The September 12, 1958 One of the most important pages in the history of technology was written: Jack Kilbyyoung US electronic engineer recently hired Texas Instrumentshe showed for the first time the operation of a integrated circuit. From that apparently simple experiment – an oscillator capable of generating a continuous sinusoidal signal – the microchip revolutionthe tiny components that today allow computers, smartphones, cars, satellite systems and anything else to work.
Kilby’s intuition was not born from nothing: it was the distillate of years of reflections on the problem of miniaturization of electronic devices, known among engineers as “Tiranian of numbers”: the more the complexity of a circuit grew, the more it became difficult to connect thousands of components without errors or prohibitive costs. His idea, which he called “The Monolithic Idea”consisted in realizing Transistors, resistors and capacitors on a single block of semiconductor materialthus avoiding the assembly piece by piece.
Despite initial skepticism, that discovery clearly changed the trajectory of science and industry. In the following paragraphs we will see as a Kansas boy, inspired by an ice storm and a father passionate about radio amateurs, came to conceive in all respects the heart of modern electronics, then sharing the authorship of the microchip with Robert Noycefuture founder of the semiconductor giant Intel.
Who was Jack Kilby
Jack St. Clair Kilby He was born in 1923 to Jefferson CityMissouri, but grew to Great Bendin Kansas. His father managed a small electric company that provided energy to the rural areas of the state. While Jack was still a young high school student, in April of 1938 An ice storm knocked down pierces and telephone lines and was in that circumstance that the father saw the father collaborate with radio amateurs to restore contacts with isolated customers. That episode fascinated him to the point of directing his vocation: electronics would have been his field of study and, in all respects, his reason for life. After the high school, he enrolled in theUniversity of Illinoisgraduating in electric engineering in 1947just a year before i Bell Labs announced the transistorthe component intended to supplant the empty pipes.
In the early years of career Kilby worked a Milwaukee producing radio and television devices, at the same time attending an evening master. The turning point came to 1958when he was hired by Texas Instruments to Dallas. There he was allowed to concentrate on the Miniaturization problem: Instead of building circuits by connecting hundreds of separate transistors, he imagined to integrate all the elements on a single piece of Germanio, a semiconductor then in use before the silicon became the standard. The July 24th he noted the idea (from him “The Monolithic Idea”) on his notebook and a few weeks later, the September 12thshowed her in front of the company managers.
Almost simultaneously, Robert Noyce from the Fairchild SemiConductor He developed a similar solution, more easily produced in series. After years of legal disputes, the two companies decided to give themselves mutual licenses, effectively sanctioning the co-therapy of the invention. From that moment, the integrated circuits began to be adopted in military and space applications, until the decision of the Nasa to use them in the Apollo missions: a recognition that consolidated its reliability.
Other precious contributions and the Nobel Prize for Physics
Kilby did not stop at the microchip. Contributed to the development of the portable calculatorthe thermal printer and experienced silicon applications for the production of solar energy. He got more than 60 patentsbecame professor at Texas A&M University and received prestigious prizes, including the National Science Medal and, in 2000, the Nobel for the Physics. He died in 2005 due to cancer, but his name is engraved next to that of Noyce in the history of electronics.
