Texas Instruments commemorated the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit with the opening Friday of Kilby Labs, honoring Jack Kilby, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the seminal electronic device. As a new TI employee in 1958, Kilby was forced to work during the traditional company summer vacation. During that time, he built the first integrated circuit, now the basic building block of everything from 3G cell phones to supercomputers.
Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, also created an integrated circuit, about six months after Kilby. At that time, Noyce was at Fairchild Semiconductor (which he also co-founded). Noyce’s chip, made of silicon, overcame some practical problems that Kilby’s germanium-based device did not.
Kilby Labs will be located on TI’s Dallas North Campus, where Kilby first designed the chip. The new facility will bring together university researchers and leading TI engineers to discover new ways to use the IC–”from creating new ways to make health care more mobile to harnessing new power sources to enabling more fuel-efficient vehicles,” TI said.
At TI’s headquarters, the original lab where Kilby worked and made his discovery of the first integrated circuit has been re-created on-site. TI has also made a donation toward Jack Kilby’s memorial statue in his hometown of Great Bend, Kansas.
It’s amazing how we are things had been changed during those 50 years from the technical point of view as things are being developed on a accelerator way so I wonder what we are going to see in the next 5 months !