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DALLAS - Nobel laureate Jack Kilby, whose invention of the integrated circuit ushered in the electronics age and made possible the microprocessor, has died after a battle with cancer. He was 81.
Mr. Kilby died Monday, (June 20,2005) according to Texas Instruments Inc., where he worked for many years.
Before the integrated circuit, electronic devices relied on bulky and fragile circuitry, including glass vacuum tubes. In the late 1950s, there was considerable interest - especially in the military - in making devices smaller.
Mr. Kilby's fingernail-size integrated circuit, a forerunner of the microchip used in today's computers, replaced the bulky and unreliable switches and tubes.
It was during his first year working at TI in Dallas in the summer of 1958 that Mr. Kilby set out on a course that would forever change how electricity is used to efficiently and reliably power everything from vacuum cleaners to supercomputers. Using borrowed equipment, he built the first integrated circuit in which all the components were fabricated in a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip.
"TI was the only company that agreed to let me work on electronic component miniaturization more or less full time, and it turned out to be a great fit," Mr. Kilby wrote in an autobiography for the Nobel Committee in 2000, the year he won the prize for physics.
Today, integrated circuits can be found in all manner of digital devices, from TVs to microwave ovens. Sales of integrated circuits totaled $179-billion in 2004, supporting a global electronics market of more than $1.1-trillion, according to TI.
The contributions of Mr. Kilby - who also co-invented the handheld calculator - are hard to overstate, according to technology experts.
"Today's trillion-dollar market for integrated circuit-based electronics is just the tip of the iceberg," inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil said. "The exponentially expanding powers of information technology are transforming every industry and facet of life from the making of music, the enhancement of human communication through the Internet, to our growing mastery of our own biology through computer-based simulation."