Can you imagine today's world without a microchip?
Jack graduated in Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois, in those days the eyes of the technological world were focused on the invention of the transistor, however Jack was aware of the benefits and limitations of them that were cheap and really worked well, but more and more were needed to perform the increasingly complex tasks required by the industry, also its assembly was expensive, it required a huge number of operators (who were usually women) and often, due to its fragility, the components were broken. The transistor consisted of a series of isolated components. Apart from the transistor itself, carbon resistors and porcelain capacitors had to be connected via copper wires.
Jack had the brilliant idea of integrating all these components into a single semiconductor block, thus avoiding the need to make the connections with copper wires as had been done up to that time. He used a 6 x 6 mm germanium pad to connect a single transistor, three resistors and a capacitor, forming a phase-rotated oscillator. Copper connections were no longer necessary. The germanium block, being a semiconductor material, replaced the connections, "integrated" them.
Jack Kilby's invention led to the mass production of modern processors.
Finally, it is also worth mentioning the contribution of the American physicist Robert Noyce, who eventually founded a new company, Intel.
Interesting facts
Kilby worked for more than 10 years at Texas Instruments where he invented the pocket calculator and the thermal printer among other things.
In 1970 he received the U.S. National Medal of Science.
In 1982, he was inducted into the American Inventors Hall of Fame.
In 2000, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with half of the prize for his contribution to the development of the Integrated Circuit.
"What we didn't realize (when we developed the integrated circuit) was that it would reduce the cost of electronic functions by a factor of a million to one."
Jack Kilby
Take the Audiovisual CTRL
Sources:
nobelprize.com
ti.com
wikipedia.com
