A massive ice storm convinced Jack Kilby that all problems have solutions. He spent the rest of his life trying to prove it.
The result: His discovery of the microchip made such an impact, he received a Nobel Prize in physics in 2000. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1982, joining Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Wright brothers and other big names.
He also received the National Medal of Science in 1970.
Kilby first heard the call to science in 1937, when an ice storm struck his native western Kansas. His dad, an electrical engineer for a power firm, borrowed a neighbor's ham radio to keep track of customers in the area who'd gotten their power and phone service knocked out.
Kilby (1923-2005) was smitten with the gadget. So he got a license to become an amateur radio operator and learn more about the device. He repeatedly dismantled the radio and rebuilt it.
"He built a ham set, improved it, scavenged some parts, improved it again," wrote T.R. Reid in "The Chip." "By the time he got to Great Bend High School, it was clear that he would make his career in electrical engineering."
He pursued that field in college before World War II intervened and he got sent to a radio repair shop in India. He got hands-on experience by helping design smaller, lighter radios for the soldiers.
Kilby resumed his studies at the University of Illinois after the war. With his brand-new electrical engineering degree in hand in 1947, he took a job with a Milwaukee electronics firm that developed ceramic-based circuits for radios and TVs.
One of his projects was to find a cheap way to make resistors the same size, so the firm could produce reliable circuits. Given his prolific reading habit, he recalled something he'd seen in a dental supply catalog. It described a new technology that let dentists use sandblasters to erase tooth decay. He looked into the devices and found they weren't popular with dentists or patients.
"But Kilby managed to track down some of those precise devices; sure enough, they were perfect for carving away excess carbon and making all the printed resistors the same size," Reid wrote.
In his 10 years at the firm, Kilby came up with 12 patentable inventions. Eager to learn even more, he earned his master's degree in electrical engineering by taking night classes at the University of Wisconsin.
Such credentials made him attractive to bigger firms such as IBM IBM and Texas Instruments TXN, and in 1958 Kilby moved to Dallas to work for the latter. Texas Instruments had come up with the Micro-Module, where electronic parts could be snapped together to create circuits.
Kilby felt a better way existed. Why not put the parts on one piece of silicon to build a tiny circuit? With the parts on one piece, you wouldn't need wires. Unlike with transistors, parts wouldn't have to be soldered on. While transistors were better than the vacuum tubes they'd replaced, each soldered wire could fail. "Day after day, he went over the idea, sketching pictures in his lab notebook, sketching circuits, planning how he might build a model," Reid wrote.
Kilby mulled over where Texas Instruments' strength lay. Clearly, it was in silicon. The firm had heavily invested in gear to purify silicon and make transistors out of the material.
"This conclusion provided Kilby the focus he needed for the narrow, concentrated phase of problem solving," Reid wrote. "He began to think and think hard about silicon. What could you do with silicon?"
A few chip parts, like diodes and transistors, could be made out of silicon. Others, such as resistors and capacitors, were made from other materials. Couldn't all the parts be made out of silicon? That way, all the parts could be manufactured into a single silicon wafer. Nothing would need to be wired together.
He worked furiously to bring his idea into being. He successfully demonstrated the first microchip on Sept. 12, 1958. All the parts were glued onto a glass slide half the size of a paper clip. Kilby continued tweaking his invention.
Robert Noyce at rival Fairchild Semiconductor came up with a similar idea around the same time as Kilby. The two firms agreed to grant licenses to each other, and Kilby and Noyce became known as co-founders of the microchip.
Today, chips power everything from computers to cell phones to medical devices. The worldwide semiconductor market grew 4% to $274 billion in sales in 2007, according to IT researcher Gartner.
In 1965, Texas Instruments gave Kilby a new task -- come up with a pocket calculator. Desk calculators at the time were the size and weight of a typewriter. A pocket version would need to run on a battery.
Kilby eagerly accepted the challenge. It took just over a year for him and his team to come up with a device that contained four chips and ran three hours on a rechargeable battery. The patent they received for it, No. 3819921, can still be found on Texas Instruments calculators.
Kilby insisted on perfection and kept tweaking the calculator until it was small enough to fit in a pocket. When the Pocketronic calculator hit the market in 1971, it was a huge success. The next year, 5 million pocket calculators were sold in the U.S. In a decade, more calculators existed than people in the country.
This story originally ran July 12, 2005, on Leaders & Success.
Source: Investor's Business Daily
