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In January 1959 the lawyers and executives at Texas Instruments began scrambling to file a patent application for Kilby’s idea of an integrated circuit—not because they knew what Noyce was jotting in his notebook but because of rumors that RCA had come up with the same idea. They decided to make the application sweeping and broad. That strategy carried a risk because the claims might be easier to dispute, as happened with Mauchly and Eckert’s broad claims for their computer patent. But if granted it would serve as an offensive weapon against anyone who tried to make a product that was similar. Kilby’s invention, the patent application declared, was “a new and totally different concept for miniaturization.” Although the application described only two circuits that Kilby had devised, it asserted, “There is no limit upon the complexity or configuration of circuits that can be made in this ma
In the rush, however, there wasn’t time to produce pictures of the various methods that might work for wiring together the components on the proposed microchip. The only example available was Kilby’s spidery demonstration model with a snarl of tiny gold wires threading through it. The Texas Instruments team decided to use this “flying wire picture,” as it was later derisively called, as the depiction. Kilby had already figured out that there could be a simpler version using printed metal co
When Texas Instruments made its public a
As happened with the patent dispute over the computer, the legal system took years grappling with the issue of who deserved what patents on the integrated circuit, and it never quite resolved the question. The rival applications from Texas Instruments and Fairchild were assigned to two different examiners, who each seemed unaware of the other. Although filed second, the Noyce patent application was ruled on first; in April 1961 it was granted. Noyce was declared the inventor of the microchip.
The Texas Instruments lawyers filed a “priority contest,” claiming that Kilby had the idea first. That led to the case of Kilby v. Noyce, run by the Board of Patent Interferences. Part of the case involved looking at the respective notebooks and other testimony to see who had come up with the general concept first; there was broad agreement, even from Noyce, that Kilby’s ideas had come a few months earlier. But there was also a dispute over whether the Kilby application really covered the key technological process of printing metal lines on top of an oxide layer, rather than using a lot of little wires, to make a microchip. This involved many conflicting arguments about the phrase Kilby had inserted at the end of the application, that “material such as gold may then be laid down” on the oxide layer. Was that a specific process he had discovered or merely a casual speculation he had tossed in?13
As the wrangling dragged on, the patent office confused things a bit further by ruling, in June 1964, on Kilby’s original application—and granting it. That made the priority contest all the more important. It was not until February 1967 that the verdict finally came, in Kilby’s favor. It had been eight years since he had filed for his patent, and now he and Texas Instruments were declared the inventors of the microchip. Except that didn’t end things. Fairchild appealed, and the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, after hearing all the arguments and testimony, ruled in November 1969 the other way. “Kilby has not demonstrated,” the appeals court declared, “that the term ‘laid down’ had . . . or has since acquired a meaning in electronic or semiconductor arts which necessarily co
Noyce’s victory, after a decade of back-and-forth and more than a million dollars in legal fees, turned out to mean little. The subhead on the small story in Electronic News was “Patent Reversal Won’t Change Much.” By this point the legal proceedings had become almost irrelevant. The market for microchips had exploded so rapidly that the businesslike folks at Fairchild and Texas Instruments realized that the stakes were too high to leave to the legal system. In the summer of 1966, three years before the final legal resolution, Noyce and his Fairchild lawyers met with the president and counsel of Texas Instruments and hammered out a peace treaty. Each company granted that the other had some intellectual property rights to the microchip, and they agreed to cross-license to each other whatever rights they had. Other companies would have to make licensing deals with both, usually paying a royalty fee that totaled about 4 percent of their profit.15
So who invented the microchip? As with the question of who invented the computer, the answer ca
There is an inspiring lesson in how Kilby and Noyce personally handled the question of who invented the microchip. They were both decent people; they came from tight-knit small communities in the Midwest and were well grounded. Unlike Shockley, they did not suffer from a toxic mix of ego and insecurity. Whenever the topic of credit for the invention came up, each was generous in praising the contributions of the other. It soon became accepted to give them joint credit and refer to them as coinventors. In one early oral history, Kilby gently grumbled, “It doesn’t fit with what I understand to be co-invention, but that’s become accepted.”16 But he, too, eventually embraced the idea and was ever afterward gracious about it. When Craig Matsumoto of Electronic Engineering Times asked him about the controversy many years later, “Kilby heaped praise on Noyce and said the semiconductor revolution came from the work of thousands, not from one patent.”17