Magnet Academy: Jack Kilby

The integrated circuit fueled the rise of microelectronics in the latter half of the twentieth century and paved the way for the Information Age. An American engineer, Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit in 1958, shortly after he began working at Texas Instruments. The magnitude of the invention's importance is reflected in the fact that in 2000, Kilby shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, an award that has traditionally been bestowed for theoretical, rather than applied, work.