Jack Kilby and the Old-Fashioned Way
Tomorrow, Sept.
12th, 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.
