Also known as: Jack Kilby, Jack St. Clair Kilby

Jack Kilby (1923–2005) was an American electrical engineer who built the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958, a breakthrough that earned him a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.¹

Life and work

In the summer of 1958, newly hired and with no vacation yet earned, Kilby stayed in a quiet lab and demonstrated that a complete electronic circuit — transistors, resistors, and their connections — could be fabricated on a single slab of semiconductor material rather than wired together from discrete parts.¹ Months later Robert Noyce developed the planar silicon version that became the manufacturable standard; the two are recognised as independent co-inventors of the integrated circuit.¹

Why they matter

Before the integrated circuit, every transistor and resistor was a separate soldered component, which capped how complex and small electronics could get. Putting the whole circuit on one chip is what made microprocessors, memory, and dense radio front-ends possible — the entire premise of a compact SDR scanner. Kilby also co-invented the handheld electronic calculator.¹

Legacy

The Nobel committee cited his “part in the invention of the integrated circuit,” recognising it as a foundation of modern information technology.

Sources

1. Jack Kilby — Wikipedia, for biography, the first integrated circuit, and the Nobel Prize. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

See also

• Integrated circuit
• Robert Noyce
• Semiconductor
• Transistor