1927-1990

American Physicist

Although Jack St. Clair Kilby (1923- ) built the world's first integrated circuit, or microchip, in 1958, Robert N. Noyce built the first practical microchip six months later. Whereas Kilby's chip had required connecting wires, Noyce used a flat transistor to replace those wires and made conducting channels printed directly on the surface of the chip. The channels were possible because Noyce had also improved on the material used: instead of germanium, as in Kilby's chip, he used silicon. Noyce later cofounded Intel Corporation.

Born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa, Noyce was the son of a minister. He attended Grinnell College, where in 1948 he had his first encounter with a newly developed technological marvel, the transistor. Noyce later said he knew from that first moment that the transistor would change the face of electronics—but he, too, was destined to affect tremendous changes...