Jack Kilby's Last Interview

"Jack did more than invent the integrated circuit … he invented the future"

Tom Engibous, Chairman, Texas Instruments



What do you say to a man that created an entire industry, whose inventiveness has led to nearly $300 billion dollars of business being generated each year? Jack Kilby -- creator of the integrated circuit, Nobel Prize winner, widely accepted “Father of the Silicon Age,” and the reason that just about any of you reading this article have a job -- granted ECN Asia's sister publication EPN an interview about five weeks before his passing. Below are excerpts of that conversation.



EPN: Creating the first IC was one thing, but selling the concept to the rest of the world was a whole different story. How did you set about converting people to your way of thinking?

Kilby: We had to take it one bit at a time, they weren't going to get widespread use overnight. We chose the applications to target very carefully. Aerospace and military were obvious places to try, and offered an important starting point for us.



EPN: The design engineers back then had a very Luddite perspective; they wanted to protect the business they had and feared that your creation would put them all out of work when in fact it was exactly the opposite that happened. ICs became more affordable and meant that whole new markets were opened up. Have we gone too far in the other direction now? When the dot-com bubble burst, was it a sign that we needed to become a bit more cautious about laying better foundations on which to build new industry sectors?

Kilby: Providing the market is there, then it is not a problem. So back in the 60s the fears of the design engineers disappeared when it became clear there would be new applications that could make use of it. As long as the industry reacts to demands it has nothing to worry about, it’s only when it tries to switch that order around that things get complicated.



Article contiues belowEPN: It must have been interesting to see your brainchild grow to maturity. You must have watched avidly how semiconductors have evolved. What have been the other important milestones in your opinion -- microprocessors, flash and EPROM memories, organic LEDs?

Kilby: All of these have contributed to widening the places that semiconductor can be found, and I would expect there to be far more innovations still to come. We are still only at the beginning.



EPN: Back in the early days it was possible for one person to make a difference. The actions of men like you, William Shockley, Tedd Hoff, Jean Hoerni, and so on could change the way the world worked. Is it still possible today for an individual to have such a profound effect, or is the industry just too big for such pioneers now?

Kilby: I think it is still possible that one person can make a difference. The industry is a lot bigger now but someone with the right idea can still have a huge impact.



EPN: Of course when the applications emerged that would not be possible with vacuum tubes or discrete transistors, then ICs started to be utilized. This rapidly snowballed as the production yields kept on getting better, and the volume levels ramped up further. The cost per chip would continue to drop, and more tasks could begin to benefit for semiconductors. Is the problem now that we have gone down this route so long that it is now causing more harm than good. Has the system as described by Gordon Moore just gone out of control. The production volumes we will need when we move down to 65nm and 45nm architectures just to keep the current companies afloat will mean there will need to be chips in literally everything. Will there simply be enough places to put them all?

Kilby: Unless the economics are right, then it won't make sense to. But as long as there are cost advantages, then companies will make the investment and take the risks that go along with it.



EPN: Following on from that, the original TI solid circuits cost hundreds of dollars and had just eight transistors on board. Today you have microprocessors from Intel or AMD with tens of millions of transistors going for less than $50. Is the commoditization going too far?

Kilby: I don't see this being a major issue for a long time to come yet. There doesn't seem to be any slowing down, new applications are still being found all the time, so the number of places we can put chips is still getting greater.



EPN: Can you tell us about when you heard that you had won the Nobel Prize? What were your feelings at the time, and how were you informed?

Kilby: It was completely unexpected, I really had no idea that this would happen. As I recall, I heard the news from a reporter who was knocking at my front door to get my reaction. I got the official phone call just after that and the award ceremony took place two months later.



EPN: When you received the Nobel Prize you graciously said that if Bob Noyce had still been alive he would have shared the award with you. However, it was not always so civilized between you and your respective companies Can you tell us of the battled that ensued over priority to the microchip?

Kilby: There was some litigation, but in the end it was all resolved amicably. Even though we never worked together and we were effectively on different sides, we were to become great friends.



EPN: The English electrical engineer Geoffrey Dummer also speculated about the possibility of integrating an entire circuit onto a single chip, back in the mid 1950s, but never managed to get his idea of the drawing board. Where did he go wrong? Was it lack of funding or support from the British Government, technical deficiencies on his part, or was he just not able to convince people that he had something worthwhile?

Kilby: Dummer was able to propose the idea very early on, but he didn't really explain how it was going to be realized, and that was what counted.



EPN: After the invention of the integrated circuit you continued to do research on many different topics, can you tell us about some of these? Also once you had made such a huge innovation relatively earlier in your career, did it make things for you to start anew? Without trying to make myself sound too dumb, was the microchip a hard act to follow?

Kilby: No. I suspect if anything it helped; people are more willing to listen to you once you have something like that under your belt. Solar power was the biggest project that I worked on, but there were a couple of sizeable things that I attempted in telecoms.



EPN: Given the work you did on alternative sources of energy, do you think the time has finally come for it to make decisive headway. For along time such things seemed to progress no further than the original research, but with the current oil prices, and the huge energy drain that China will bring, must we favour this route?

Kilby: Its still there, whether the time is right is still hard to say. Though, clearly, we can't go on like we are now indefinitely. Things will have to change sooner or later.