SwRI Congratulates Nobel Winner Kilby

Jack Kilby was a new employee at Texas Instruments in July 1958 when his co-workers left on a traditional two-week company vacation. While he stayed behind to man the shop, Kilby invented an electronic chip smaller than a postage stamp — and launched a revolution.

Forty years later, the Royal Swedish Academy awarded Kilby, a Southwest Research Institute trustee, the Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the invention of the integrated circuit.

Kilby, 77, is retired from TI, where he still serves as a consultant. He became one of SwRI's 118 trustees in 1986. "I think Southwest Research Institute is a most important organization and I'm very pleased to have contact with them," he told Technology Today.

SwRI reciprocates Kilby's regard for the association.

"We at Southwest Research Institute are proud to be associated with an engineering visionary like Jack Kilby," said SwRI President Dan Bates. "Through his remarkable achievement, Mr. Kilby personifies the ideals of this Institute — excellence, quality, and service to humankind."

Kilby will share the $920,000 physics prize with two physicists credited with developing semiconductor heterostructures. Russian Zhores I. Alferov and German-born Herbert Kroener will share half of the physics prize; Kilby will receive the other half. The prize will be awarded in a ceremony in Stockholm in December.

When he invented the integrated circuit, Kilby didn't imagine the profound effect it would have on the electronics industry, he said. Smaller transistors were more reliable, used less power and generated less heat than the vacuum tubes that had dominated electronics technology for almost 50 years. But interconnecting these transistors proved to be time-consuming and expensive. Enter Kilby, who developed a reliable way to produce these components and interconnect them on a single chip.

"We expected to reduce the cost of electronics, but I don't think anybody was thinking in terms of factors of a million," Kilby said.

The integrated circuit first found purchase in the military's computer and weapons markets. In the 1960s, TI challenged Kilby to help come up with a calculator that was as powerful as an electromagnetic desktop model but small enough to fit in a coat pocket. The result was the hand-held calculator.

Following Kilby's work on the integrated circuit, other researchers developed even smaller circuits. This technology enabled a burgeoning industry, which resulted in the development of personal computers, appliances, and communication devices.

"It's true that the original idea was mine, but what you see today is the work of probably tens of thousands of the world's best engineers, all concentrating on improving this product," Kilby said.

Kilby holds more than 60 patents. His integrated circuit has earned him a National Medal of Science and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. 

Published in the Fall/Winter 2000 issue of Technology Today, published by Southwest Research Institute. For more information, contact Maria Martinez.

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