Although Bob Noyce would probably have taken the accolade of inventing the integrated circuit (IC) a few years later if Jack Kilby had not moved to Texas Instruments (TI) in the late 1950s, it was Kilby who unveiled the first demonstration of a microchip on 12 September 1958.

Kilby’s introduction to microelectronics came when he was working for a Milwaukee-based company making ceramic, silk-screened circuits for consumer products. The company had a licence from AT&T Bell Labs for the transistor and Kilby went on a two-week course to learn about semiconductors.

After that, he went to work for TI, which had a small semiconductor group at the time and better manufacturing resources. It was at TI that he came up with the idea of integrating active and passive electronic devices on the same wafer. The massive cost reductions allowed by integration would lead to an industry worth $136bn in 1999.

In the 1970s, Kilby left TI to work as an independent inventor, working on solar power among other things. He later joined Texas A&M University and now serves as director of several corporations.

The technology

Once the transistor had been invented, the idea of planarising the individual parts so that multiple transistors could be placed side-by- side was inevitable. What no-one could have predicted at the time of its invention was the breakneck speed of progress in IC design.

Although the original bipolar designs could be made in reasonable densities, it was the move to metal oxide semiconductors (MOS) that made it possible to build entire microprocessors on one piece of silicon. With MOS technology, it was a relatively simple step to move to the complementary (CMOS) variant. Although painful in terms of the loss of density compared with straight n-channel MOS (NMOS), the lower power consumption offered by CMOS would ultimately make it possible to build devices with millions of transistors on-chip.

As we move into the hundred million transistor generation, power dissipation is going to be the key to moving forward. Silicon-on- insulator technology shows some promise, but we are likely to be seeing variants of CMOS for some time yet.

The applications

No other economic model behaves like that of the IC business. No other has a roadmap as aggressive as that predicted by Moore’s Law. And that is why we are now seeing new cars being sold with as many as 70 microcontrollers inside.

The integrated electronics revolution has taken hold because engineers can predict, with reasonable accuracy, when it becomes more cost- effective to move from a traditional way of controlling a system to one based on microelectronics.