Jack Kilby

In early 1958, Kilby joined Texas Instruments in Dallas. By the end of that summer, he had changed the course of the electronics industry. Working with borrowed and improvised equipment, Kilby conceived and built the first electronic circuit in which all components, both active and passive, were fabricated in one piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip. Demonstrated successfully on Sept. 12, 1958, Kilby's monolithic integrated circuit laid the conceptual and technical foundation for the entire field of modern microelectronics. Kilby went on to pioneer military, industrial, and commercial applications for microchip technology and headed construction of the first military system and the first computer to incorporate ICs. He also co-invented the handheld calculator and the thermal printer. Kilby won the Nobel prize in physics for his part in inventing the IC.