Jack Kilby - IC Inventor
"Kilby's 1958 invention of the integrated circuit changed the face of the world. Until the integrated circuit, electronics were created with large, fragile components. After Kilby's invention, electronics were able to become more complex, reliable, efficient and miniaturized. The invention made the microprocessor possible.
Kilby built the first integrated circuit using borrowed equipment during his first year at Texas Instruments. The component was built into a piece of semiconducting material smaller than a paper clip. By 1962, four years later, Texas Instruments had won its first major contract for integrated circuits for the Minuteman missile."
"Kilby's 1958 invention of the integrated circuit changed the face of the world. Until the integrated circuit, electronics were created with large, fragile components. After Kilby's invention, electronics were able to become more complex, reliable, efficient and miniaturized. The invention made the microprocessor possible.
Kilby built the first integrated circuit using borrowed equipment during his first year at Texas Instruments. The component was built into a piece of semiconducting material smaller than a paper clip. By 1962, four years later, Texas Instruments had won its first major contract for integrated circuits for the Minuteman missile."
Comments:
The late Robert Noyce, who died in 1990, is also widely credited with inventing the integrated circuit while working for Fairchild Electronics in California. However, he filed his patent in July 1959 -- some five months after Kilby filed his patent for "miniaturized electronics" and was also aware of Kilby's work at the time. But Noyce, who co-founded Intel in 1968, developed the circuit as it was later to be manufactured in practice, with silicon as the semiconductor and the components connected with aluminium. After years of legal battles, Texas Instruments and Fairchilld eventually cross-licensed their technologies.
The two companies battled each other for more than a decade for the right to claim invention of the integrated circuit. Kilby's handwritten lab notes, where he noted he could let a chip be the prime connector in an electronic circuit, was a principal exhibit in the legal proceedings. They reached a settlement and a kind of detente. Kilby was recognized as the inventor of the chip, while Noyce was recognized as the pioneer who made it practicable.
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