Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Turning Potential into Realities: The Invention of the Integrated Circuit

Jack St. Clair Kilby
Winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics

Tuesday, February 18, 2003, 7:30 p.m.
Auditorium, Annenberg Presidential Conference Center
Texas A&M University

Abstract

In 1958, Jack Kilby conceived and built the first integrated electronic circuit, fabricating all of the components in a single piece of semiconductor material. His invention became the foundation for today's electronics. At the Texas A&M University Distinguished Lecture series, Kilby will discuss the environment that led to his groundbreaking invention and the tremendous innovation that has followed.

About the Speaker

It is fitting to search the World Wide Web for information about Jack St. Clair Kilby because he helped make this and other tools of modern information technology possible. A query on one popular search engine yields more than a thousand citations, ranging from lists of Nobel laureates to scientific papers to the biographies of famous Kansans to some that describe his affiliation with Texas A&M. The one thing they have in common is praise for the man who invented the microchip.

According to he Texas Instruments web site, "There are few living men whose insights and professional accomplishments have changed the world. Jack Kilby is one of these men. His invention of the monolithic integrated circuit - the microchip - some 40 years ago at Texas Instruments (TI) laid the conceptual and technical foundation for the entire field of modern microelectronics. It was this breakthrough that made possible the sophisticated high-speed computers and large-capacity semiconductor memories of today's information age."

Jack Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kansas. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin respectively. He began his professional career in 1947 in Milwaukee, working with the Centralab Division of Globe Union Inc. His assignment was developing ceramic-base, silk-screen circuits for consumer electronic products.

In 1958, he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas. Again, according to the web site, "During the summer of that year working with borrowed and improvised equipment, he conceived and built the first electronic circuit in which all of the components, both active and passive, were fabricated in a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip." With a successful laboratory demonstration, the first microchip debuted on September 12, 1958.

Later in his career, he pioneered military, industrial, and commercial applications of microchip technology, co-inventing the now ubiquitous hand-held calculator and the thermal printer.

In 1970, he took a leave of absence from TI to work as an independent inventor. He explored, among other subjects, the use of silicon technology for generating electrical power from sunlight. From 1978 to 1984, he held the position of Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. Mr. Kilbyofficially retired from TI in the 1980s.

He is the recipient of two of the nation's most prestigious honors in science and engineering. In 1970, he received the National Medal of Science. In 1982, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, joining the likes of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers.

He holds over 60 U.S. patents, is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He has been awarded the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal, the NAE's Vladimir Zworykin Award, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Holley Medal, the IEEE's Medal of Honor, the Charles Stark Draper Prize administered by the NAE, the Cledo Brunetti Award, and the David Sarnoff Award.