Walter Houser Brattain Walter Houser Brattain Walter Houser Brattain (; February 10, 1902 – October 13, 1987) was an American physicist at Bell Labs who, along with fellow scientists John Bardeen and William Shockley, invented the point-contact transistor in December 1947. They shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention. Brattain devoted much of his life to research on surface states. Walter Brattain was born in Xiamen, Fujian, China, to American parents Ross R. Brattain and Ottilie Houser Brattain. Ross R. Brattain was a teacher at the Ting-Wen Institute, a private school for Chinese boys. Both parents were graduates of Whitman
Invention of the integrated circuit about 5,000 standard logic ICs, and during their manufacture, the price for an IC dropped from US$1,000 to US$20–30. In this way, NASA and the Pentagon prepared the ground for the non-military IC market. The resistor-transistor logic of first ICs by Fairchild and Texas Instruments was vulnerable to electromagnetic interference, and therefore in 1964 both companies replaced it by the diode-transistor logic [91]. Signetics released the diode-transistor family Utilogic back in 1962, but fell behind Fairchild and Texas Instruments with the expansion of production. Fairchild was the leader in the number of ICs sold in 1961–1965, but Texas Instruments was