Jack St. Clair Kilby, 81, died Monday, almost 50 years after his idea for what is commonly known as the microchip revolutionized the way that the world computes, calculates and communicates, ushering in the Information Age. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his 1958 invention of the integrated electronic circuit, which made personal computers, satellite navigation systems, cell phones and the $200 billion field of microelectronics possible. He invented the hand-held calculator, which commercialized the microchip, and held more than 60 other patents.
There are only a handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world and the way we live in it - Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers and Jack Kilby," Tom Engibous, chairman of Texas Instruments, where
Kilby worked for years, said in a statement. "If there was ever a seminal invention that transformed not only our industry but our world, it was Jack's invention of the first integrated circuit." Kilby, who failed the college entrance exam for MIT, had not worked at Texas Instruments long enough to merit vacation during the company's annual summer shutdown. So he was alone in the labs, working on borrowed equipment on July 24, 1958, when he struck upon the idea that he jotted down in his notebook: "The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor."
Engineers call that the Monolithic Idea. It cracked a nagging engineering problem. The transistor had been invented 10 years earlier, replacing the vacuum tubes used in the earliest computers. But transistors were built of components strung together with wires. A single bad connection would ruin the circuit, and circuits could only get so small before it was impossible for humans to solder them together. Kilby's idea was to eliminate the wires and use a single block of silicon, or germanium, containing an entire electronic circuit. For more read here...
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