In the 1950s, the term "interconnect problem" referred to the dilemma that engineers could design digital electronic systems that were much more complex than could be manufactured, since, at the time, all individual circuit elements had to be manually placed and hand-soldered onto a circuit board. Although active devices (transistors) and passive devices (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) were mass produced at low unit cost, the price of an electronic system was dominated by the cost of interconnecting these components at the circuit-board level. In addition to the high cost of interconnection, problems existed due to the resulting system size and complexity along with low reliability brought about by the large numbers of solder joints. The invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 greatly reduced this problem. The resulting orders-of-magnitude increases in function per unit cost, volume, and mass are well known and, in fact, still drive a large portion of our economy.
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