Jack Kilby

Jack Kilby (born Nov. 8, 1923, Jefferson City, Mo., U.S.—died June 20, 2005, Dallas, Texas) was an American engineer and one of the inventors of the integrated circuit, a system of interconnected transistors on a single microchip. In 2000, Kilby was a corecipient, with Herbert Kroemer and Zhores Alferov, of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Education and early career

Kilby was the son of an electrical engineer and, like many inventors of his era, got his start in electronics with amateur radio. His interest began while he was in high school when the Kansas Power Company of Great Bend, Kansas, of which his father was president, had to rely on amateur radio operators for communications after an ice storm disrupted normal service. After serving as an electronics technician in the U.S. Army during World War II, Kilby enrolled in the electrical engineering program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (B.S.E.E., 1947).

After graduation Kilby joined the Centralab Division of Globe Union, Inc., located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was placed in charge of designing and developing miniaturized electronic circuits. He also found time to continue his studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Extension Division (M.S.E.E., 1950). In 1952 Centralab sent Kilby to Bell Laboratories’ headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to learn about the transistor, which had been invented at Bell in 1947 and which Centralab had purchased a license to manufacture. Back at Centralab, Kilby began working on germanium-based transistors for use in hearing aids. He soon realized, however, that he needed the resources of a larger company to pursue the goal of miniaturizing circuits, and in 1958 he switched to another Bell licensee, Texas Instruments Incorporated of Dallas, Texas.

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Career at Texas Instruments

Shortly after his arrival at Texas Instruments (TI), Kilby had his epoch-making “monolithic idea.” Kilby realized that, instead of connecting separate components, an entire electronic assembly could be made as one unit from one semiconducting material by overlaying it with various impurities to replicate individual electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors. Soon Kilby had a working postage-stamp-size prototype manufactured from germanium, and in February 1959 TI filed a patent application for this “miniaturized electronic circuit”—the world’s first integrated circuit. Four months later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation filed a patent application for essentially the same device, but based on a different manufacturing procedure. Ten years later, long after their respective companies had cross-licensed technologies, the courts gave Kilby credit for the idea of the integrated circuit but gave Noyce the patent for his planar manufacturing process, a method for evaporating lines of conductive metal (the “wires”) directly onto a silicon chip.

Although the original integrated circuit (IC) was Kilby’s most important invention, it was only one of more than 50 patents that he was awarded. Many of those patents concerned improvements in IC design and manufacturing, including those for the first IC-powered experimental computer that TI built for the U.S. Air Force in 1961 and for the ICs that TI designed and delivered to the Air Force in 1962 for use in the Minuteman ballistic missile guidance system. In 1965 Kilby invented the semiconductor-based thermal printer. In 1967 he designed the first IC-based electronic calculator, the Pocketronic, gaining himself and TI the basic patent that lies at the heart of all pocket calculators. The Pocketronic required dozens of ICs, making it too complicated and expensive to manufacture for consumers, but by 1972 TI had reduced the number of necessary ICs to one. The introduction in that year of the TI Datamath pocket calculator marked the beginning of the IC’s integration into the very fabric of everyday life. By 1976 the pocket calculator had made the slide rule a museum piece.

Honours and awards

Kilby began a leave of absence from TI in 1970 to pursue independent research, particularly in solar power generation, although he continued as a semiconductor consultant on a part-time basis. He also served (1978–84) as a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station. Among his many honours, Kilby was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1969, the Charles Stark Draper Medal in 1989, and the National Medal of Technology in 1990. In 1997 TI dedicated its new research and development building in Dallas, the Kilby Center. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, breaking with a trend of recognizing only theoretical physicists, awarded half of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics to Kilby for his work as an applied physicist.