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Basic work on information and communication technology.
Re-reading Computers: An Illustrated History, we came across Jack Kilby yesterday who is one of the two fathers of the integrated circuit.
[The second father, Robert Noyce, was working on the same topic at the same time but his patent application was filed in July 1959 five months after Kilby's, thus being only the second. He co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and later Integrated Electronics together with Gordon Moore. Integrated Electronics is better known as Intel today.]
The story goes that Jack Kilby as a new hire without vacation time was alone in the Texas Instruments plant in July 1958 with the task to work on microminiaturization while everyone else left for summer holidays. Studying the cost analysis of an IF amplifier, he came to the conclusion "that semiconductors were all that were really required - that resistors and capacitors, in particular, could be made from the same material as the active devices." That was the birth of the integrated circuit. Half the Nobel Price in Physics 2000.
Speed read and scientific background from Stockholm.
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