The revolution called microchip

BANGALORE,INDIA: September 12, 1958. Jack S. Kilby, a newly employed engineer at Texas Instruments, was sweating it out in the lab of the company without even getting a vacation. His challenge was to find a solution to the problem in circuit and connect up a large number of electronic components in elaborate circuits in a cost-effective, efficient way.

After a lot of experiment and brainstorming he came to the conclusion that manufacturing the circuit components in mass in a single piece of semiconductor material could provide a solution. Finally, on September 12, 1958 Kilby presented his findings to the company.

What he showed was a piece of germanium with an oscilloscope attached to it. When he pressed a switch, the oscilloscope showed a continuous sine wave, which proved his integrated circuit worked and that he solved the problem.

But those days that young man would not have thought that the invention would revolutionize the information age and heralded an explosion of consumer electronics products. Still that was bound to happen and he became a legend. The device, measuring 7/16ths of an inch by one 16th of an inch, virtually revolutionized electronics.

For whatever revolution we have today in the filed of IT or electronics, the credit should go to Jack Kilby, and, of course, Robert Norton Noyce, another brain behind the invention.

Actually Noyce, then at Fairchild Semiconductor, was also working on the same thing, without even knowing that Kilby was at it. The only difference was that while Kilby used germanium and Noyce used silicon.

In February 1959, Texas Instruments filed for a patent and Fairchild did the same in July thus resulting in a legal battle. Finally, the Patent No. 3,138,743 for Miniaturized Electronic Circuits was issued to Jack S. Kilby and Texas Instruments in 1964 and the Patent No. 2,981,877 for the silicon based IC was granted to Robert Noyce.

Then in 1968 Noyce founded INTEL, the company responsible for the invention of the microprocessor.

In the beginning the integrated circuit won a place in the military market through programs such as the first computer using silicon chips for the US Air Force in 1961 and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. But that did not help the chip gain the popularity it deserved.

That was how Patrick E. Haggerty, former TI chairman, challenged Kilby to design a calculator as powerful as the large, electro-mechanical desktop models of the day, but small enough to fit in a coat pocket. And thus Kilby co-invented the electronic hand-held calculator, which helped the successful commercialization of the integrated circuit (IC) or the microchip.

The monolithic integrated circuit placed the previously separated transistors, resistors, capacitors and all the connecting wiring onto a single crystal made of semiconductor material.

"What we didn't realize then was that the integrated circuit would reduce the cost of electronic functions by a factor of a million to one, nothing had ever done that for anything before," Jack Kilby said once.

In 2000 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, "for basic work on information and communication technology". He held nearly 60 patents by the time he died at the age of 81, on (June 21, 2005.

Today the global market of microchip is worth about $1 trillion a year.

There is no doubt that the microchip virtually created the modern computer industry. The magic power of the microchip has its role in all fields of modern science, be it communications, transport, medicine, manufacturing or commerce.

We owe it a lot to the tiny chip for transforming yesterday's room-size machines into the mainframes, minicomputers and personal computers of today.