[Premium-Rx] The late Jack Kilby

[Albert P. Belle Isle]

Jack Kilby was, indeed, a great engineer who made many seminal 
contributions to electronics (and to TI's patent portfolio).

However, the technology underlying the integrated circuit revolution and 
Gordon Moore's eponymous "law" wasn't among them.

Kilby demonstrated that it was possible to use wires to interconnect 
discrete transistors and resistors on a substrate and make a uselul 
higher-level function whose sale might increase the use of transistors (and 
TI's customer base).

This was more analogous to today's hybrid integrated circuits than to the 
monolithic integrated circuits whose relentless transistor density 
increases have so dramatically changed our world.

The late Bob Noyce invented the concept of using Silicon's native oxide 
with photolithographic patterning. (The lack of a native oxide is what has 
prevented higher electron mobility substrates like GaAs from challenging 
the economics of Silicon.)

Noyce's first _monolithic_ integrated circuit is the basis for modern 
electronics.

He was a consumate gentlemen who never begrudged Kilby his fame, but most 
everyone in the integrated circuit industry (outside the TI marketing 
deptartment) views Noyce as the father of us all.

(TI, however, was the company that "bet the farm" on Silicon transistor 
technology, while everyone else was pushing Germanium. They certainly can 
lay claim as a "plank-owner" in the launching of the electronic revolution 
on that basis, alone.)

Regards,
Al


At 08:21 PM 6/24/2005 +0100, you wrote:
>Dear Guys
>
>I'd like to thank Greg for mentioning the recent death of Jack Kilby.  For 
>those who did not catch Greg's posting, Jack was the inventor of the 
>integrated circuit, developed when he was with Texas Instruments.  His 
>breakthrough was to use a single block of silicon to contain an entire 
>circuit.  His first one had an area about half a centimetre square and one 
>mm thick.  We have come a long way since.  Today's ICs can accommodate 
>about 100 million transistors within this volume.
>
>The Times in the UK gave him a whole page obituary yesterday, as befits a 
>Nobel Prize winner and someone who singlehandedly transformed the way in 
>which we live.  I well remember the valve age and I continue to be amazed 
>at how complex are modern professional radios.
>
>Interestingly, Jack's early interest in electronics was sparked by amateur 
>radio via his dad.
>
>In 2000 he was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame and 
>joined the likes of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers.  He 
>was described as one of the world's greatest inventors.  Yet he received 
>little financial reward, and nor did he benefit much from his many 
>inventions.  He did not have a digital watch, a microwave oven or a pocket 
>calculator. To his death he continued to use a slide rule.  Despite 
>receiving countless awards he remained a modest man whose main interest 
>seems to have been to encourage the young.  A truly great man.  RIP.
>
>73s
>Michael O'Beirne
>G8MOB
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