🔌Jack Kilby
Original nameJack Kilby
American Engineer, Inventor of the Integrated Circuit
Those Who Turned Invention Into Industry · Industry-Builders
The Integrated CircuitTexas InstrumentsThe Nobel Prize in Physics (2000)
Who they are
Jack Kilby (1923–2005) was an engineer at Texas Instruments who in the summer of 1958, having joined recently and not yet accumulated enough vacation leave, stayed alone in the near-empty company lab and conceived a scheme of making several electronic components previously requiring discrete soldered assembly (transistor, resistor, capacitor) directly on the same piece of semiconductor material, producing the world’s first workable integrated-circuit prototype. The core significance of this invention was to turn a circuit that previously required manual point-by-point connection and assembly into a single chip that could be mass-produced by semiconductor processes, fundamentally solving the problem that, as electronic equipment grew ever more complex, the surging number of components sent assembly cost, size, and failure rate spiraling out of control. Integrated-circuit technology, later further improved in manufacturing process by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and others, became the core foundation of all later modern computers, communication equipment, and almost all electronic products, directly opening the era of the continual exponential growth in chip integration described by "Moore’s law." Kilby himself was low-key and reserved, and only in 2000 won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this invention, a historic recognition arriving belatedly more than forty years after the integrated circuit’s invention.
Primary sourcesJack Kilby’s integrated-circuit patent documents (US Patent No. 3138743)The 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics citation
Key stories
A One-Person Vacation Laboratory
In the summer of 1958 Kilby, having just joined Texas Instruments and not yet accumulated enough paid leave, stayed alone in the lab while his colleagues took vacation, thinking things through, and at last conceived a scheme of integrating several electronic components directly on the same germanium wafer and soldered and assembled with his own hands the first integrated-circuit prototype that could actually verify the working principle — this invention that thereafter profoundly changed the whole face of the electronics industry was first born in a near-empty laboratory over a vacation.
A Nobel Prize Recognized Forty-Two Years Later
Forty-two years after Kilby invented the integrated circuit, the Nobel Prize in Physics committee formally awarded it to him in 2000, in recognition of the foundational influence of the integrated circuit on modern information technology; at the award Kilby was already near eighty, reflecting from the side that the historical value of many foundational technical inventions that profoundly change an age often needs decades of industrial evolution to be fully recognized.
Echoes today
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
The physical starting point of "Moore’s law"The integrated circuit Kilby invented is the physical basis on which the exponential growth of chip integration described by "Moore’s law" could occur, the two often mentioned together in the history of technology.