Army field workshop

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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Kilby spent most of his childhood in Great Bend, Kansas, where he often accompanied his father, an electrical power engineer, on his maintenance rounds. Working in the blizzard of 1937, his father borrowed a "ham" radio, and this fired Jack to study for his amateur licence (W9GTY) and to construct his own equipment while still a student at Great Bend High School. In 1941 he entered the University of Illinois, but four months later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was enlisted in the US Army and found himself working in a radio repair workshop in India. When the war ended he returned to his studies, obtaining his BSEE from Illinois in 1947 and his MSEE from the University of Wisconsin. He then joined Centralab, a small electronics firm in Milwaukee owned by Globe-Union. There he filed twelve patents, including some for reduced titanate capacitors and for Steatite-packing of transistors, and developed a transistorized hearing-aid. During this period he also attended a course on transistors at Bell Laboratories. In May 1958, concerned to gain experience in the field of number processing, he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas. Shortly afterwards, while working alone during the factory vacation, he conceived the idea of making monolithic, or integrated, circuits by diffusing impurities into a silicon substrate to create P-N junctions. Within less than a month he had produced a complete oscillator on a chip to prove that the technology was feasible, and the following year at the 1ERE Show he demonstrated a germanium integrated-circuit flip-flop. Initially he was granted a patent for the idea, but eventually, after protracted litigation, priority was awarded to Robert Noyce of Fairchild. In 1965 he was commissioned by Patrick Haggerty, the Chief Executive of Texas Instruments, to make a pocket calculator based on integrated circuits, and on 14 April 1971 the world's first such device, the Pocketronic, was launched onto the market. Costing $150 (and weighing some 2½ lb or 1.1 kg), it was an instant success and in 1972 some 5 million calculators were sold worldwide. He left Texas Instruments in November 1970 to become an independent consultant and inventor, working on, amongst other things, methods of deriving electricity from sunlight.

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