Jack Kilby: The Empty Lab Summer That Produced the Integrated Circuit

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Jack Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1923 and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, where a winter ice storm once snapped the telephone poles and his father, who ran the local electric company, used amateur radio operators to coordinate the repairs. The lesson stuck: when the infrastructure breaks, find another path for the signal. After serving as an Army electronics technician in World War II, Kilby earned his engineering degree at the University of Illinois in 1947, then spent his days on the factory floor at Centralab in Milwaukee and his nights earning a master's degree.

This episode follows him to Texas Instruments in mid-1958, when the industry was stuck on the tyranny of numbers: advanced systems needed so many hand-soldered parts that failure was all but guaranteed. As a new hire with no vacation time, Kilby was left alone in the lab while his colleagues took their summer break. There he asked a question nobody else had: what if resistors, capacitors, and transistors could all be made from one block of semiconductor, with no joints to fail?

• On September 12, 1958, Kilby pressed a switch in front of TI management, and a sliver of germanium wired to an oscilloscope produced a continuous sine wave. He filed his patent for miniaturized electronic circuits in February 1959.
• Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor arrived at a similar idea months later and used the planar process in silicon to replace Kilby's flying gold wires. Both men are recognized as co-inventors.
• Early chips were expensive and yields were low, so Kilby led the teams that built the first military systems and computers to use them, where savings in size and weight justified the cost.
• To open a consumer market he co-invented the handheld electronic calculator with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel, then the thermal printer to go with it.
• In 1970 he took leave from TI to explore solar power, later taught at Texas A&M from 1978 to 1984, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. He died in Dallas on June 20, 2005, at 81.