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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.
His name will forever be engraved in the J-K flip-flop. (That's right, J-K did not stand for John Kerry)
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
hey there from another ancient hacker!
:) But then again what else do ancient hackers do but code and split hairs on slash.
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
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