Jack Kilby

• Born: November 8, 1923
• Birthplace: Jefferson City, Missouri
• Died: June 20, 2005
• Place of death: Dallas, Texas

Cocreator of the integrated circuit

Primary Field: Computer science

Specialty: Computer hardware

Primary Company/Organization: Texas Instruments

Introduction

Integrated circuits are the foundation for modern electronics. Jack Kilby was coinventor of the integrated circuit. Kilby also patented the portable electronic calculator and a thermal printer among his sixty patents. The Australian Computer Society's Information Age magazine listed Kilby as number one in its list of top fifty innovators, ranking ahead of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Douglas Engelbart, Gordon E. Moore, and others. According to the chairman of Texas Instruments, Tom Engibous, Kilby ranks with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers for the significance of his contributions to the way the world's people now live.

Early Life

Jack St. Clair Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kansas, where his father ran the local power company. When Kilby was in high school, an ice storm knocked out power lines. Kilby used amateur radio to let his audience know what was happening. That was Kilby's first exposure to the ability of electronics to bring people closer and reduce the fears generated by being isolated. Kilby became fascinated by electronics, which he studied at the University of Illinois. He spent two years at Illinois; then, during World War II, he enlisted in the Army, where he went through radio operator school in the Signal Corps and then served in the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) in communications. He completed his undergraduate work after the war ended, taking electrical engineering courses at the University of Illinois in 1946.

Anticipating his career after college, Kilby sent letters to more than two dozen electronics companies inquiring about work, and in 1948 he took a position at Centralab (a subsidiary of Globe-Union), located in Milwaukee, which produced switches, volume controls, ceramic capacitors, and other devices for consumer electronics. At the same time, he earned a master's in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin Extension in Milwaukee, awarded in 1950. Kilby's first job at Centralab was to work on silk screen circuits to make resistor-capacitor combinations for the burgeoning manufacture of television sets. This work involved integrating vacuum tubes into larger circuits and standardizing connections to make not only televisions but also hearing aids and other electronic devices. Like all the best engineers of the time, Kilby faced a reality that the technology available was inadequate to allow them to create the electrical products they could envision. The technology required assembling and connecting by hand hundreds, perhaps thousands, of components, soldering them, and then connecting them to vacuum tubes.

Life's Work

Throughout the 1950s, vacuum tube technology had defined the limits of progress in electronics. The transistor had been developed by William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen at Bell Laboratories. However, the technology was not yet commercially disseminated. In 1952, however, Bell licensed the technology to more than two dozen companies, among them Centralab, and Kilby was among approximately one hundred engineers sent to attend lectures at Bell Labs' headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to learn about the technology. Kilby then returned to Centralab to work on making transistors for use in Centralab's hearing aids.

In May 1958, Kilby moved to Dallas and joined Texas Instruments to work in microminiaturization. His job was to figure out how to shrink electronics, to make the components as small as possible. The Signal Corps Micro-Module program was working with the idea that the components could be put onto small square ceramic wafers and connected to each other by three riser wires along the edges. RCA had the prime contract. Kilby did not like the idea. He wanted to make all the components in one operation with the same material. Kilby was thinking about capacitors and resistors and transistors, about how to array them, how to make them most efficient. On July 24, 1958, he had an idea. If capacitors, resistors, and transistors were all made of the same material instead of being made of different material as the conventional wisdom dictated, then the same chip could be resistor, capacitor, or transistor, and he could connect without restriction to form a circuit. He said that he used the bulk effect in the silicon for resistors and p-n junctions for capacitors. Left alone while the others vacationed, he created the prototype of the integrated circuit with resistors diffused in silicon or using the bulk effect and capacitors using p-n junctions.

Kilby's invention was based on a transistor only a decade old. His working model was the basis for the smart device revolution. He recognized, like all smart engineers, that the massive wiring jobs, the tyranny of numbers, was going to kill electronics. He used the semiconductor germanium, transistors, and wires, and built the prototype, which management did not recognize as significant until he later put it into a working pocket calculator. By September 12, 1958, his idea was to use a sliver of germanium on a piece of glass, half the size of a paper clip, connected to an oscilloscope by a few wires. Kilby threw a switch and his colleagues saw a working circuit. The same idea came to Robert Noyce on the West Coast four months later. Kilby showed his sketches to his bosses and began building the circuit he had demonstrated on September 12. Work continued, and on March 6, 1959, Texas Instruments announced the breakthrough. In 1960, the company sent out chips to customers for evaluation.

Integrated circuits were not an overnight success. They had only tens of components rather than the hundreds or thousands of vacuum tubes. The first major contract was for the Minuteman missile, a contract to design and build twenty-two special circuits, and after that the chip began finding uses in consumer products. In 1966, Kilby found a commercial application when he created the first handheld calculator. By the end of his career, Kilby had more than sixty patents.

The floodgates opened, and engineers' imaginations ran wild. Smaller and smaller chips held more and more components, with a Pentium 4 chip holding 169 million transistors. The microchip made personal computing possible and ever faster. Kilby never ceased to be amazed and delighted at the way his invention spread into unimagined tools, which dropped precipitously in cost.

Kilby shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Zhores I. Alferov and Herbert Kroemer. The latter two received the award, in the words of the Nobel Foundation, “for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics”; the other half of the award went to Kilby's foundational work “for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.” Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, now acknowledged as coinventor of the microchip with Kilby, had died in 1990; he was also a cofounder of Intel. Noyce had used silicon rather than germanium. The legal battle between Texas Instruments and Fairchild was resolved on appeal in Noyce's favor, but before that, in 1966, both sides agreed that Kilby was the originator of the integrated circuit.

Although Kilby's invention became ubiquitous—in computers and mobile phones and elsewhere—he was content to work without notice, just like his integrated circuit. His Nobel lecture incorporated a quote from laser-inventor Charles Townes: “It's like the beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam. ‘No, I didn't build it myself. However, it's based on an idea of mine!’”

Personal Life

While overseeing developments at Texas Instruments, Kilby worked as an independent consultant during leave time. He also held the title of distinguished professor of electrical engineering from 1978 to 1984 or 1985 at Texas A&M University. He loved big band music and considered himself lucky if he could locate a radio station that played it.

After retirement from Texas Instruments in 1983, Kilby continued to consult for the firm and remained in a “significant” relationship with the company. He was awarded the David Sarnoff Award (1966), the Medal of Honor from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1986), the National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology (one of only thirteen to receive the highest technical recognition given by the U.S. government), and the Nobel Prize in Physics (2000). He died from cancer at age eighty-one.

Bibliography

Agarwal, Arun. Nobel Prize Winners in Physics. New Delhi: APH, 2008. Print. Aside from a history of the awards, the work features brief biographies as well as information on the laureates' contributions.

DeAngelis, Gina, and David J. Bianco. Computers: Processing the Data. Minneapolis: Oliver, 2005. Print. Includes a chapter on Noyce and Kilby and the integrated circuit debate.

Gawel, Richard. “Jack Kilby, Inventor of the Integrated Circuit.” Electronic Design. 53.16 (2005): 25. Web. 1 May 2012. A brief overview of Kilby's accomplishment, with a focus on his breakthrough during his first summer Texas Instruments.

Huff, Howard R. Into the Nano Era: Moore's Law Beyond Planar Silicon CMOS. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Print. On the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the integrated circuit, the question is whether Moore's law and increasing capacity/decreasing cost remain valid.

“Jack Kilby.” The Economist, 9 July 2005: 75. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 May 2012. A biographical sketch, from Kilby's early life in Kansas to the end of his career.

Kilby, Jack. “Autobiography.” 8 Dec. 2000. Nobelprize.org. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. Kilby's thousand-word sketch of his life, written upon the occasion of his winning the Nobel Prize in Physics.

---. “An Interview with Jack S. Kilby.” Interview by Arthur L. Norberg. 21 June 1984. Charles Babbage Institute. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. Detailed first-hand coverage of Kilby's entire career to 1984.

---. “Turning Potential into Reality: The Invention of the Integrated Circuit.” 8 Dec. 2000. Nobelprize.org. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. Kilby's Nobel lecture upon his becoming a Nobel laureate in physics “for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.” Recounting the developments that laid the foundation for microcomputing.

Rostky, George. “The IC's Surprising Birth.” Mechanical Engineering 122.6 (2000): 68. Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 May 2012. Overview of the development of the integrated circuit.

Ulanoff, Lance.”Thank You, Jack Kilby.” PC Magazine 27.13 (2008): 8. Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 May 2012. Short sidebar about the significance of Kilby's invention.