Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: Noyce files patent for the integrated circuit
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (605) · July 30th, 2010 · Add a Comment
Today in History – July 30, 1959 – Noyce patents the integrated circuit – 50th anniversary.
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at the small Fairchild Semiconductor start-up company were both working on the concept of an integrated circuit in 1958. Prior to this invention, only parts of a circuit – such as the transistor – were fabricated using semiconductor technology. Even though some of the other parts were composed of substrates using germanium or silicon, they were soldered together on other substrates to form the circuit. The integrated circuit concept was to make all of the parts, such as the capacitors and resistors, and their connections out of silicon on a single chip. By September 12, Kilby had built a working model.
On February 6, 1959 Kilby applied for a patent and Texas Instruments was issued U.S. patent # 3,138,743 in 1964 for “Miniaturized electronic circuits”.
Noyce was aware of the work at Texas Instruments and was careful to improve on their design and submitted a more detailed patent application on July 30, 1959. On April 25, 1961, the patent office awarded Robert Noyce the first patent for an integrated circuit, while Kilby’s application was still being analyzed. Both Fairchild and Texas Instruments introduced commercial ICs in 1961
Today, both men are acknowledged as having independently conceived of the idea and are given credit as the inventors of the integrated circuit. Kilby was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. Most believe that Robert Noyce would have shared this prize had he been alive. (Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously.)
Jack Kilby is also well known as the inventor of the portable calculator in 1967 and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1970. Robert Noyce co-founded Intel in 1968.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on integrated circuits or view our Electrical Engineering Education community site.
Tags: Computer Engineering · Electrical Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science
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