The Sine Wave

1958 · Germanium Solid Circuit · Work 841 of 1,871

An electronics laboratory in Dallas on a September afternoon, sunlight in stripes through slatted blinds, on a bench a small glass slide with a pale pinkish-beige bar of germanium one centimetre long in grey-white wax, fine gold wires in low arches over the bar, a stereo microscope, an oscilloscope in a grey steel case, its round screen glowing with a single green sine wave on a plain dark ground, at the bench a slender young man with short dark hair in a white short-sleeved shirt, one hand on a black toggle switch, alone at the bench, seen from directly behind, face turned fully away, the room empty around him.

Who
Jack S. Kilby (1923–2005) was an electrical engineer at Texas Instruments and one of the two inventors of the integrated circuit, the microchip. He grew up in Kansas, where his father ran a small electric company; when an ice storm brought down the lines, he saw radio amateurs keep people in touch. After studying electrical engineering at the University of Illinois (1947), he designed circuits for hearing aids and television sets at the parts maker Centralab in Milwaukee. In May 1958 he moved to Texas Instruments in Dallas, which let him work full time on miniaturising electronics. That summer he built the first circuit whose components were all made from a single piece of semiconductor. He later helped develop the first handheld calculator and the thermal printer. For his part in the invention he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. Robert Noyce of Fairchild, who developed the chip independently in a form fit for production, would have shared it, Kilby said, had he still been alive. The calculator, the mobile phone and the digital camera would not have been possible without the chip.
The moment
In the summer of 1958 about 90 percent of the Texas Instruments workforce was on the company's mass vacation; Kilby, newly hired, had no vacation coming and used the quiet. On 24 July he wrote in his notebook that resistors, capacitors and transistors made of the same material could be formed in a single piece. His supervisor Willis Adcock was enthusiastic but sceptical and asked for proof, which Kilby delivered on 28 August with a circuit built from separate silicon parts. For the first truly integrated circuit, the technicians Pat Harbrecht and Tom Yeargan cut germanium wafers into bars of about 0.12 by 0.4 inches; fine gold wires connected the parts. On 12 September 1958 the first three phase-shift oscillators were completed. When power was applied, the first unit oscillated at about 1.3 megahertz. On 19 September a flip-flop built the same way was completed.
The other side
In his Nobel lecture Kilby said that military applications had played a major role and that the early proponents of miniaturised electronics were the US military and space agencies. In May 1959 Eldon Hall of MIT came to Dallas to shrink the guidance computer of the Navy's submarine-launched Polaris missile. The Navy paid for 64 units of a custom version at 1,000 dollars each. Laborious handcrafting and competing priorities within TI delayed delivery until 1962, too late for the project. The breakthrough came in the 1960s with the Apollo programme and the Minuteman missile.

What the sources leave open: Kilby does not describe how the oscillation looked on the oscilloscope; he gives only the frequency. Who stood beside him on 12 September is not recorded; the two men in the picture are typified. Kilby is seen from behind because there is no public-domain photograph of him as a young man; the only free one shows him in 1986. Laboratory and building are not described.

Connections

Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.

  1. Parallel toMicrologic1960On 12 September 1958 Kilby demonstrated a phase-shift oscillator on a small bar of germanium at Texas Instruments. At Fairchild, prompted by Hoerni's planar process, Noyce noted on 23 January 1959 the idea of making multiple devices on a single piece of silicon; the first planar circuit followed in May 1960. According to the MRS Bulletin, Noyce, Hoerni and Moore worked independently of Kilby.Source: IEEE Milestone: First Semiconductor Integrated Circuit (IC), 1958 (ETHW) · Computer History Museum, D. Laws: Who Invented the IC? · K. J. Anderson, Integrating the Circuit, MRS Bulletin, Dezember 1991 (Cambridge Core)

Further reading

Sources