The integrated circuit, or computer chip, reached a major milestone 66 years ago this week, when Jack Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments, filed a patent for “miniaturized electronic circuits,” a multi-transistor device on Feb. 6, 1959.
The motivation behind the first computer chip
In mid-1958, as a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, Kilby was not yet eligible for a summer vacation. He spent the summer working on the problem in circuit design that was commonly called the “tyranny of numbers”, and he finally came to the conclusion that the manufacturing of circuit components en masse in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution.
On September 12, 1959, Kilby presented his findings to TI’s management. He showed them a 1/16×7/16-inch piece of germanium containing a single transistor and supporting components. He attached an oscilloscope, pressed a switch, and the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave. This proved that his integrated circuit worked.
Kilby filed U.S. Patent 3,138,743 for “Miniaturized Electronic Circuits”, on February 6, 1959. It was the earliest patent on the integrated circuit, one of 60 patents he was granted in his career. It was notable for having different components such as transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors on one single substrate. Along with Robert Noyce, who independently made a similar circuit a few months later, Kilby is generally credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit.
The first practical computer chip
Robert Noyce, then working at Fairchild, was independently working on the same problem.
Noyce’s approach, unveiled in 1959, ended up being the one that resulted in a practical computer chip as we know it today. Kilby’s device had several transistors connected by individual wires, a technique called “flying wires.” This method didn’t lend itself to mass production. Noyce devised the idea of interconnecting transistors with a layer of metal conductors, making the circuit truly monolithic. This approach made it possible to create much more ambitious designs, especially as transistors grew smaller. It also facilitated mass production.
Modern computer chips still use Noyce’s approach to manufacturing today.
The cautionary tale of TI and Fairchild
But both companies can give an example of being first not being a guarantee of future success. Both Fairchild and TI had a chance to dominate future consumer electronics with vertical integration. TI did, for a while, in the handheld calculator market. Both Fairchild’s game console and TI’s home computer looked promising in the late 1970s/early 1980s time period because those two companies were capable of producing the whole thing, down to the computer chips inside, cutting out several layers of middlemen. But both products proved to be commercial failures.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.