Jack Kilby
Jack Kilby
Jack St. Clair Kilbywas an American electrical engineer who took partin the realization of the first integrated circuit while working at Texas Instrumentsin 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on December 10, 2000. To congratulate him, US President Bill Clinton wrote, "You can take pride in the knowledge that your work will help to improve lives for generations to come."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 November 1923
CityJefferson City, MO
CountryUnited States of America
Five years ago, people were crying and feeling the Japanese were about to take over the Earth. I don't hear that kind of talk anymore.
Somewhere in that 20-year period, I would assume that there will be some basically new approach that will begin to cut into it, but it's got a long time.
Well, it's very dangerous to project, but it's clear that the existing technology has some more years to go.
I feel my story has been exercised very thoroughly and very frequently.
It's true that the original idea was mine, but what you see today is the work of probably tens of thousands of the world's best engineers, all concentrating on improving the product, reducing the cost, things of that sort.
The number of parts that were required were just prohibitive.
It's also somewhat in the center of a number of things that will be useful to the company.
It was really a very small company when I started and it changed very rapidly during those first periods.
They were the largest semiconductor maker in the world up until about 1980. I'm not sure that that can be re-gained again, but their progress in the last few years has been very impressive.
Well, the thought that everybody might have a personal computer at their desk or their home was certainly not on the mainstream of anybody's activity at that time.
Well, the big products in electronics in the '50s were radio and television. The first big computers were just beginning to come in and represented the most logical market for us to work in.
Today, people tend to credit me with having the original idea and made the first circuits.
They're very strong in memory. Didn't do very much in microprocessors or digital signal processing.
There was a space program before there was integrated circuits.