The genesis of low power electronics can be traced to the invention of the bipolar transistor in 1947. Elimination of the suppressive requirements for several watts of filament power and several hundred volts of anode voltage in vacuum tubes in exchange for transistor operation in the tens of milliwatts range was a breakthrough of unmatched importance in low power electronics. The capability to fully exploit the superb low power assets of the bipolar transistor was provided by a second breakthrough, the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958