Very large-scale integration was made possible with the wide adoption of the MOS transistor, originally invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959.[2] Atalla first proposed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit chip in 1960, followed by Kahng in 1961, both noting that the MOS transistor's ease of fabrication made it useful for integrated circuits.[3][4] General Microelectronics introduced the first commercial MOS integrated circuit in 1964.[5] In the early 1970s, MOS integrated circuit technology allowed the integration of more than 10,000 transistors in a single chip.[6] This paved the way for VLSI in the 1970s and 1980s, with tens of thousands of MOS transistors on a single chip (later hundreds of thousands, then millions, and now billions).