53 years ago today, on Feb 6 1959,
Jack Kilby, an Electrical Engineer working at
Texas Instruments (TI), filed the first ever patent for a method of making an
integrated circuit.
See
http://www.google.com/patents?id=b_x...page&q&f=false
Kilby had partly based his idea on that made in the early 1950's by an English engineer named
Geoff Drummer of the Royal Radar Establishment. Though Drummer
proposed miniaturization by using a single block of material with various layers
to build a circuit, an attempt in 1956 to fabricate such a device failed for various
technical reasons. In his Nobel Prize for Physics acceptance speech that Kilby gave
in 2000, he said "My contribution was taking this idea and making it a practical
reality".
Kilby had only joined TI the year before and rather than going on vacation
like everyone else at the company, he took the opportunity of the quieter
environment to spend some time thinking about the problem. He came
up with a solution and Kilby's first device was fabricated in germanium and
demonstrated on Aug 28 1958.
Meantime, in California, another incredibly talented engineer by the name of
Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, had been
independently and concurrently inventing the integrated circuit. Noyce favoured
the use of silicon and he and his colleagues developed what is known as the
planar process which ended up becoming the favoured way of making such
devices.
Owing to the work of Kilby, Noyce and their colleagues, they helped spawn what
is today the trillion dollar a year global electronics market.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Jack Kilby said -
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Jack Kilby
Charles Townes won the Nobel for his work with laser technology, and he summed up how I feel.
"It's like the beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam. 'No, I didn't build it myself. But it is based on an idea of mine!'"
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Jack Kilby's Nobel Prize speech entitled "
Turning Potential into Realities:
The Invention of the Integrated Circuit" is an interesting read and can be found here -
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_priz...by-lecture.pdf
Spare a moment to think what the modern world would be like if the integrated circuit
had never been invented. For a start, you would not be reading these words on
your screen.
53 years since the first Integrated Circuit patent submitted - Feb 6 1959
