Aussie Geek Podcast

Valley of Integrated Circuits by bionerd

It’s been 50 years since the world’s first Integrated Circuit. Jack Kilby built it while working for Texas Instruments and it was made from glass, germanium, wires and glue. Kilby thought like a business person, looking for a cost effective solution to the tyranny of numbers problem.

“Further thought led me to the conclusion that semiconductors were all that were really required — that resistors and capacitors [passive devices], in particular, could be made from the same material as the active devices [transistors]. I also realized that, since all of the components could be made of a single material, they could also be made in situ interconnected to form a complete circuit”

The chip that Jack built was first sold to the public inside a pocket calculator, as a replacement for the large vacuum tube computation machines. The Integrated Circuit is now a critical part of modern life. The Integrated Circuit has achieved many things: enabling the deaf to hear, medical diagnostic machines, transportation, manufacturing, computers and the industry that goes with it.

Jack Kilby went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in the year 2000. You can get Jack Kilby’s Nobel Prize lecture in RealPlayer format or PDF transcript.