The integrated circuit is one of the greatest inventions of the 20^th century and continues its dominance as an electronic packaging technology  in the 21^st Century.     

This talk focusses on its beginnings and looks at the controversies around attribution of “who was first?”  

We start with the invention of the transistor by William Shockley in the 1940’s at Bell Labs.   We then talk about the motivation for the Integrated Circuit and look at the implementation approaches.   Finally, we examine the  Integrated Circuit patent  fight between Texas Instruments (Jack Kilby) and Fairchild Semiconductor (Robert Noyce).  We conclude with the Nobel Prize awarded to Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments in the year 2000.  As a special bonus we find out what Kilby’s IC prototype was worth in 2014.

Biography:

Gene Freeman worked in the Electronics Industry from 1977 until his retirement in 2018.  He worked in R and D both as an individual contributor and manager.   His employers included  Hughes Aircraft, Northrup, Teledyne Inet, Texas Instruments, NCR Microelectronics, Compaq, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.   He started out working with PC boards then moved to IC Development and then to System Integration.   Key products  included PC Servers, Microcomputers and Controllers , Volatile and Non Volatile Memories, Storage Interconnects, Graphic Chips, BMCs, DSPs, Automotive ASICS,  Optical Interconnects, and UPS Controllers.  Gene served on several patent committees and was a member of  industry consortia including ANSI T11 (Fibre Channel) and JEDEC Memory Committees.    He is the current chair of the IEEE Computer Society -- Pikes Peak Chapter and a Life Member of IEEE.

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