50 years of Integrated Circuits – Sept 12, 1958

The dawn of today’s society rose 50 years ago today.

On September 12, 1958, John Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in his lab at Texas Instruments. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Integrated Circuit, (the chips that run much of our modern infrastructure).

Kilby, who was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the chip, solved the problem that stood in the way of computer scientists since the invention of the transistor a decade earlier. Electronics are made up of numerous components including resistors, transistors, diodes and capacitors. The problem is, no matter how small the individual components were, they still needed to be connected to form an electronic circuit.

Kilby’s inspiration came while working with semi-conductors with Texas Instruments. He figured resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors could be made from the same materials as semi-conductors and combined on a single chip, the integrated circuit.

Kilby ended up sharing credit for the discovery of the integrated circuit with Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel. Working independently of Kilby, Noyce was trying to build an integrated circuit for Fairchild Semiconductor at the same time Kilby was developing his at Texas Instruments. Noyce choose silicone as his base material, an innovation that resulted in the hundreds of billions of chips running our world today.

(info source: Wired – This Day in Tech)