Integrated Circuit Inventor Jack Kilby Dead at 81

geekotourist writes " Jack Kilby , inventor of the integrated circuit, one winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics (Robert Noyce died in 1990), died June 20th after a brief battle with cancer. In 1958 he invented the foundation for a trillion dollar industry as a substitute for going on vacation." Update: 06/22 02:03 GMT by T : Kilby was 81, not 91 as the headline originally indicated.

Comments

Uh, I believe he was 81.

[inotocracy]

He was 81, not 91.

His name will live on...

[__aaptsy9143]

His name will forever be engraved in the J-K flip-flop. (That's right, J-K did not stand for John Kerry)

81, not 91.

[winkydink]

From http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=528&e=1& u=/ap/20050622/ap_on_hi_te/obit_kilby

"Jack St. Clair Kilby was born in 1923 in Great Bend, Kan. His father was the owner of a small electric company, and Kilby became interested in radio tubes while listening to big band radio in the 1940s."

May he rest in peace.

Your're right

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember early articles about the integrated circuit. It really was an evolutionary development; sort of what we would now call a hybrid IC. For sure, somebody would have come up with it within a few years. What I think was critical for the IC was a market. That market was provided by NASA. I think that, without NASA's technological drive, the IC would have taken quite a few more years to become common. What the IC provided was something that was rugged enough to withstand launch forces and was light. It costs a lot to launch something. The engineering work to make something lighter pays big dividends. The IC happened because NASA needed it.

J.K. didnt quite do this...

[Ancient_Hacker]

JK's invention was more like what's known as a "hybrid" Ic, with little parts hooked together with very fine wires. It was Noyce at Fairchild that invented what is the "IC"-- a planar silicon device, with the components etched and diffused onto the surface. No discrete wires, no discrete components. See JK's patent 3,138,743 for details.

Re:J.K. didnt quite do this...

[jacquesm]

hey there from another ancient hacker!

I believe it was called a thin-film integrated circuit, and it definitely qualifies as the first step in integration, it just did not push it all the way through, to put multiple components on a single die. There had been some thermally coupled transistors on a single die before that time but there were no interconnects between them, so they did not qualify as a circuit.

Intergrated Circuits have many components in a single carrier and as such Kilby's work definitely qualifies.

You're absolutely right though in that Noyce's device was much closer to what we consider to be a 'chip' nowadays, especially since he used silicon, instead of noisy Germanium.

Probably our current crop of smd's would look remarkably familiar along side one of those old thin film circuits.

It's splitting hairs though :) But then again what else do ancient hackers do but code and split hairs on slash.

Re:Jack Kilby's notebook

[jackstack]

I was astonished to learn that all his IC patents (and, consequently, his Nobel Prize) were based on his notarized notebook entries and not on publications (those came later).

You shouldn't be astonished. This is the way it is done. If it is published, it's in the public domain and cannot be patented. Notebooks (paper and pen/pencil) is the way ideas have always been recorded for IP documentation (at least for the "hardware" innovation that I'm familiar with, like nanotech) and will probably continue to be for a long time.

If you are working for a company, publications are for teaching everyone else how to do it once you have the patent, or if you think it'll go nowhere (like IBM thought about Relational databases, till Oracle picked it up)