Egyptian-born American engineer and entrepreneur who revolutionized transistor technology by developing the MOSFET in the early 1960s and pioneered the digital revolution.
Consider an industry, with an annual production of 1 trillion 115 billion devices; Let the total annual turnover generated by these devices be over 500 billion dollars.
Imagine an industry, from the refrigerator in our home to the washing machine, from the phone in our pocket to the watch on our wrist, from the elevator we take to the elevator, from the computer in front of us to almost all the machines in the factory, from the traffic light on the street to the payment system in the subway, from the ATM of the bank to the safe of the market, it is no longer possible to do without it.
Mohamed M. Atalla (August 4, 1924 – December 30, 2009) was an Egyptian-American engineer, physicist, cryptographer, inventor and entrepreneur. He was a semiconductor pioneer who made important contributions to modern electronics. He is best known for inventing the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor) in 1959 (along with his colleague Dawon Kahng), which along with Atalla's earlier surface passivation and thermal oxidation processes, revolutionized the electronics industry.
The name of this industry is the semiconductor industry. Yes, I'm talking about the 'chips' you know. A tiny 'chip' that most people think only exists in computers.
Today, we cannot imagine any area of modern life without them. Therefore, when we consider this industry, which has an annual turnover of half a trillion dollars, together with all areas of life, we come across almost the total size of the world economy. It would not be wrong to call modern life and the economy the 'chip economy' today.
The science that created this gigantic thing is called quantum mechanics. We wouldn't be able to build today's semiconductor industry without the famous quantum wavefunction equation of quantum mechanics. In this respect, the world owes a great debt of gratitude to the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger.
But not just Schrodinger. And then there is Mohammed Attala, an extremely extraordinary inventor, whose name we should normally mention among giants such as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, but little known.
The 'chip' or technical name for semiconductors is MOS or MOSFET. In other words, 'metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor.'
What makes MOS or MOSFET important is that it allows placing more than one transistor on the same ground. I say more than once, if the phone you are using is the iPhone 14 and it has Apple's M2 processor inside, know that there are exactly 20 billion transistors in this one processor, you read it right, 20 billion transistors. Here is Mohammed Atalla, the man who invented the technology that makes this possible.
He was born in Egypt in 1924, graduated from Cairo University as a mechanical engineer, and then received his master's and doctorate degrees in mechanical engineering from Purdue University in the USA.
Because he was not a physicist or physical chemist, he was seen as a bit of a disgrace wherever he worked, but in the end, he created MOS in 1959. He did this by finding a method to reset the quantum effect experienced by electrons to be used as transistors. Yes, a mechanical engineer did it.
However, Bell Lab, where he worked at that time, did not understand his invention and did not care about it. He left Bell, first to HP, and then to Fairchilds, where future Intel founders Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce were among the founding bosses. And it was there that he began to bring his invention to life, when Moore and Noyce founded their own company Intel, they unquestionably started manufacturing with MOS technology, and the semiconductor industry as we know it today was born.
It is not actually Intel that gave this name to Silicon Valley; It is none other than Muhammed Atalla, who uses silicon instead of germanium in MOS.
Do not think that Muhammad Attala's adventure ends here, he does not invent anything else in life. No, he's not standing there. This Egyptian man enters the field of computer security in 1972, establishes a company under his own name, and first produces a piece of hardware and builds computer security with it. Almost all ATM devices you see on the street today have this hardware installed. That way, you can safely withdraw your money and continue to deposit money into your account safely thanks to that device.
But it's not just that. There is that 4-digit PIN (Personnel Identification Number) that you enter when withdrawing money from an ATM or trying to open your phone's screen, Mohammed Attala invents it and adds it to computer communication security.
Then, after the spread of the internet, American banks demand internet security from him. Until that day, big companies, especially banks, provide internet security with a wall (FireWall) they have built around their computer systems. Attala abandons this idea and creates an architecture of password protection for every single important thing (e.g. e-mail, a particular file, a particular computer subsystem) as well. Later, the RSA standard encryption, which we all use everywhere, was developed on this architecture today. The encryption does not belong to Attala, but the main architecture we use is his work.
This awesome man passed away in 2009. But as I said at the beginning of the article, we all live our modern lives thanks to the technology on which it is based.