Semiconductor and Hardware Engineering

This group gathers pioneers of computer systems organization whose primary contribution was the physical electronics that computers are built from, including transistor and integrated circuit development, semiconductor fabrication, digital circuit design techniques such as the Karnaugh map and Quine-McCluskey method, the flip-flop and other switching circuits, magnetic and solid state memory and storage technology, and the founding of semiconductor companies such as Fairchild and Intel that supplied the industry. It follows the Semiconductor devices strand within the ACM Computing Classification System's Hardware area as applied to computer systems. Their shared work is the physical component and circuit level of computing, as distinct from how those components are assembled into a machine's architecture or the software and algorithms that run on top of them.