Jack St. Clair Kilby Biography

World of Computer Science on Jack St. Clair Kilby

Jack St. Clair Kilby is a pioneer in miniaturized electronics who holds more than sixty patents. He shares credit with Robert Noyce for inventing the integrated circuit chip while employed at Texas Instruments. Kilby also invented the hand-held calculator.

Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on November 8, 1923. His father was an electrical engineer who became president of the Kansas Power Company when Kilby was four years old. The family moved to Salina, Kansas, where Kilby learned the intricacies of electricity during the summers when he accompanied his father on visits to company facilities throughout the western part of the state. His interest in electrical engineering was kindled in the winter of 1937 when his father used a ham radio to maintain contact with his power stations during a blizzard. Fascinated by radio, Kilby studied hard, soon gained his Federal Communications Commission license, and built his own radio using salvaged parts.

Throughout high school Kilby wanted to be an electrical engineer. Ultimately, he enrolled at his parents' alma mater, the University of Illinois. Four months after his first semester began, the American naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked. Kilby enlisted in the U.S Army Signal Corps and later served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). At the time, small groups of Allied soldiers were being airlifted into remote places to build resistance units. These soldiers were given backpack radios to communicate with their commanders. Although they represented the state of the art in radio technology, the radios were heavy and performed erratically; they had not been designed for jungle combat. In his attempt to remedy the situation, Kilby traveled to Calcutta for a truckload of black-market radio parts, and soon his unit was building smaller, more reliable radios for the troops. From this experience Kilby learned that if a machine does not quite meet certain needs, it can be rebuilt to do so.

After the war he returned to the University of Illinois and graduated in 1947 with a B.S. in electrical engineering. He then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he took a job with an electronics company called Centralab. Kilby's early years with Centralab were spent finding ways to build electrical circuits in ever smaller and more efficient packages; he was particularly concerned with reducing manufacturing steps to improve profitability. For example, he used silk-screen techniques to build printed circuit boards, and he also perfected a way to print carbon resistors directly on a ceramic circuit base. While working at Centralab, he earned an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.

In 1952 Bell Laboratories announced that it would sponsor seminars on its new transistors and issue production licenses. Eager to get into the transistor business, Centralab paid the fee and sent Kilby to the seminar. He had already been immersed in the field for several years, and his mind was soon occupied by the possibilities of a device that would eliminate vacuum tubes, which were large, hot, and consumed a great deal of power. He quickly learned, however, that transistorized circuits had limitations that prevented engineers from actually being able to build the circuits they designed. Although transistors were certainly an improvement over vacuum tubes, truly miniaturized circuits still could not be built because there were too many electrical connections too close together to be made by human workers. Kilby was determined to overcome this challenge, but to do so he needed more resources than were available to him at Centralab.

In 1958 Kilby went to work at a new company called Texas Instruments, which had already made a name for itself by reducing the price of once-expensive transistors and finding a place for them in the consumer market. In 1954 the company had been involved with manufacturing the first transistor pocket radio, which was enormously successful. Executives at Texas Instruments believed that the possibilities of electronic circuits were nearly endless. In May of 1954 company engineers perfected a process for making transistors out of silicon--an improvement which made them much less prone to fail when they got hot. In their research they discovered that several electrical components could be built from silicon, although at the time they were only interested in transistors.

When Kilby joined the company, Texas Instruments was already working on the problem of electrical connections in miniature circuits. In partnership with the U.S. Army, the company was trying to perfect a concept called the "micro-module"--a system of standardized components with built-in connections that could be snapped together to make instant circuits. Kilby considered this a bad idea; he believed they should concentrate on reducing the number of parts needed rather than making it easier to put the parts together. Though Kilby had little influence on the decisions being made, he did have the laboratory entirely to himself for a few weeks when most Texas Instruments employees were on vacation. He used this time to devise a better solution to the problem of electrical connections in miniature circuits.

Kilby's solution to this problem has come to be called the "monolithic idea." He listed all the electrical components that could be built from silicon: transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors. He then conceived the idea of constructing a single device with all the needed parts that could be made of silicon and soldering it to a circuit board. He understood that if he could eliminate the wires between the parts, he could squeeze more parts into a smaller space, thus solving the obstacle of manufacturing complex transistor circuits. Thus, Kilby had conceived of the integrated circuit chip. His first chip, a "phase-shift oscillator," was half an inch long and narrower than a toothpick. He demonstrated it on September 12, 1958, to a group of company executives, and it worked perfectly. Several teams in different companies around the country were working on this problem simultaneously, and the competition to solve it first was fierce. Kilby's chip worked, but it was not a complete solution. Though he put all the components on a single chip, he had not connected them feasibly. His demonstrator chip connected all the parts with tiny gold wires, which were not practical in the long term. Responding to rumors that another company was about to patent a working chip, Texas Instruments applied for a patent for their chip on February 6, 1959, even though they had not yet devised a way to connect the parts.

Another engineer, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Electronics, had also been working on the problem. He applied for a patent on July 3, 1959, almost five months later than Kilby, but his working model achieved both integration and interconnection. Both inventors were eventually awarded patents: Noyce in May, 1962, and Kilby in June, 1964. This set the stage for a court fight between the two companies that was not settled until 1970, by which time integrated circuit chips had become a multi-billion dollar industry. In the summer of 1966 executives of the two companies had made an agreement to share ownership by granting production licenses to each other. Any other company that wanted to produce integrated circuits had to pay both Texas Instruments and Fairchild. As for Kilby, the scientific community informally agreed that both he and Noyce had invented the chip and that they both deserved credit.

The new chip was quickly adopted by the military, but there were no immediate consumer applications. Therefore, Texas Instruments directed Kilby to make a miniature calculator that could fit in a person's hand. At the time, calculators were the size of typewriters and cost over a thousand dollars. In 1971 Kilby and his team introduced the first hand-held calculator, the Pocketronic. It weighed 2.5 pounds; it could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and it cost 250 dollars. It was extremely successful and remained the single most popular application of the integrated circuit for years. The pocket calculator also illustrated the way production costs fell over the years. A decade after its introduction, Texas Instruments' pocket calculators were selling for under seven dollars.

Kilby left Texas Instruments in 1971 and began working as an independent consultant. From 1978 to 1984 he was Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1969 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1982. He earned the National Academy of Engineering's Charles Stark Draper Prize along with Robert Noyce in 1989, the National Medal of Technology in 1990, and Japan's Kyoto Prize in 1993.