By Joe Simnacher and Crayton Harrison,The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS – Nobel laureate Jack St. Clair Kilby, the engineer who set off the high-tech revolution with his invention of the semiconductor chip in 1958, died Monday of cancer at his Dallas home. He was 81.

Kilby’s semiconductor put an entire electronic circuit on a single piece of material, an idea that ushered in a second industrial revolution. Although he shunned the thought, many put Kilby in the same league with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

During the 20 years following his discovery, products made possible by his semiconductor helped the electronics industry grow 20 fold, jumping to nearly $500 billion a year by 1988. Kilby won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.

Kilby’s chip made it possible for man to travel to the moon and for personal computers to enter everyday life.

Despite the widespread changes spawned by his invention, the inventor avoided many of the byproducts of his idea. He didn’t own a digital watch or a microwave oven. A conventional watch with its sweeping hands better conveyed the passage of time, he reasoned. And, although he invented the hand-held calculator in 1965 to demonstrate a practical use for his semiconductor, Kilby continued to use his slide rule.

Desperation was the mother of Kilby’s invention, if not the catalyst.

The 34-year-old engineer moved to Dallas from Milwaukee, wanting to work on what engineers referred to as the “tyranny of numbers.” A computer made of conventional electronics would require tens of thousands of components with up to hundreds of thousands of interconnections. Such computers were limited by size, weight and cost.

Engineers were working on what they called the monolithic idea – a single block of semiconductor material containing an entire electronic circuit. Kilby’s monolithic idea is known to laymen as the semiconductor chip.

In Dallas, Kilby, who already had a dozen patented inventions under his belt, hoped to work on the problem with a larger organization, Texas Instruments Inc. But the Dallas company was pursuing a fundamentally different tack than he personally would have chosen to solve the problem.

While most of Texas Instruments was on a mass summer vacation, Kilby, too new to the company to have a vacation, worked alone in TI’s research labs.

“I felt it likely that I would be put to work on a proposal for the Micro-Module program when vacation was over unless I came up with a good idea very quickly,” he said in T.R. Reid’s book, “The Chip.”

An inventor, Kilby said he simply looked for a solution to the industry’s problem. Since Texas Instruments was already heavily committed to silicon for production of transistors, he focused on using that material.

Three universities gave Kilby honorary degrees. The University of Texas, with an endowment from TI, named a faculty fellowship in his honor.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

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