Sixty years. But how much longer? In 1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby —from Great Bend, Kan.—created one of the greatest inventions, a great bend, in the history of mankind. Kilby recently had started at Texas Instruments as an electrical engineer. Most everyone left on a mandated summer break, but he stayed in the lab and worked on combining a transistor, capacitor and three resistors on a single piece of germanium. On Sept. 12, he showed his boss his integrated circuit. At a half-inch long and not very wide, it had ugly wires sticking out, resembling an upside-down cockroach glued to a glass slide.
In January 1959 Bob Noyce, another Midwesterner, was keeping busy at Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto, Calif. He deployed a photographic printing technique—the planar process, which uses glass as insulation—to deposit aluminum wires above silicon transistors. Without the messy cockroach-leg wires, the integrated circuit, or chip, became manufacturable.
In March 1960, TI introduced the Type 502 Flip Flop—basically one bit of memory for $450. A few weeks later, Fairchild announced its own. The U.S. Air Force used them in 1961. So did new computer companies and even NASA in its Apollo rockets. One bit turned into four, then 16, then 64. This started the shrink, integrate, shrink, integrate, rinse, repeat motion that’s still going strong today. This relentless cost decline creates new markets out of nothing.
In 1965 Fairchild research chief Gordon Moore wrote a now-famous article for Electronics magazine, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.” Today known as Moore’s Law, the article’s thesis was that chips would double in density every 18 to 24 months. By 1969, the 3101 64-bit memory chip shipped at $1 a bit. We’ve come a long way. Your iPhone probably has a trillion bits at picocents a bit. Kilby received the Nobel Physics Prize in 2000 and credited Noyce, who had died a decade earlier, in his acceptance speech. You have to wonder what took the Nobel Committee so long.
Integrated circuits are the greatest invention since fire—or maybe indoor plumbing. The world would be unrecognizable without them. They have bent the curve of history, influencing the economy, government and general human flourishing. The productivity unleashed from silicon computing power disrupted or destroyed everything in its path: retail, music, finance, advertising, travel, manufacturing, health care, energy. It’s hard to find anything Kilby’s invention hasn’t changed.
Now what?
