[extropy-chat] Inventor of Microchip is Dead

[Olga Bourlin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/business/22kilby.html

June 22, 2005
Jack S. Kilby, an Inventor of the Microchip, Is Dead at 81
By JOHN MARKOFF
Jack S. Kilby, an electrical engineer whose invention of the integrated 
circuit gave rise to the information age and heralded an explosion of 
consumer electronics products in the last 50 years, from personal computers 
to cellphones, died Monday in Dallas. He was 81.

His death, after a brief battle with cancer, was announced yesterday by 
Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based electronics company where he worked for 
a quarter-century.

The integrated circuit that Mr. Kilby designed shortly after arriving at 
Texas Instruments in 1958 served as the basis for modern microelectronics, 
transforming a technology that permitted the simultaneous manufacturing of a 
mere handful of transistors into a chip industry that routinely places 
billions of Lilliputian switches in the area of a fingernail.

His achievement - the integration - yielded a thin chip of crystal 
connecting previously separate components like transistors, resistors and 
capacitors within a single device. For that creation, commonly called the 
microchip, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.

During his career at Texas Instruments he claimed more than 60 patents and 
was also one of the inventors of the hand-held calculator and the thermal 
printer. But it was Mr. Kilby's invention of the integrated circuit that 
most broadly shaped the electronic era.

"It's hard to find a place where the integrated circuit doesn't affect your 
life today," Richard K. Templeton, Texas Instruments' president and chief 
executive officer, said in an interview yesterday. "That's how broad its 
impact is."

It is an impact, Mr. Kilby said, that was largely unexpected. "We expected 
to reduce the cost of electronics, but I don't think anybody was thinking in 
terms of factors of a million," he said in an undated interview cited by 
Texas Instruments.

The remarkable acceleration of the manufacturing process based on the 
integrated circuit was later described by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the 
Intel Corporation, whose partner, Robert N. Noyce, invented another version 
of the integrated circuit just months after Mr. Kilby.

In 1965, three years after the first commercial integrated circuits came to 
market, Dr. Moore observed that the number of transistors on a circuit was 
doubling at regular intervals and would do so far into the future. The 
observation, which came to be known as Moore's law, became the defining 
attribute of the chip-making industry, centered in what is now known as 
Silicon Valley, where Intel was based, rather than in Dallas.

That was partly because Dr. Noyce's version of the integrated circuit, using 
silicon and based on a photolithographic printing technology known as the 
planar process, was easier to manufacture than Mr. Kilby's original 
invention, which employed germanium and used individual wires.

In 1959 Mr. Kilby and Dr. Noyce, then with Fairchild Semiconductor, were 
named as inventors in their companies' applications for patents for the 
integrated circuit. After years of legal battles, Fairchild and Texas 
Instruments decided to cross-license their technologies, ultimately creating 
a world information industries market now worth more than $1 trillion 
annually. Dr. Noyce died in 1990.

Dr. Moore remembered Mr. Kilby as a tall - he was 6-foot-6 - and gentle man 
with whom he would occasionally socialize while attending technical 
meetings.

"He was mild mannered," Dr. Moore recalled in a telephone interview 
yesterday, "but I would never worry when I was walking down the street with 
him in New York City."

Mr. Kilby's contribution came in an era when manufacturing industries were 
hunting for new approaches to miniaturization for reasons of both cost and 
performance. It was a drive that began during World War II and pushed beyond 
military uses into consumer products in the postwar era.

He began his career in 1947 with the Centralab division of Globe Union Inc. 
in Milwaukee, developing ceramic-based silk-screen circuits for consumer 
electronic products.

Michael Riordan, co-author of "Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor 
and the Birth of the Information Age" (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), noted 
that Globe Union and Texas Instruments were both pioneers in 
miniaturization, and that Mr. Kilby "came to T.I. with a drive to make 
things small."

Mr. Kilby had also been sent by Globe Union to attend an early workshop held 
by the Bell Laboratories of A.T.& T. to familiarize the technical world with 
the transistor in the early 1950's. It was Mr. Kilby who first pulled the 
idea of miniaturization together with the transistor.

A lifelong optimist who rarely showed signs of anger, according to his 
daughter, Janet Kilby Cameron, Mr. Kilby took his Nobel Prize in stride. 
When asked what he did after learning of the award, he said simply, "I made 
coffee."

Jack St. Clair Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Mo., on Nov. 8, 1923, to 
Hubert and Vina Kilby. He grew up in Great Bend, Kan., and was exposed early 
on to the world of engineers: his father ran the local electric utility.

He decided in high school that he would become an electrical engineer and 
applied to M.I.T., even then the mecca for aspiring engineers. He took a 
train to Cambridge, Mass., but fell slightly short in his score on the 
entrance exam in June 1941 and was unable to enroll. A few months later he 
joined the Army and was assigned to a radio repair shop at an outpost on a 
tea plantation in northeast India.

After the war he attended college on the G.I. Bill of Rights. After 
receiving a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University 
of Illinois and a master's from the University of Wisconsin, he went to work 
for Globe Union.

He arrived at Texas Instruments in 1958 and during his first summer, working 
with borrowed equipment, improvised a working integrated circuit. A 
successful laboratory demonstration of the first simple microchip took place 
on Sept. 12, 1958. He formally retired from the company in 1983 but 
continued his association as a consultant.

His other awards included both the National Medal of Science and the 
National Medal of Technology, the highest technical awards given by the 
United States government.

His wife, Barbara Annegers Kilby, died in 1982. In addition to Ms. Cameron, 
of Palisade, Colo., Mr. Kilby is survived by another daughter, Ann Kilby, of 
Austin, Tex., and five granddaughters.