Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce each built an integrated circuit in the late 1950s, and neither needed the other’s help. Both men are credited as co-inventors of the microchip.
Kilby, at Texas Instruments, was first to file a patent application, and he built the first working circuit. Noyce knew of that application when he filed his own. His version was the one that suited manufacturing: silicon and silicon dioxide as the semiconductor and insulator, with aluminium carrying the current.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave Kilby a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.” Noyce had died in 1990. He was honoured as one of the founders of Silicon Valley.
Why it took a decade
The transistor arrived just before Christmas 1947. It was smaller, more reliable and used less energy than the radio valve. Yet systems built from separate parts soon hit a ceiling. Around a thousand valves was the practical limit. Soldering individual transistors onto a printed-circuit board stretched that past ten thousand.
Even then, the sheer count of transistors held back the young computer industry. By the early 1950s engineers were already talking about making transistors, resistors and condensers together in one block of semiconductor. It took ten years from the transistor before the technology had matured enough to fabricate all the elements in one piece of material.
Apollo and the pocket calculator
The first integrated circuits went to military and aerospace customers, who valued small size and reliability. They were part of the Apollo Guidance Computer that helped steer the spacecraft to the moon in 1969. Mass production then cut prices, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s chips turned up in calculators, hearing aids and the first personal computers.
Kilby went on to collect some 60 patents and is a co-inventor of the pocket calculator. Before manufacturing was planned, a market survey found next to no interest in one. People had slide rules.
He was born in 1923 in Jefferson City, Missouri, and had worked at Texas Instruments since 1958.
