Integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby

During the summer of 1958, TI shut down for the annual two-week, company-wide mass vacation. As a new employee, Jack Kilby had not yet accrued vacation time, so he stayed on the job and began looking for a viable alternative to the micro-module program, a miniaturization method for circuits. While studying the problem, he decided the only product a semiconductor house could make cost-effectively was a semiconductor. Perhaps other circuit components should be made from the same material as the semiconductors.

Kilby drew up a few sketches and showed them to his manager, Willis Adcock, as soon as the vacation period had ended. Adcock was optimistic, but cautious, about the new idea. He suggested that Kilby try building a working circuit, utilizing components made from silicon. With Adcock's orders in hand, Kilby carried his sketches to the lab and asked the technicians to fabricate some silicon resistors and capacitors. He wired these parts into a transistor flip-flop circuit and demonstrated the working device to Adcock on August 28. Kilby was given the go-ahead to continue his project, and when he designed the next circuit, he integrated all the individual components onto a single bar of semiconductor material. He sketched in his notebook the complete circuit of a phase-shift oscillator on a bar of germanium.

Within two weeks, the first three oscillators were completed and ready to test. What TI managers saw on that historic day of September 12, 1958, was a tiny bar of germanium, measuring 7/16-x1/16-inches, with protruding wires, glued to a glass slide. It was a rough device by anyone's standards. But when Kilby applied the voltage, an unending sine wave undulated across the oscilloscope screen.