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

Kilby's line runs from a single summer's demonstration in 1958 — a complete circuit on one piece of semiconductor — to the Nobel Prize that recognised it as a foundation of modern electronics.

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

Year	Milestone
1958	Builds the first working integrated circuit at TI
1967	Co-invents the handheld electronic calculator
1970	Awarded the National Medal of Science
2000	Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics

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 — the manufacturing idea every chip in a radio receiver still descends from.

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