Semiconductor History | Texas Instruments, Dallas — The Circuit That Worked First, on a Bar of Germanium

The first integrated circuit was a bar of germanium 11.1 millimetres long and 1.6 millimetres wide, with gold wires arcing above it and wax holding the ends down.

Jack Kilby switched it on for a small group of Texas Instruments managers on 12 September 1958 and it oscillated, which is exactly what a phase-shift oscillator is supposed to do.

Kilby had joined TI that May and had no holiday accrued. When most of the company shut down for two weeks that summer he was alone in the laboratory, which is where the idea came from, sketched in his notebook on 24 July.

The problem he was solving was arithmetic rather than physics. A circuit needed transistors, resistors and capacitors, each made separately and each soldered by hand, so complexity ran into a wall of wiring the industry had started calling the tyranny of numbers.

His answer was to make the resistors and capacitors out of the same semiconductor as the transistors, and then leave them where they were.

What nobody should write is that Kilby invented the integrated circuit, full stop.

Kilby built the first one that worked, in germanium, with hand-placed flying wires, and filed his patent on 6 February 1959. Four months later Robert Noyce at Fairchild filed for the monolithic version, with the interconnections deposited onto the chip, which is the one that could be mass-produced.

Interference proceedings ran for years, the courts came down on Noyce's side, and by then the two companies had cross-licensed and the industry had moved on without waiting.

The Nobel committee got the wording right in 2000 when it gave Kilby his share of the prize for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.

Noyce had died in 1990 and the prize does not go to the dead. Kilby said so himself, publicly, when he accepted it.

The demonstration happened in TI's Semiconductor Building at 13500 North Central Expressway, which had been finished only months earlier and is still standing on what is now the company's North Campus.

Access is limited: that campus is private, working ground with controlled gates, and the IEEE Milestone plaque for the invention is inside it rather than on the street.

The object is public, though. Six prototypes survive, one of them on display in Austin at the Bullock Texas State History Museum, and replicas sit in museum cases abroad, including the one photographed here in Germany.

Photo: Florian Schäffer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (a replica of Kilby's first integrated circuit, Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, Paderborn).

Photo: James R. Biard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Jack Kilby in the 1960s).