Electrical engineering alumnus receives Nobel Prize

Jack Kilby began to write down and sketch out his ideas in July of 1958. By September, he was ready to demonstrate a working integrated circuit built on a piece of semiconductor material. Photo courtesy of Texas Instruments. (15K JPG)

"Kilby's invention of the integrated circuit was one of two watershed events in the miniaturization of technology." — Dean Paul Peercy

Jack St. Clair Kilby, a 1950 MS graduate in electrical engineering, has been named a co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics. Kilby received the prize for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit, or the chip, an insight that led to what is now the foundation of the modern electronics industry.

Also sharing in the 2000 Nobel in physics are Zhores I. Alferov, with the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia and Herbert Kroemer of the University of California at Santa Barbara, California, USA. They invented and developed fast opto- and microelectronic components based on layered semiconductor structures, termed semiconductor heterostructures. The three received the prize in Sweden on Dec. 10.

Kilby, 76, joined Texas Instruments in 1958. His idea for his Nobel-winning invention was captured in his notebook in these words: "The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice (of silicon): resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor." According to Texas Instruments, he was working with borrowed and improvised equipment when he conceived and built the first electronic circuit in which all of the components, both active and passive, were fabricated in a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip. The demonstration of that first simple microchip on Sept. 12, 1958, made history.

"Kilby's invention of the integrated circuit was one of two watershed events in the miniaturization of technology," says UW-Madison College of Engineering Dean Paul Peercy. "The first was the transistor, which was co-invented by another of our alumni, John Bardeen. That replaced vacuum tubes. Then Kilby realized that you could replace discrete components such as resistors and capacitors by placing the technology on silicon with the transistors. That really set the stage for today's computing revolution. The integrated circuit is the engine that drives the information age.

"From a business standpoint, chip manufacture is roughly a $200 billion a year enterprise, and growing. Add to that the economic significance of high-tech industry. You may now begin to see the significance of Kilby's invention," Peercy adds.

In an interview for Texas Instruments, Kilby reflected on his thoughts at the time the circuit was invented. "I think I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business and electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers. What we did not appreciate was how much the lower costs would expand the field of electronics into completely different applications that I don't know that anyone had thought of at that time," he said.

In 1947, Kilby earned a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. After graduation, he worked for the Centralab Division of Globe-Union Inc. in Milwaukee, where he worked on ceramic-based printed circuits.

Kilby holds more than 60 patents. He is the recipient of numerous national and international awards. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a recipient of both the National Medal of Science and a Draper Prize, an inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and an IEEE Fellow. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from UW-Madison in 1990, and a Distinguished Service Citation from the College of Engineering in 1986.