IC Inventor Dies

The man credited with inventing the integrated circuit is dead.
Jack Kilby died of cancer Monday at age 81, Reuters reported. In 1958, Kilby was so new to Texas Instruments he didn’t qualify for a summer vacation. That’s when he hard-wired together multiple transistors, beginning what now has grown to become the miniaturization of circuits housed on pieces of silicon to be used in such items as radios, computers and elevators.
Kilby and Texas Instruments were the first to patent the IC. A competitor, Bob Noyce at Fairchild semiconductor who later co-founded Intel, is credited with making the IC so that it could be manufactured on a mass production basis, the report cites.
Texas Instruments announced Kirby’s death on Tuesday.