Jack Kilby’s invention of the integrated circuit ushered in a digital age of notebook computers, cellular phones and countless electronic devices yet to come.
Forty-two years later, the man who helped transform the way Americans work and entertain themselves gained international recognition for his feat. He won the Nobel Prize for physics on Oct. 10.
“My goal was simply to make things more efficient and less costly” for the electronics industry, the typically understated Kilby said at a news conference at Texas Instruments Inc.’s Dallas headquarters.
Kilby, 76, performed his landmark research in a semiconductor laboratory on the Texas Instruments’ campus during a hot summer 42 years ago.
A decade passed before people realized the importance of his work. Now chips, which pack millions of transistors on a surface smaller than a postage stamp, are the chief building blocks of the vast computer networks that form the new information economy.
For all the importance of his invention, for all the 60 patents he has received and the numerous awards he has won, culminating with the Nobel, the tall and lanky Kilby remains a quiet and reflective figure.
An engineer more enamored of practical technology than bells and whistles, he keeps computers and other electronic gear long after most people would have thrown them out. When interviewed three years ago, he defended as completely adequate a PC that was already several generations behind.
“I have some modern electronics at home, but probably less than most of you,” he told reporters at the news conference. “I may be the only person in the room without a cell phone.”
Although he rose through the management ranks in research, Kilby never served in Texas Instruments’ executive suite. He left the company in 1970, frustrated with life in a big corporation and convinced that creativity required more freedom.
In recent years, he has spent much of his time working by himself in a small office, smoking cigarettes at his desk, and serving as a consultant to different start-ups.
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Three years ago, Texas Instruments opened a new research building that it named the Kilby Center in his honor, hanging a huge banner outside that said, “The Chip that Jack Built Changed the World.” About the same time, he resumed consulting for the semiconductor giant.
Now he keeps a second office at the company and often lunches with engineers, chatting about technological obstacles of the day.
Kilby, who also co-invented the pocket calculator, will receive half of the $915,000 award. The other half will be split by Zhores I. Alferov of Russia and Herbert Kroemer of the University of California-Santa Barbara for work in solid-state physics that also helped create modern information technology.
Kilby is one of the great inventors of our time, said Michael Riordan, physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Although he didn’t make any fundamental breakthroughs in physics, “he took the results and the knowledge of semiconductor physics and assembled them into basically the most important device of our age–the integrated circuit.”
All this from an engineer who has described himself as a B student and who failed the entrance exam at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The idea for the integrated circuit didn’t come in a single brilliant flash.
The challenge was to overcome what was called the “tyranny of numbers.” Although the transistor, invented 10 years earlier, made it theoretically possible to build a computer the size of a wristwatch, such a device couldn’t be manufactured because there was no way to link electrically the vast number of required components.
Kilby was hired by Texas Instruments in May 1958 to tackle this obstacle. He soon found himself working alone in the lab, not by choice, but because as a newcomer, he didn’t have the seniority to participate in the July vacation exodus.
He methodically built on one small advance after another, until he came up with an idea for making all the parts out of a single block of material. That way, they all would be connected–or integrated–eliminating any need for soldered wiring. By September, he had built a working model.
The solution seems simple in retrospect, but was anything but obvious at the time.
Nor was the impact of the chip obvious. “I don’t think anybody could have visualized what has happened,” Kilby said.
“The integrated circuit has made possible a millionfold decrease in the cost of electronics. We had no basis for projecting that. We had no basis for even guessing what new applications that would open up.”
Kilby had to fight for credit for his invention. A few months after he demonstrated the integrated circuit, the same idea occurred to Robert Noyce, an engineer working at a small company in Northern California called Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. Both men filed for patents, resulting in a protracted legal fight. It eventually ended in a draw when the companies agreed to share the rights.
Engineers generally regard Kilby and Noyce, who went on to a lucrative, high-profile career as a co-founder of Intel Corp., as inventors of the chip. Over the years, the two men developed a cordial relationship. Noyce died of a heart attack in 1990.