THE US engineer and physicist Jack Kilby changed our world. His invention of the integrated circuit revolutionised the way the world communicates and calculates, affecting the lives of us all. The integrated circuit, commonly called the microchip, is the basis of information technology (IT) upon which we all depend.
Sales of integrated circuits total nearly $200 billion a year, and support a world electronics market worth well over a million million US dollars. For his revolutionary developments in the field of electronics Kilby was awarded the Nobel Physics Prize in 2000. He received half of the prize; the German physicist Herbert Kroemer and the Russian Zhores Alferov shared the other half.
Integrated circuits are so important in today’s world because they allow large volumes of information to be transferred in a very short time. They also allow the electronic equipment, particularly computers, needed in IT to be small so that it can fit into offices, homes and even pockets.
Our environment is now flooded with portable electronic equipment — personal computers and laptops, mini-calculators, TV games, mobile phones, microwave ovens and electronic watches — and most of us depend on such things to such an extent that we would be lost without them. IT controls high-tech systems, medical diagnostic equipment, appliances we use at home in our daily lives, and much else. About a billion computers are used worldwide.
The performance of microelectronic circuits is improving a hundredfold every ten years without increase in cost — and there is no end to this improvement in sight. IT is the main driver of the economic success that many societies have experienced in the past 15 years or so. We certainly have much to thank Kilby for.
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John St Clair Kilby was born in 1923 in Grand Bend, Kansas. His father, who ran a small electrical company in rural Kansas, worked with amateur radio operators to communicate with country people who, during storms for example, had lost their electricity supplies and telephone services. This gave Jack Kilby an early interest in amateur radio and sparked his interest in electronics. He decided to become an electronics and electrical engineer.
After finishing his schooling, Kilby tried to get in to the highly respected Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but just failed the admission examination. He went instead to the University of Illinois, but his studies were interrupted by the war and he served in the US Army. In 1947 he received a degree in electrical engineering from Illinois and in, 1950, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.
While studying for his masters degree, Kilby worked for a manufacturer of electronic components in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1958 he moved to Dallas, Texas, to take a job with Texas Instruments, the only company that would allow him to work more or less full-time on the miniaturisation of electronic components. He first demonstrated that an integrated circuit worked on September 12, 1958 — and that date is one of the milestones in the history of technology.
Kilby’s integrated circuit replaced the transistors that had themselves replaced the ordinary vacuum tubes (“radio valves”, as they were called in those days) used in the first computers. The transistor, invented at Bell Laboratories in 1947, consisted of components joined with wires. The size of transistors was, therefore, limited because, as their size decreased, it became impossible to solder the components together.
Kilby’s breakthrough was to use a single block of silicon to contain the entire circuit. His first electronic circuit had a surface area of about a half a square centimetre and was about a millimetre thick. Today’s electronic engineers can accommodate the equivalent of around 100 million transistors in this volume.
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After proving that integrated circuits were possible, Kilby directed the teams that built the first military systems and the first computer based on integrated circuits. He and his colleagues also invented the pocket calculator and the thermal printer.
In 1970 Kilby took time off from Texas Instruments to work independently, mainly to develop silicon technology to generate electricity from sunlight. Solar power is now much in the news as one way of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide to reduce global warming and minimise climate change.
Between 1978 and 1984 Kilby was Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. After retiring from Texas Instruments in 1983 he stayed with the company as a consultant. He was also consulted on various industry and government projects, mostly concerning semiconductors. Texas Instruments named its new $154 million research complex after him.
Kilby earned more than 60 patents and received many awards in addition to the Nobel prize. In 1995 he received the Robert N. Noyce Award and in 2000 he won the US National Medal of Science and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
“Seeing your name alongside the likes of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the Wright Brothers is a very humbling experience,” he said. He also won the US National Medal of Technology — becoming one of only thirteen people to win both national medals, the highest US awards in science and technology.
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Kilby was one of the world’s greatest inventors. Few other inventions have had such a great impact on humankind as his. He invented the integrated circuit because, he said: “I had the fortunate experience of being the first person with the right idea and the right resources available at the right time in history.”
He received little financial reward for his inventions. Nor did he benefit much from them. He did not have a digital watch, a microwave oven or a pocket calculator, continuing to use a slide rule. For all his achievements, he was an extraordinarily modest man who was always willing to give advice and encouragement to young people.
His wife died in 1981, and he is survived by two daughters.
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Jack Kilby, inventor of the microchip and Nobel prizewinner, was born on November 8, 1923. He died on June 20, 2005, aged 81.