AUSTIN, Texas—Jack Kilby, the engineer who received the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the integrated circuit and revolutionizing personal computing, will speak at The University of Texas at Austin’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series, noon to 1 p.m., Monday, Sept. 9 in the ACES Auditorium Room 2.302.
The speech is part of a yearlong series of lectures celebrating the 100th anniversary of The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Emulating his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Kilby will discuss his invention of the integrated circuit, a relatively simple device he showed to a handful of co-workers gathered in Texas Instruments’ semiconductor lab in 1958. His microchip, as it later became known, virtually created the modern computer industry, shrinking room-size machines into an array of mainframes, minicomputers and personal computers.
Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kansas, then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin, respectively. He began his engineering career in 1947 with Globe Union Inc. in Milwaukee, developing ceramic-base, silk-screen circuits for consumer electronic products.
In 1958, he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas. During the summer of that year he built the first electronic circuit in which all of the components were fabricated in a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip. The successful laboratory demonstration of that first simple microchip occurred in September 1958.
For his innovative work, Kilby later received two of the nation’s most prestigious honors in science and engineering. In a 1970 White House ceremony, he received the National Medal of Science. In 1982 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, taking his place alongside Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers.
In 2000, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.
For more information contact: Becky Rische, College of Engineering, 512-471-7272.
