Demonstration of the First Working Integrated Circuit

The idea came in an empty lab in July 1958. Kilby, hired by Texas Instruments that May, had earned no vacation, so he worked alone while colleagues left for the summer. The Handbook of Texas says he reached what he called the monolithic idea: make every component and the base from one piece of semiconductor. The crude, hand-wired prototype passed its test on September 12, 1958. Robert Noyce of Fairchild arrived at the same idea in January 1959, and the patent went to Noyce after years of appeals. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics and credited Noyce.

What the plaque says

Demonstration of the First Working Integrated Circuit The twentieth-century age of electronics can trace its roots to the 1906 invention of the triode vacuum tube, which marked the birth of modern radio. The invention of the transistor after World War II ushered in a new era of solid-state electronics. As engineers designed increasingly complex equipment, the difficulty of interconnecting large numbers of individual transistors and other components to form electronic circuits was a barrier to further progress. The need arose for a reliable, cost-effective way to produce and interconnect the components. Technical research groups in the United States and abroad began work on the problem. In 1958, Jack St. Clair Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas, designed and built an integrated circuit with all the components formed in a single piece of semiconductor material. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated this first working integrated circuit to TI personnel in the semiconductor building on this site. This conceptual breakthrough and work elsewhere led to development of the microchips that are at the core of modern electronic products, including a broad range of consumer electronics, digital computers, defense systems, and global communications networks. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 10 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Fair Park — 10 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 11 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 11 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.

More markers nearby

• Wheeler School — 1.5 mi
• First Presbyterian Church of Richardson — 2.0 mi
• First United Methodist Church Richardson — 2.0 mi
• Richardson — 2.3 mi