Jack Kilby

摘要

Few people ever take a look at the innards of their electronic gadgets. But when a mobile phone comes a cropper, all is revealed. Among the shards of glass and bits of metal lie lots of tiny black rectangular chips. These "integrated circuits" are the boxes inside the boxes that make the modern world go. This wasn't always the case, of course. When Jack Kilby finished his degree in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in 1947, a computer was something that filled a room and took an army of technicians to maintain. Though the invention of the transistor, by Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, was less than a year away, bulky vacuum tubes still ruled the day. Mr Kilby had deliberately taken extra classes on the physics of vacuum-tube engineering, little knowing that he himself would help to make them obsolete.