The first semiconductor particle detectors between 1943 and 1955 have been developed to serve as compact particle energy spectrometers. It soon became evident that with these devices improved energy resolution can be obtained in comparison with gaseous and scintillation-based detectors, and at a cost that is much lower than for the superior magnetic spectrometer systems. A variety of physics experiments and applications have become possible, in particular after 1970 with the high purity germanium detectors. The segmentation of semiconductor devices has been tried in parallel also since the early days but the need for matched readout electronics remained largely unfulfilled until 1990-2000. Then in the early 1980s a few people developed dense (C)MOS signal processing circuits for silicon detectors. This eventually allowed the exponential increase in the application of position sensitive detectors in 1, 2 and 3 dimensions. Several new fields of application have opened up, most notably tracking in elementary particle physics and space experiments, which at present are installing several hundreds of square meters of silicon detectors. For early imaging devices in 1971 the lack of electronics has been circumvented in the MOS charge coupled devices. Now the use of new approaches in silicon technology allow alternative techniques that become complementary to CCD for imaging over large parts of the wavelength spectrum. The continuous interaction between microelectronics development and semiconductor detector technology fuels progress and leads to new applications.

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