Integrated circuit is 50 years old
Texas Instruments commemorated the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit with the opening Friday of Kilby Labs, honoring Jack Kilby, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the seminal electronic device.
As a new TI employee in 1958, Kilby was forced to work during the traditional company summer vacation. During that time, he built the first integrated circuit, now the basic building block of everything from 3G cell phones to supercomputers.
The first IC was crude: a sliver of germanium with protruding wires glued to a glass slide (see image below). When Kilby applied electricity to the circuit, "an unending sine wave undulated across his oscilloscope screen. In that instant...he had successfully integrated all of the parts of an electronic circuit onto a single device made from the same semiconductor material," according to TI's Web site.
