Jack Kilby

Lore & Background

Jack Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, where his father ran a small electric company. A severe ice storm that knocked down telephone and power poles forced his father's company to rely on amateur radio operators for communication, sparking Kilby's interest in electronics. After serving as an electronics technician in the U.S. Army during World War II, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois and later earned a master's degree while working at Centralab in Milwaukee.

In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments who had not yet earned a summer vacation, Kilby spent the summer addressing the "tyranny of numbers" in circuit design. He concluded that manufacturing circuit components en masse on a single piece of semiconductor material could solve the problem. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated a working integrated circuit to management by showing a continuous sine wave on an oscilloscope. U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for "Miniaturized electronic circuits" was filed on February 6, 1959. Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor independently made a similar circuit a few months later, and both are generally credited as co-inventors.

Kilby later headed teams that created the first military system and the first computer incorporating integrated circuits. He took a leave of absence from TI in 1970 to work as an independent inventor, exploring silicon technology for generating power from sunlight. From 1978 to 1984, he was Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. He retired from Texas Instruments in 1983.

Reader's Guide

Jack Kilby's invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 is widely regarded as a foundational development in modern electronics, enabling the miniaturization and mass production of electronic circuits. His work at Texas Instruments directly addressed the "tyranny of numbers" problem, where increasing circuit complexity made discrete component designs impractical. The integrated circuit allowed multiple components—transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors—to be fabricated on a single semiconductor substrate, a concept that revolutionized the electronics industry.

Kilby's later contributions included co-inventing the handheld calculator and the thermal printer, and his teams created the first military system and computer to use integrated circuits. After his death in 2005, Texas Instruments created the Historic TI Archives, and his family donated his personal manuscripts and photograph collection to Southern Methodist University. The Kilby Award Foundation was founded in 1980 in his honor, and the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal was created in 1995. Kilby Labs, TI's research laboratory for silicon manufacturing and integrated circuit design, is named after him, as is the Jack Kilby Computer Centre at Edinburgh Napier University. A statue of Jack Kilby stands in Texas Instruments Plaza at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Barton Community College holds an annual Jack Kilby STEM Day.

Did You Know?

• Kilby's interest in electronics was sparked when an ice storm forced his father's electric company to use amateur radio operators for communication.
• He demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958, by showing a continuous sine wave on an oscilloscope.
• Kilby co-invented the handheld calculator along with Jerry Merryman and James Van Tassel.
• He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in inventing the integrated circuit.