One Chip, Two Chips

When Jack St. Clair Kilby, a 34-year-old electrical engineer from Grand Bend, Kans., began working at a fledgling Dallas company called Texas Instruments in May 1958, he didn't yet qualify for the annual two-week summer vacation. So, come July, he had the lab pretty much to himself to try out something that had long been bugging him. Why, he wondered, couldn't all those tiny components--transistors, resistors, capacitors--in TI's electronic gadgetry be created out of a single block of material instead of separately wired parts? By September, he was ready to show his skeptical bosses just such an integrated circuit, or microchip. Last week Kilby's long-ago summer's tinkering won science's ultimate accolade: a Nobel Prize for Physics.

Kilby, now 76 and largely retired, was understandably surprised by the belated honor. "The integrated circuit didn't have much new physics in it," the 6-ft. 6-in., plainspoken inventor said with a shrug to reporters who gathered outside his door. But the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences thought otherwise. Awarding Kilby half the 2000 physics prize (total value: $915,000), it noted that his chip created nothing less than a revolution in solid-state physics, not to mention a $231 billion worldwide industry for the microchips that are the heart of today's electronic wizardry, from computers to smart toasters to talking Barbie dolls. The other half of the prize, fittingly, went to Zhores Alferov of St. Petersburg's Ioffee Physico-Technical Institute and Herbert Kroemer of the University of California at Santa Barbara for continuing that revolution by pioneering the lightning-fast chips used in satellite links, cell phones and CD players.

Still, if the Nobel rules allowed posthumous awards, Kilby would almost certainly be sharing his prize with someone else. For not long after Kilby's productive summer, Robert Noyce, another inventive young Midwesterner, began toying with similar ideas at an upstart outfit called Fairchild Semiconductor. But there was a key difference. Noyce, who had a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T.--Kilby flunked the admissions test--used a new chemical etching technique. It could not only print transistors on silicon wafers directly, like patterns in a rug, but also lay down the critical connecting tracks between them, simplifying the chips' manufacture and increasing their speed. Fairchild and TI fought a bitter patent battle that Fairchild ultimately won. But the gentlemanly Kilby and equally gentlemanly Noyce, who died in 1990 at age 62, were always content to call themselves co-inventors.

Kilby eventually left TI to teach and tinker full time, earning more than 60 patents. One was for a device his wife requested that seems especially relevant in this telemarketing era: it lets you block out unwanted phone calls--though presumably not predawn calls from Stockholm.

For more about the full slate of Nobel Prizes announced last week, check out time.com