Jack Kilby, father of the integrated circuit

Jack St. Clair Kilby:
Technology Titan

BY TOM ENGIBOUS

Jack St. Clair Kilby was an engineer and proud of it. 

He was a gentleman and a gentle man. He was practical and low-key. He was generous, thoughtful, good-humored, and humble. Yet despite his quiet ways, IEEE Fellow Jack Kilby’s legacy is the modern world we know today. His invention of the monolithic integrated circuit in 1958 laid the foundation for today’s world of microelectronics, and in 2000 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.

Reared in Great Bend, Kan., he discovered a passion for engineering in high school. After an ice storm downed phone and power lines, his father, who ran a small power company, worked with amateur radio operators to communicate with customers. This triggered young Kilby’s lifelong fascination with electronics.

In 1950 he joined Centralab, in Milwaukee, where he worked with transistors.

In an age when soldering irons were used to connect components, the industry needed a better way to build electronics. In 1958, he left Centralab and moved to Dallas to work on this issue for Texas Instruments. As a new employee that summer, he was not eligible for the August vacation that was customary among TI employees at the time. In this relatively quiet time, the idea of the integrated circuit first came to Jack. In a July 1976 IEEE paper entitled “Invention of the Integrated Circuit,” Jack wrote, “I began to feel that the only thing a semiconductor house could make in a cost-effective way was a semiconductor. Further thought led me to the conclusion that semiconductors were all that were really required—that resistors and capacitors, in particular, could be made from the same material as the active devices.” Jack integrated all the devices on one substrate.   

The circuit was put to the test on 12 September 1958. It worked—an elegant solution for the increasingly complex electronic designs of the time. But many in the industry were skeptical. Some said integrated circuits did not make optimal use of materials, while others said such chips were not commercially viable.  

Looking back on those days, Jack said, “We were the source of entertainment at IEEE conferences over the next few years.”

But then as now, change is the nature of this industry. The integrated circuit was commercialized, and today its applications touch every facet of our lives.

Tom Engibous is the chairman of Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas.