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ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER
Abelman, Frayne, &Schwab
This Week in Intellectual Property History for the Week of June 21, 2010:
Jack S. Kilby
On June 23, 1964, the U.S. Patent Office issue U.S. Patent No. 3,138,743, entitled "Miniaturized Electronic Circuits" to Jack S. Kilby.
Kilby's invention is now more familiarly known as the integrated circuit and took more than 5 years to issue (having been filed on February 6, 1959).
Kilby assigned his invention to his employer, Texas Instruments, Corp.
With the '743 Patent, Kilby created a way of reducing the space taken up by an electronic circuit by which "all components of an entire electronic circuit are integrated into the body of semiconductor material," (for which he used germanium). The invention essentially took the computer (which up to that time were huge machines and literally took up whole rooms) out of the corporate research setting and paved the way for the creation of the personal computer and other high-tech electronic gadgets we now take for granted.
Jack St. Clair Kilby
(1923 - 2005)
However, Kilby was not the first person to come up with the concept of the integrated circuit. In fact, Geoffrey W.A. Dummer, a British engineer, had conceived of the idea years earlier, but never completed a working device. A few months after Kilby's demonstration in 1964, an IC device in an improved form was independently invented by Robert Noyce at a company then known as N.M. Electronics (which later was given a more well-known corporate name -- Intel Corporation). Battles over the technology ensued but eventually, the two companies agreed to cross-license their patents and Kilby and Noyce are generally credited as being co-inventors of the integrated circuit.
Kilby also has a few other well known patents in his name -- the handheld calculator and the thermal printer -- and was also the recipient of a few prestigious honors in science and engineering including the Noble Prize in Physics (in 2000), the National Medal of Science (in 1969) and the National Medal of Technology (in 1990). In total, Kilby held 60 patents and was inducted into the National Inventors' Hall of Fame in 1982.
