Translations:Siemens/20/en

As the upturn in the home appliances sector ground to a halt in the 1970s, the era of microelectronics and the computer dawned at the same time. Basic research had been ongoing in these areas since the 1950s. Siemens successfully entered the microelectronics market in 1953 with a patent for producing extremely pure silicon, the basic component of microchips. Thanks to successes achieved in miniaturization, the first microprocessors and memory chips appeared on the market in the 1970s. Memory and processor capacity developed rapidly. The performance of the processors and chips doubled approximately every four years.