Jack S. Kilby, an electrical engineer whose invention of the integrated circuit gave rise to the information age and heralded an explosion of consumer electronics products in the last 50 years, from personal computers to cellphones, died Monday in Dallas. He was 81.
His death, after a brief battle with cancer, was announced yesterday by Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based electronics company where he worked for a quarter-century.
(46) {{U}}The integrated circuit that Mr. Kilby designed '.shortly after arriving at Texas Instruments in 1958 served as the basis for modern microelectronics, transforming a technology that permitted the simultaneous manufacturing of a mere handful of transistors(晶体管 ) into a chip industry that routinely places billions of Lilliputian(微小的) switches in the area of a fingernail.{{/U}}
His achievement--the integration--yielded a thin chip of crystal connecting previously separate components like transistors, resistors and capacitors within a single device. For that creation, commonly called the microchip, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.
(47) {{U}}During his career at Texas Instruments he claimed more than 60 patents and was also one of the inventors of the hand-held calculator and the thermal printer. But it was Mr. Kilby's invention of the integrated circuit that most broadly shaped the electronic era.{{/U}}
"It's hard to find a place where the integrated circuit doesn't affect your life today," Richard m. Templeton, Texas Instruments' president and chief executive officer, said in an interview yesterday. "That's how broad its impact is. "
It is an impact, Mr. Kilby said, that was largely unexpected. (48){{U}} "We expected to reduce the cost of electronics, but I don't think anybody was thinking in terms of factors of a million," he said in an undated interview cited by Texas Instruments.{{/U}}
(49) {{U}}The remarkable acceleration of the manufacturing process based on the integrated circuit was later described by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation, whose partner, Robert N. Noyce, invented another version of the integrated circuit just months after Mr. Kilby.{{/U}}
In 1965, three years after the first commercial integrated circuits came to market, Dr. Moore observed that the number of transistors on a circuit was doubling at regular intervals and would do so far into the future. (50) {{U}}The observation, which came to be known as Moore's law, became the defining attribute of the chip-making industry, centered in what is now known as Silicon Valley, where Intel was based, rather than in Dallas.{{/U}}