Jack S. Kilby, an Inventor of the Microchip, Is Dead at 81
It has just been brought to my attention that Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit, died on Monday.
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.
nathan
Yeah…I remember my first integrated circuit. *swoon*
olivia
Wow, I didn’t even realise he invented it all on his own. I dig the pic they have there of his first integrated circuit.
Another excellent post B0b!