Past Forward: RCA's VideoDisc Gamble Paid Off in Chips

In the early 1980s, the RCA VideoDisc entered the burgeoning home video market. If you've never heard of the VideoDisc, don't beat yourself up. The technology quickly lost out in a big way to VHS tape (which itself was eventually swept away by DVDs, which later succumbed to streaming services). But RCA VideoDisc players contained a hidden gem: exquisite sensors capable of measuring capacitance variations at the level of a quintillionth of a farad. These were part of the electronic stylus that sensed the audio and video signal encoded in the groove of each VideoDisc. An enterprising RCA researcher incorporated the sensor into a new kind of microscope, the scanning capacitance microscope. And then a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology built a series of SCMs using similarly cannibalized VideoDisc sensors. After NIST's successful validation, instrument makers commercialized the microscopes, and chipmakers immediately began using them to characterize their integrated circuits, thus opening the door to the next generation of semiconductors.