posted on May, 31 2004 @ 11:21 AM
In late 1958, a young engineer at Texas Instruments named Jack Kilby placed two circuits on a single piece of germanium, hand-wired the interconnects
and--presto--created the first IC. Within months, Noyce and company at Fairchild Semiconductor used a planar process they had developed to connect the
components on their version of the IC. In so doing, they discovered that the IC's conductivity was better and more controllable when silicon was used
instead of germanium. To this day, Kilby and Noyce are both credited as the independent co-inventors of the IC
Within three years, Fairchild and TI were producing affordable chips in volume using Noyce's process, a manufacturing technique that has undergone
minor improvements but remains basically unchanged to this day. ICs were first used in a commercial product--a hearing aid--in 1963. By the mid-1960s,
they were used widely throughout the electronics industry. Noyce went on to cofound Intel Corp. in 1968 and served as president and chairman of the
board.
In mid-1988, after the U.S. chip industry had been losing market share to offshore competitors for years, Noyce was named CEO of Sematech. The
government-industry consortium was established to conduct advanced computer chip R&D on behalf of its members and to advance U.S. competitiveness. It
succeeded. Noyce, the son of an Iowa minister, was widely regarded as a gentleman and a scholar. He died at the relatively young age of 62 in 1990.
As an aside, a few years after inventing the IC at Texas Instruments, Kilby helped toll the death knell for the time-honored slide rule when he was a
member of the TI team that invented the first pocket calculator. Kilby still works as a consultant.
Or maybe its to do with fishing?