Jack Kilby shows his Texas Instruments colleagues a little something he’s built. A very little something: a working integrated circuit on a piece of semiconductor material. The world will soon change.
Most TI employees took a two-week summer vacation that year, but new hire Kilby hadn’t earned any time off yet. Using his solitude to good effect, Kilby dreamed up the integrated circuit and constructed a prototype by September. It was a sliver (a chip, you might say) of germanium with wires sticking out glued to a glass slide about the size of a thumbnail.
The stakes were high for the new guy. Top company execs came to see Kilby’s September 12 demonstration. Kilby connected his device to an oscilloscope and threw the switch. A continuous sine curve pulsed on the screen, and a new era began.
As is often the case with great inventions, there was a prior claim. British radar scientist Geoffrey Dummer had presented the concept of a miniaturized integrated circuit at a 1952 electronics symposium in Washington, DC. But his prototype failed, and his bosses at the Ministry of Defence abandoned the idea.
And as also often happens, science advances with near-simultaneous discovery. Fairchild Semiconductor engineer Robert Noyce was working on an integrated circuit using silicon instead of germanium. Kilby filed his patent six weeks before Noyce but received his patent later. TI and Fairchild fought a lengthy legal battle before agreeing to cross-license their technologies. Noyce’s silicon chip eventually triumphed over Kilby’s germanium. Noyce went on to cofound Intel.
Kilby shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics, but Noyce didn’t. He’d died in 1990, and Nobel Prizes aren’t awarded posthumously.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, germanium to silicon.—RA