1.3 How chips pave the Road to the Higgs particle and the attoworld beyond

Scientific knowledge is the basis for new technology, but in return, new technology enables progress in science. One example has been the introduction of semiconductor imagers in astronomy. Telescopes now can go into space, taking stunning pictures and opening up new wavelength windows. Another example will be described in this paper. In the field of elementary particle physics, the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN use custom-designed CMOS chips as key components for the analog signal processing and digital information extraction, and these chips enabled significant discoveries to be made, that of the Higgs particle in particular, after only a few years of operation.