Sixty years ago this month, Jack Kilby, a young engineer so new to his job at Texas Instruments that he had no vacation time yet, watched as his colleagues went off to enjoy a break. Kilby, alone in the office, “was left with my thoughts and imagination,” he later wrote.
What he demonstrated to TI management Sept. 12, 1958 became one of the most transformational inventions in modern history: the integrated circuit. Kilby and Robert Noyce, working separately at Fairchild Semiconductor, ultimately shared credit for the invention, and Kilby was honored before his death with the Nobel Prize for physics (here’s a link to his Nobel speech).
Kilby was an unassuming man. He was humble in assessing his role in electronics history when I talked to him around the time of the Nobel awards (reflected in this EE Times editorial published on his passing).
No less than the legendary Gordon Moore said of Kilby, he “was always an engineer’s engineer.”
Innovation wells up in various ways. Sometimes in the shower; sometimes on a dog walk; sometimes at work when everyone’s off on vacation. No doubt you can relate. You and your team work long, hard hours in cube-land, standing on the shoulders of thousands of innovators whose names aren’t necessarily as famous as Kilby, Noyce and Moore. And you’ve made breakthroughs, so we think that it’s time to celebrate them.
The Arm TechCon Innovation Awards are back this year, and submissions are open now until Sept. 14.
The Innovation Awards contest is open to all exhibitors at Arm TechCon 2018 (October 16-18, 2018, in the San Jose Convention Center). This year’s contest focuses on four of the hottest areas in technology development.
We’ll announce and celebrate finalists, hold an exhibits-floor tour at Arm TechCon and then announce the winners from the TechCon theater. Last year, Linaro, Secure RF and Xilinx walked off the stage with winners’ hardware. Maybe this year, it’ll be you and our team, and those long hours of toil will have yielded an added benefit.
For more information, check out the Innovation Awards by clicking on the button below, or ping me with questions (brian.fuller@arm.com). I hope to see your submissions soon!
Innovation Awards