Jack Kilby
| Jack Kilby | |
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| Born | November 8, 1923 Jefferson City, Missouri, USA |
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| Died | June 20, 2005 (aged 81) Dallas, Texas, USA |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | Physics, Electrical engineering |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Physics IEEE Medal of Honor |
Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 - June 20, 2005) was a Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 2000 for his invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 while working at Texas Instruments (TI). He is also the inventor of the handheld calculator and thermal printer.
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Biography
Kilby's life began in Jefferson City, Missouri. He spent much of his early life in Great Bend, Kansas and graduated from Great Bend High School. Road signs at the entrances to the town commemorate his time there, and the Commons Area at Great Bend High School has been named The Jack Kilby Commons Area.
Kilby received his bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he is an honorary member of Acacia Fraternity. In 1947, he received a degree in Electrical Engineering. He obtained his master of science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1950, while simultaneously working at Centralab in Milwaukee.
In mid-1958, Kilby was a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments who did not yet have the right to a summer vacation. He spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the "tyranny of numbers" and finally came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components in mass in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. On September 12 he presented his findings to the management, which included Mark Shepherd, of Texas Instruments: he showed them a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, proving that his integrated circuit worked and thus that he solved the problem. U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized Electronic Circuits", the first integrated circuit, was filed on February 6, 1959. Along with Robert Noyce (who independently made a similar circuit a few months later), Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.
In addition to the integrated circuit, Kilby also is noted for patenting the electronic portable calculator and the thermal printer used in data terminals. In total, he held about 60 patents.
Useful Reference Encyclopedia 1978 to 1985, he was Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. In 1983, Kilby retired from Texas Instruments.
Kilby died June 20, 2005 when he was 81, in Dallas, Texas, following a brief battle with cancer.
On December 14, 2005,Texas Instruments created the Historic TI Archives. The Jack Kilby family donated his personal manuscripts and his personal photograph collection to Southern Methodist University. The collection will be cataloged and stored at DeGolyer Library, SMU.
Included in the two collections is the world’s richest history in technology and engineering. Among the items are numerous firsts: the integrated circuit, the commercial transistor, the electronic calculator, the single-chip microprocessor, early digital watches, and early cell phone technologies. The Library of Congress houses the majority of the papers of Jack Kilby.
In 2008, the SMU School of Engineering, with the DeGolyer Library and the Library of Congress, hosted a yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the birth of the digital age with Jack Kilby’s Nobel Prize-winning invention of the integrated circuit. Symposia and exhibits will examine the many ways in which technology and engineers have shaped the modern world. Jack Kilby was a holder of an honorary Doctorate of Science from SMU and longtime associate of SMU through the Kilby Foundation.
Awards and honors
Recognition of Kilby’s outstanding achievements have been made by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), including award of Fellow grade in 1966, the David Sarnoff Medal in 1966, co-recipient of the IEEE Cledo Brunetti award in 1978, The IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984 and the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1986. He was co-recipient of the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballentine Medal in 1966. In 1982 and 1989, he received the Holley Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME.) He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and received the Academy’s Vladimir K. Zworykin Award in 1975, was co-recipient of the NAE’s Charles Stark Draper Prize in 1989.The Kilby Award Foundation was founded in 1990 in his honor.
He is also the recipient of the nation’s most prestigious honors in science and engineering: the National Medal of Science in 1969 and the National Medal of Technology in 1990. In 1982, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
In 1993 he was awarded the prodigious Kyoto Prize by the Inamori Foundation. He was awarded both the Washington Award, administered by the Western Society of Engineers and the Eta Kappa Nu Vladimir Karapetoff Award in 1999. In 2000, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his breakthrough discovery, and delivered his personal view of the industry and its history in his acceptance speech.
Kilby holds nine honorary doctorate degrees from Universities including Southern Methodist University, University of Miami, The University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Texas A & M, Yale and Rochester Institute of Technology October 14, 1986. A copy of this degree can be viewed in the Archives of the Wallace Library on RIT campus. The National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) awarded Kilby with a certificate of Honorary Professorship in 1998. He also received the Alumni Honor Award from the College of Engineering of the University of Illinois in 1971, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University in 1973.
The Kilby Center, TI's research center for silicon manufacturing, is named after him.The Jack Kilby Computer Centre at the Merchiston Campus of Edinburgh Napier University in Edinburgh is also named in his honor.
Related
- Geoffrey Dummer, the British engineer who first conceptualised the idea of the integrated circuit.
External links
- "Jack St. Clair Kilby: A Man of Few Words", biography by Ed Millis.
- "Jack St. Clair Kilby", biography by Texas Instruments.
- Oral history interview with Jack S. Kilby at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Interview covers Kilby's entire career, including his education, work experiences at Centralab and Texas Instruments (TI), and his independent work after leaving TI in 1970.
- "Jack Kilby, Touching Lives on Micro and Macro Scales - By T.R. Reid", The Washington Post (June 2005).
- Obituary: The Economist, Jul 7th 2005
- Nobelprize.org posts Mr Kilby’s Nobel lecture
- Jack S. Kilby, Autobiography in English
- Jack S. Kilby Patents
- Inventors of the Modern Computer
- Nobel Prize in Physics 2000
- Kilby statue in Great Bend
- Biography of Kilby from IEEE
Kilby patents
- U.S. Patent 2,892,130 Plug-in Circuit Units, filed December 1953, issued June 1959, assigned to Globe-Union, Inc.
- U.S. Patent 3,072,832 Semiconductor Structure Fabrication, filed May 1959, issued January 1963
- U.S. Patent 3,115,581 Miniature Semiconductor Integrated Circuit, filed May 1959, issued December 1963
- U.S. Patent 3,138,721 Miniature Semiconductor Network Diode and Gate, filed May 1959, issued June 1964
- US Patent 3138743 Miniaturized Electronic Circuits, filed February 6, 1959, issued June, 1964
- U.S. Patent 3,138,744 Miniaturized Self-contained Circuit Modules, filed May 1959, issued June 1964
- U.S. Patent 3,435,516 Semiconductor Structure Fabrication, filed May 1959, issued April 1969
- U.S. Patent 3,496,333 Thermal Printer, filed October 1965, issued February 1970
- US Patent 3819921 Miniature Electronic Calculator, originally filed September 1967, issued June 1974