Integrated circuit inventor dies

By T.R. Reid

June 23, 2005
Nobel Prize winner Jack Kilby built by hand the first integrated
circuit in 1958 for Texas Instruments.

Nobel Prize winner Jack Kilby built by hand the first integrated circuit in 1958 for Texas Instruments.
Photo: AP

Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit, the basis of the computer chip revolution and foundation of what is now a trillion-dollar industry, has died of cancer.

Kilby, 81, made the discovery 47 years ago, when, as a recently hired engineer at Texas Instruments, he was left to work alone in a laboratory while most of his colleagues were on holiday.

"It was a very quiet time and he got a lot done," said Pat Weber, 65, a colleague and friend of Kilby, who retired as vice-chairman of Dallas-based Texas Instruments in 1998. Kilby died on Monday.

Kilby, a seminal 20th-century inventor rated by many as in the same league as Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000 for his work.

By hand wiring together multiple transistors, Kilby's invention - about half the size of a paper clip - spawned a revolution in miniaturisation in which millions of circuits are now housed on tiny pieces of silicon used in devices from computers to lifts to pacemakers.

For decades after Jack St Clair Kilby got the revolutionary idea that has enhanced daily life for almost everybody on Earth, people used to tell the inventor of the microchip that he deserved a Nobel Prize.

Kilby always scoffed at the notion. "Those big prizes are for the advancement of understanding," he would explain in his slow, plain-spoken Kansas way. "They are for scientists, who are motivated by pure knowledge. But I'm an engineer. I'm motivated by a need to solve problems, to make something work. For guys like me, the prize is seeing a successful solution."

As it happened, Jack Kilby did eventually win the Nobel Prize - more than 40 years after his 1958 breakthrough.

Kilby expressed amazement at the vast range of applications that have developed around the tiny circuit-on-a-chip.

"It's astonishing what human ingenuity and creativity can do," he said. "My part was pretty small, actually." Kilby did get a shot at big-time fame, when interviewed for the CBS Morning News. When the interviewer noted that Kilby's invention had kept the US at the forefront of technology, Kilby stewed over the idea for a moment and then said, "Well, I hadn't thought of it in those terms."

The TV reporter asked, "Have you made money from this invention?" Jack paused again, and finally said, "Some, yeah."

With that, CBS broke for a commercial and Jack Kilby's moment in the sun was over. Except, of course, that his contribution to the modern world goes on.

He never became famous, but he solved a problem. For Jack Kilby, the engineer, that was enough.

- agencies
