Jack St. Clair Kilby

Abstract

The electronics Integrated Circuit (IC) chips have enabled us to create intelligence on silicon (Si). Hence the impact of electronics manufacturing cuts across the entire industrial ecosystem. The IC chip is arguably one of the most profound inventions of the last century. Since the invention of the semiconductor transistor towards the end of the year 1947, the entire electronic industry was struggling to deal with the tyranny of numbers — the difficult problem of manually assembling a large of number of transistors on a board to realize complex circuits. This is when Jack S. Kilby entered the stage in the year 1958. He was a hands-on engineer with a lot of imagination and intuition, but grounded to reality with a lot of practical experience. He proposed a revolutionary concept of creating all components of an electronic circuit, insitu, on a single semiconductor piece. He successfully implemented this idea on September 12, 1958, by realizing a phase shift oscillator on a small piece of germanium (Ge), the first ever electronics IC chip. The importance of this milestone in the modern history of science and technology is highlighted by the fact that Jack Kilby received the Nobel prize in Physics, in the year 2000. The story of Jack Kilby and his remarkable achievements are very inspiring for all ages.