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
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.
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.
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.
This could be done in part, because the equipment was very inexpensive. Not much money was involved in tooling so that basic changes of that type could be accomplished.
Space was of interest, but a major driving factor was the interest in the military, which had much broader, more diverse needs, more urgency with it.
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.
I feel my story has been exercised very thoroughly and very frequently.
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.
There was a space program before there was integrated circuits.
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're very strong in memory. Didn't do very much in microprocessors or digital signal processing.