Jack Kilby, Nobel laureate; invention led to microchip

WASHINGTON -- Jack St. Clair Kilby died of cancer Monday at his home in Dallas, almost 50 years after his idea for what is commonly known as the microchip revolutionized the way that the world computes, calculates, and communicates, ushering in the Information Age. He was 81.

Mr. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his 1958 invention of the integrated electronic circuit, which made personal computers, satellite navigation systems, cell phones, and the $200 billion field of microelectronics possible. He also helped invent the handheld calculator, which commercialized the microchip, and held more than 60 other patents.

''In my opinion, there are only a handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world and the way we live in it -- Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, and Jack Kilby," Tom Engibous, chairman of Texas Instruments, where Mr. Kilby worked for years, said in a statement. ''If there was ever a seminal invention that transformed not only our industry but our world, it was Jack's invention of the first integrated circuit."

Mr. Kilby, who failed the college entrance exam for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had not worked at Texas Instruments long enough to participate in the company's annual summer shutdown, when its 7,500 employees went on vacation.

So he was alone in the labs, working on borrowed equipment on July 24, 1958, when he struck upon the idea that he jotted down in his notebook: ''The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor."

Engineers call that the Monolithic Idea. It cracked a nagging engineering problem. The transistor had been invented 10 years earlier, replacing the vacuum tubes used in the earliest computers. But transistors were built of components strung together with wires. A single bad connection would ruin the circuit, and circuits could only get so small before it was impossible for humans to solder them together. Mr. Kilby's idea was to eliminate the wires and use a single block of silicon, or germanium, containing an entire electronic circuit.

When he built the first circuit, it was half the size of a paperclip. In the same space, engineers can now squeeze about 100 million transistors.

The chip first went to work in a computer for the Air Force in 1961 and in the Minuteman missile in 1962. A list of what it's used for today is almost endless: CAT scans, vehicle emission controls, sports broadcasting replays, iPods, military night-vision goggles, microwave ovens, and pet-locator devices, among others.

Mr. Kilby's invention came just six months before Robert Noyce, who later co-founded Intel Corp., came up with the same idea. Noyce, who died in 1990, was usually credited with making the idea practical. After a 10-year patent battle, the men called themselves co-inventors of the microchip, and Mr. Kilby credited Noyce in his Nobel Prize speech.

A quiet, self-effacing man, the 6-foot-6 Mr. Kilby ''seemed almost embarrassed by the attention" of the Nobel Prize, said Washington Post writer T.R. Reid, who wrote a book about the invention. ''I never imagined how much human ingenuity could do to turn that one idea into useful applications," Mr. Kilby told Reid.

Born in Jefferson City, Mo., Mr. Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kan. During World War II, he was in the Army and was sent to India, where his job was to repair radios, although there were no spare parts. The resourcefulness that the assignment taught him proved useful.

After the war, he took the MIT entrance exam but fell three points short of the required grade. He enrolled in and graduated from the University of Illinois in electrical engineering, then earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1950.

He left Texas Instruments to become a consultant in 1970 and retired during the 1980s, but he continued to drop in at Texas Instruments to inspire younger engineers. He was a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University from 1978 to 1984.

Although Mr. Kilby's work inaugurated the Information Age, he was slow to embrace the latest consumer technologies, working on outdated computers for years. He didn't own a digital watch or a cell phone as recently as a year ago. He preferred a slide rule, but would use his own handheld calculator because of its greater accuracy.

Mr. Kilby was once asked what was the worst application of his invention. His response was immediate: the singing greeting card.