Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing: A big step for TI integrated circuits

On July 20, 1969, TI aerospace engineer Verie Lima was swimming with his family at a community pool in the Dallas area when he heard a woman yell, “It’s coming!”

“Man is going to land on the moon,” Verie said. “When they heard the news, everyone in the pool jumped out and got back to their cars almost at the same time.”

Verie, his wife and three children were home within minutes, watching the historic moment of man's landing on the moon on television in the living room.

“What I think about most is the technology behind making the moon shot possible,” said Verie, who has retired from TI.

For many engineers like Verie, a circuit designer at TI who worked on the unmanned space program, the moon landing was a dream and the culmination of years of hard work. TI engineers developed products to guide the Apollo 11 lunar probe model, to start and terminate rocket sprints, and to control radar and navigation devices, all of which were critical to a successful moon landing.

Verie isHe was deeply moved by the sight of Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon. But at the same time, he was still thinking about his work.

"It was very important to me that Apollo 11 succeeded because if it had failed, the rest of the space program would have been on hold," he said. "Successful landing on the moon meant I could continue to do that."

Striving to be the first in the space race

In the 1960s and 1970s, Verie helped develop integrated circuits for the Mariner and Voyager spacecraft as he and thousands of TI employees sought to get ahead in the space race.

Sid Parker, a chemist who has since retired from TI, developed a process for making mercury cadmium telluride, a material used in forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras that sense infrared radiation.

"Forward-looking infrared can produce images with extremely fine detail and has a variety of uses, including gaining insight into the depths of space," Sid said.

Solving the technological challenges to enable space exploration was critical to achieving President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon in the 1960s.

“Before he died, Kennedy said the dream of landing on the moon would come true within a decade. We firmly believe that we can be the leader in developing the technology to land on the moon,” Verie said.

In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union successfully photographed the far side of the moon and took the lead in the space race before Apollo 11 came along.

“We tried to keep up with the Soviets, but we couldn’t,” Verie said. “We were behind. And the Soviets really had their own activities on the moon.”

Many of the integrated circuits that Verie designed decades ago are still used in space today. For example, Voyager II has not yet been retired from the spacecraft. The spacecraft uses technology from the 1970s to continue exploring planets and has reached more than 13 billion miles from Earth. Verie said the pictures taken by the spacecraft have answered some of the mysteries of the universe, such as whether there is life on Mars. All of this is achieved with just enough electricity to power three light bulbs.

“The Voyager program was as important as the moon landing because it did something that no one had ever done before and no one has ever done before. It achieved more than 40 years of space exploration,” Verie said.

Solving the technical challenges of space flight

Without the invention of the integrated circuit, none of the Voyager, Apollo, or Mariner space missions would have been possible. Eleven years before the first human landing on the moon, TI engineer Jack Kilby handcrafted the first integrated circuit in a lab. Although not immediately recognized, the integrated circuit would help solve the technical problems of space flight because it allowed engineers to place multiple electronic circuits on a small, flat piece of semiconductor material, reducing weight and saving power.

“With less weight, less power and less volume, you can put more experiments on the spacecraft,” Verie said.

Integrated circuits must have made huge advances between September 12, 1958, when Jack first introduced the technology, and July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong took his “small step” for mankind.

“The problem is not the circuits or components, but using the right technology in a zero-G environment,” Verie said.

“At TI, it took us just 11 years to develop a new integrated circuit for the most critical mission in aerospace history – Apollo 11 – that was as innovative as the first integrated circuit,” said Ahmad Bahai, chief technology officer.

cut costs

In 1959, the U.S. Air Force funded a project at TI to study the manufacturing process of integrated circuits. The resulting pilot project reduced the cost of integrated circuits from $1,000 to $450 each, and in the following years, the manufacturing industry developed, which further reduced the cost of each chip to $25.

TI engineers designed the first integrated circuit device to travel into space aboard a rocket in 1962. It was used to create a counter to study radiation trapped in the Earth's magnetic field.

In 1964, our engineers built the command probe/decoder for Ranger 7. The space probe successfully sent the first close-up images of the lunar surface, allowing scientists and engineers to determine the safest landing area for the Apollo astronauts.

Today, integrated circuits remain the cornerstone of modern electronics, growing exponentially in capacity, power, size, and speed. Integrated circuits power virtually every smart device you own and many of the things you touch every day. A modern integrated circuit, smaller than a dime, may contain billions of transistors.

“A smartphone has 240,000 times more memory than the components on the Voyager spacecraft and is 100,000 times faster,” Verie said. “It’s incredible.”

Verie believes that the future development of technology will exceed our imagination.

“We have come a long way since Jack Kilby invented the first integrated circuit in 1958 in a TI lab. I will remember it all.”