Kilby lives on to invent the future

Jack Kilby lives on by changing the present and the future with the speed of Moore’s Law.

He changed the past while the world was waiting to be changed. When he joined TI in 1958, the transistor was supplanting the vacuum tube. TI had made the first transistor radio in 1954 in a joint venture with Industrial Development Engineering Associates. A small Japanese company, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later known as Sony, was ushering in a global cultural change more than a technological change with its transistorized consumer electronics products. Designers were wondering whether the world could be changed faster.

As early as 1952, designers were trying to put more than one transistor on a single chip. Kilby was probably the first to achieve this distinction. By inventing the IC, he drove theelectronics industry into the high gear of miniaturization and integration that continues today, and will continue into the future. Kilby may never again be at the driver’s seat; yet he continues to provide the drive. The seemingly endless process of miniaturization and integration that his IC began will always have his mark.

Some say that Robert Noyce of Fairchild invented the IC. While receiving the Nobel Prize in 2000, Kilby humbly declared that if Noyce had been alive, he would have shared the award with Noyce. When IC was invented, there was litigation on who held the patent for IC. But soon the persons and companies involved settled the litigation amicably. Today IT companies are involved in so long and bitter litigations that it is facetiously said that IT companies may soon need more lawyers than engineers. Kilby’s is a living example of how to settle problems with grace and dignity. Litigation has become a scourge.

Some companies are said to be spending over 20 percent of their revenues on litigation. The average expenditure on R&D is six percent! During downturns, R&D expenditure falls, while litigation expenditure rises! If Kilby’s example doesn’t “live” through the legal problems that invariably arise, litigation problems may become even more difficult than scaling problems. I don’t think any other industrial segment has seen so much resources draining into court cases.

Kilby belonged to the times that can be called the “era of happy scaling.” In this era, designers could confidently reach for higher performance and lower costs through scaling. As designers move from the “era of happy scaling” to the more challenging ultimate- CMOS era, they are confronted with problems such as short-channel effects, leakage, dissipation, intradie variability, etc. Complex technological innovations, such as device architectures and multi-gate devices, metal gates, strained silicon and high-k materials are all looked upon to offer solutions; but these come at a high cost. So the designertoday can no more confidently assert that he can reach for higher performance at lower cost through scaling.

The IC growth during Kilby’s lifetime was brought about by designers and engineers “living apart together.” However great be the “togetherness” in “living apart,” this will just not work. Joining forces like never before, systemdesigners and process engineers work together to tackle, for instance, the intra-die variability problem. Designers and lithographers work together to learn each other’s language to tackle the increasing complexity in lithography techniques, for instance, by designing highly regular cell and interconnect architectures reducing mask/design cost, and litho-friendly layouts improving printability.

Carbon nanotubes and semiconducting nanowires are possible gateways to 5nm physical gate size at which scaling will end. We have lived under Kilby’s shadow for decades. We shall continue to live under his shadow. Of the handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world, he is among the foremost. He has been eclipsed by death. But his light shines.

Meanwhile, EDN Asia comes with new looks from this issue. We believe the changes make the magazine more reader-friendly.