How a Texas Instruments engineer created the integrated circuit

Aug 12, 2023

When Jack Kilby started working as an engineer at Dallas-based Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958, Texas was slugging through its worst drought on record. Since he hadn’t accrued enough personal time to take vacation time in July, Kilby found himself stuck in the office with time on his hands.

In Episode 9 of The Engines of Texanity, we talk about how Kilby used that time to solve an engineering problem that would revolutionize modern computing.

Founded to collect and process seismic data for oil exploration, TI crossed over into the mainstream in 1954 by adapting their technology to produce the Regency TR-1 — a pocket-sized transistor radio. The key technology was the transistor, invented by Bell Labs in 1947 to replace the bulky and costly vacuum tube. The transistor is a semiconductor that regulates or amplifies signals in an electronic circuit.

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But transistors weren’t easy to install, having to be wired together and hand-soldered into place. A device with 1,000 transistors might require 10,000 soldered connections. One bad connection would make the entire device inoperable.

Previous engineers had focused on making each component smaller. Kilby aimed to miniaturize the entire circuit, realizing that all the circuit elements could be made on a single slice of semiconductor material. By settling on the performance of the components, Kilby solved the real problem: how to design a truly integrated circuit that could be manufactured by machines, at scale, cheaply.

On Sept. 12, 1958, Kilby demonstrated his prototype, a rough-looking patchwork of germanium, aluminum and gold wiring that contained a transistor, a capacitor and three resistors all on one chip. Kilby was focused more on performance than appearance — the prototype looked like a child’s failed art project. But, it worked.

After refining Kilby’s prototype, TI filed for a patent in February 1959 and debuted it at the Institute of Radio Engineers annual convention that March, where only one firm appreciated its potential impact: Fairchild Semiconductor. Robert Noyce, cofounder of Fairchild, also had been experimenting with integrated circuit concepts.

Noyce revised Kilby’s design by making a silicon-based chip which eliminated exposed gold wiring. In July 1959, Noyce filed a patent for his own integrated circuit.

In 1961, Noyce received the first U.S. patent for an integrated circuit because TI’s drawings in its patent application didn’t exactly match the actual design. This set off a decade of litigation between TI and Fairchild, which eventually ended with the two parties agreeing to grant each other unlimited reciprocal licenses for the use and production of the integrated circuit.

President John F. Kennedy’s “We Choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University in 1962 unleashed a flood of spending by NASA — and integrated circuits were particularly well-suited and necessary for space flight. The U.S. government was the entirety of the market for the integrated circuit until 1964. The Apollo program had purchased more than 1 million integrated circuits by the time of the moon landing in 1969.

San Antonio-based Datapoint, founded by former NASA contractors Gus Roche and Phil Ray in 1968, applied the integrated circuit to Teletype machines, devices that were commonly used in corporate offices to send and receive typed messages. By installing alphabetic keyboards, screens to review messages and receivers to instantly and silently receive messages, the Datapoint 3300 terminal, as well as the upgraded, user-programmable Datapoint 2200, became a precursor to the personal computer.

The National Academy of the Sciences has described Kilby’s invention of the integrated circuit as the catalyst of the “Second Industrial Revolution”. It launched the computer age, accelerated the concentration of populations into urban areas, and has helped lift the comparative standard of living of nearly everyone on the planet.

With the early leadership of TI and Datapoint, and despite the fact that Texas never had its own Silicon Valley, there have been many computing and tech innovations that have emerged: Fort Worth’s Radio Shack with their TRS-80 home computer kits; the 1980s computer graphics hub that emerged in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex; Mostek, another Dallas company, founded by TI alums; Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems; and all the computer manufacturers like AST, Compaq and Dell. Old rivals TI, Intel and IBM came together in 1987 to form an industry consortium called SEMATECH, choosing as their headquarters Austin, whose economy since then has probably owed more to the tech industry than to more traditional Texas industries like agriculture or oil.

Texas’ role in giving birth to the computing age is important, but it’s hard to claim that it is uniquely Texan. If Kilby hadn’t invented the integrated circuit, someone would have done it somewhere else. That shouldn’t diminish Texas’ celebration of its tech heroes or the impact they’ve had on the shape of life in our state.

Click below to listen to Episode 9 of The Engines of Texanity.

Brandon Seale is the president of Howard Energy Ventures. With degrees in philosophy, law, and business, he writes and records stories about the residents of the borderland and about the intersection of... More by Brandon Seale