Jack kilby

“I had the fortunate experience of being the first person with the right idea and the right resources available at the right time in history…I'm grateful to the innovative thinkers who came before me, and I admire the innovators who have followed."

Radios. Televisions. Automobiles. Alarm clocks. Microwave ovens. Cell phones. Watches.

You name it; if it uses electricity, it probably packs a microprocessor — a tiny "chip" that contains complex electronic circuitry in a compact package.

The latest computers feature processor chips that contain up to 55 million transistors. They can process more than 1.5 million instructions per second.

But it all started with a crude-looking device¹cooked up in a North Dallas laboratory when Dwight Eisenhower was president, just months after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite.

For almost 50 years after the turn of the 20th century, the electronics industry had been dominated by vacuum tube technology. But vacuum tubes had inherent limitations. They were fragile, bulky, unreliable, power hungry, and produced considerable heat.

It wasn't until 1947, with the invention of the transistor by Bell Telephone Laboratories, that the vacuum tube problem was solved. Transistors were miniature in comparison, more reliable, longer lasting, produced less heat, and consumed less power. The transistor stimulated engineers to design ever more complex electronic circuits and equipment containing hundreds or thousands of discrete components such as transistors, diodes, rectifiers and capacitors. But the problem was that these components still had to be interconnected to form electronic circuits, and hand-soldering thousands of components to thousands of bits of wire was expensive and time-consuming. It was also unreliable; every soldered joint was a potential source of trouble. The challenge was to find cost-effective, reliable ways of producing these components and interconnecting them.

The Begining

Born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1923 Jack St Clair Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kansas. His interest in electronics can be traced to his high school days when his father was running a small power company scattered across the western part of Kansas. One year, a big ice storm took down all the telephone and many of the power lines, so Jack and his father began to work with amateur radio operators to provide some communications.

Kilby entered the University of Illinois Electrical Engineering Department in the fall of 1941. He completed his first two years before entering the Army. After the war, he returned to campus in January 1946; he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1947. He began his career with the Centralab Division of Globe Union Inc. in Milwaukee, developing ceramic-base, silk-screen circuits² for consumer electronic products. He worked in the area of miniaturization, looking for ways to develop smaller and more effective electrical components.

In 1952, Centralab, which had acquired a license for manufacturing transistors from Bell Laboratories, sent Kilby to a transistor symposium at Bell Labs’ headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey. There, Kilby saw first-hand the ground-breaking technology that was invented by Bell Labs scientists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley in 1947. When he returned to Centralab, he began working on germanium transistors that could be used in hearing aids manufactured by Centralab.

Although germanium was originally the material of choice for transistors, it proved not to be the element that would make the best integrated circuits. In 1954, scientists working on transistor research at Bell Labs found silicon to be a better choice. Not only was it a superior semiconductive element, it was also more available than germanium, thereby reducing the costs of components manufactured.

Kilby agreed with the Bell Labs scientists and embraced silicon as well as the wave of the future. However, Centralab didn’t seem likely to change from germanium-based components any time soon. Although Kilby was pleased with his work at Centralab, he realized he wanted to be with a company that was working on the leading edge of the coming technology.

Kilby found what he was looking for at Texas Instruments (TI), which also had acquired a Bell Labs license for manufacturing transistors and had several military contracts for developing silicon transistors. He joined Texas Instruments in 1958, and was employed by them until he retired in the early 1970s.