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Integrated Circuit Inventor Jack Kilby Dead at 81

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thanks-for-the-ideas dept.

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.

6 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Uh, I believe he was 81. by inotocracy · · Score: 2, Informative

    He was 81, not 91.

  2. His name will live on... by __aaptsy9143 · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. 81, not 91. by winkydink · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    "I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey

  4. J.K. didnt quite do this... by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:J.K. didnt quite do this... by jacquesm · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      MP3 Search Engine
  5. Re:Jack Kilby's notebook by jackstack · · Score: 2, Informative
    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)