965. Silicon-gate MOS technology was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild in 1968. Since then, the MOSFET has been the basic building block of modern electronics. The mass-production of silicon MOSFETs and MOS integrated circuit chips, along with continuous MOSFET scaling miniaturization at an exponential pace (as predicted by Moore's law), has since led to revolutionary changes in technology, economy, culture and thinking. The Apollo program which culminated in landing astronauts on the Moon with Apollo 11 in 1969 was enabled by NASA's adoption of advances in semiconductor electronic technology, including MOSFETs in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) and silicon integrated circuit chips in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). The development of MOS integrated circuit technology in the 1960s led to the invention of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. The first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, released in 1971. The Intel 4004 was designed and realized by Federico Faggin at Intel with his silicon-gate MOS technology, along with Intel's Marcian Hoff and Stanley Mazor and Busicom's Masatoshi Shima. This ignited the development of the personal computer. The 4004, a 4-bit processor, was followed in 1973 by the Intel 8080, an 8-bit processor, which made possible the building of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800. See also History of electronic engineering History of electromagnetic theory History of radio References External links Nobel Prize Awards Related to Electrical Engineering (relevant patents included) Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity – Jim Al-Khalili BBC Horizon Electrickery, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Simon Schaffer, Patricia Fara & Iwan Morus (In Our Time, November 4, 2004) de:Elektrotechnik#Geschichte, Entwicklungen und Personen der Elektrotechnik