Kilby's spirit lives on.

JACK S. Kilby died recently, at 81. Some of you may not recognize the name, but without him most of us would be doing something different. Or at least quite a bit differently. Kilby joined Texas Instruments in May 1958. He had a wild idea in July of that year, while the rest of TI was out for its two-week annual vacation. (As a new hire, he wasn't eligible for the company wide annual leave.)

Kilby theorized that discrete and passive devices could be made from a single piece of semiconductor material and interconnected to form a circuit. Since all of his coworkers were gone, there was no one around to tell the 24-year-old all of the ways that his integrated circuit would fail, that it would be too difficult or expensive to mass-produce, and that no one would ever need it if it did actually function.

Kilby worked on his invention in July and August and successfully tested his IC--not much more than a piece of germanium on a glass slide--on Sept. 12, 1958. That's turnaround.

Naturally, the customers loved the IC, but the rest of the industry hated it. Kilby's contemporaries tried to downplay the importance of his invention, out of envy and fear. For years, electrical engineers were afraid the IC was going to make them obsolete, much in the same way the multichip module, system-on-chip and optoelectronics surely spelled the end of the PCB in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, the IC and its applications have employed hundreds of thousands of EEs for decades.

Justifiably known as the "Father of the Silicon Age," Kilby is one of the few people whose inventions have changed the world. I'm glad Kilby didn't have enough vacation time to spend two weeks at Padre Island, ogling girls and '58 Chevy Bel Airs. Safe to say that without his little invention, I wouldn't be typing on a laptop right now.

Kilby later co-invented the pocket calculator, which replaced those huge desktop machines that seemed to require their operators to wear visors. He won a 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his work, which, according to the citation, "laid the foundation of modern information technology."

Apparently Kilby just loved to work. A few years ago, I tried to get him to come to PCB Design Conference East to receive an award, but his friendly spokesperson said he was very busy that day. He was probably busy receiving another award--conference chairmen loved to give Kilby awards. He was still working part-time and sitting on the boards of a few companies even then, and he must have been around 77.

Kilby and most of his peers in electronics are gone: Paul Eisler, Albert Hanson, Edwin Armstrong, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The first five or six decades of the last century boasted a disproportionate number of inventions that shook the earth. (Maybe there was just more to invent back then.)

But there is still plenty of innovation going on today in the world of electronics and in PCBs; I see it each month when I read through the editorial content for this magazine. A lot of extremely clever people reading this column make new discoveries every day, whether it's a fab process improvement or an advance in materials, design or packaging.

Many of PCD&M's contributors have patents to their name; it always surprises me that some authors take their patents for granted, even forgetting to mention patents in their bios. If I had a patent I'd never let anyone forget.

But that's just it. Most of our readers have better things to do than worry about getting credit for a patent or two. They have work to do and if they earn bragging rights along the way, fine.

Much like Jack Kilby.