David Lammers

Jack Kilby and the Old-Fashioned Way
September 11, 2008

Tomorrow, Sept. 12^th, marks the day 50 years ago when Jack Kilby demonstrated the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Dallas.

Many people know the gist of the Kilby story, how the young Kansas native, the son of a manager of a Kansas electric cooperative, came to TI just before a company-wide summer vacation left the newly hired Kilby alone in the lab. After trying to build a tube version of an integrated “Micro-Module” that the U.S. military was seeking, Kilby grew pessimistic about the yields and costs of that approach. He turned his mind to solid state devices and their potential to serve not only as transistors, but also as bulk resistors, and as capacitors formed by p-n junctions.

Kilby took his sketches to his boss, Willis Adcock, who asked for a prototype. Kilby first delivered a circuit made of discrete solid-state devices, and demonstrated that to Adcock on Aug. 28, 1958. In a remarkably short time, just two weeks, he moved to an integrated version.

“I obtained several wafers, diffused and with contacts in place. By choosing the circuit, I was able to lay out two structures that would use the existing contacts on the wafers. The first circuit attempted was a phase-shift oscillator, a favorite demonstration vehicle for linear circuits at that time. On September 12, 1958, the first three oscillators of this type were completed. When power was applied, the first unit oscillated at about 1.3 megacycles,” Kilby wrote.

At the Sept. 12, 1958 demonstration to several of TI’s top executives, Kilby showed “a sliver of germanium, with protruding wires, glued to a glass slide. It was a rough device,” according to a TI history. When Kilby pressed the switch, “an unending sine curve undulated across the oscilloscope screen. His invention worked — he had solved the problem.”

Kilby went on to do a few other great things, including leading the development of the first hand-held calculator, made of bipolar ICs fabbed on 2 in. wafers. He spent a good deal of his time working on photovoltaics at his private lab in Dallas. And oh yes, he won the Nobel Prize in 2000, five years before he died in the same house he had moved into when he first came to Dallas in 1958.

I first met Kilby in 1985 at a TI reception at the Tsukuba Expo, and he was not a particularly happy man. TI and Japan’s patent office were locked in a dispute over the basic “Kilby patent,” and Japan’s custom office had held up the entry of an exhibit of Kilby’s original IC. Kilby was fuming, in a quiet way, of course.

What struck me about Kilby was that his character was founded on values that were very traditional, almost classical. For example, he and his sister would memorize poetry, and be called upon by their parents to recite verses at the family dinner table. His father would take him around Kansas in his car while he worked on power generators. What resulted was a man so very unlike most of us who work in the hurry-up-or-die semiconductor industry today.

Kilby was quiet and humble, but he was blessed with a natural curiosity. One time in Dallas he asked if I had heard about a rumor that the Cyrix microprocessors were achieving a megahertz clock speed. I cringed with guilt, because I had received the information from Cyrix’s public relations person but had failed to promptly write the story. He taught me that news does have a time stamp on it, and that even a short story is better than no story.

Conversely, Kilby’s message is that there are no shortcuts to greatness. Real achievement, lasting value, comes from taking the time to do a job well, from thinking through how something can be done better, with less cost, for the good of people trying to get something done. What happened 50 years ago holds encouraging lessons for anyone who thinks such good things cannot happen again. And it serves as a caution for those who think there is a shake-and-bake path to accomplishment.

Posted by David Lammers on September 11, 2008 | Comments (0)