On this day in 1958 American electrical engineer and co-inventor of the integrated circuit Jack Kilby successfully tested the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments. The test proved that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material and create a totally integrated electronic circuit, hence the name integrated circuit. The US Air Force was the first to make use of Kilby’s invention, and it wasn’t long before numerous common electronic devices were being designed with Kilby’s integrated circuit in mind.
For this breakthrough discovery, Jack Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on December 10, 2000.
Thanks to Jack Kilby. He is great.