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谢谢你芯片先生英语美文
Thank you, Mr. Chips
Ever heard of Jack Kilby? Clue: His invention changed your life.
By T.R. Reid from Reader‘s Digest
For anybody who ever flunked a math test, something marvelous happened in Stockholm last December 10. A soft-spoken fellow from Kansas—a guy who was turned down by MIT because his math scores were too low and who never had much formal physics training—received the Nobel Prize in physics. This is slightly anomalous, because Jack St. Clair Kilby is not a physicist.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was willing to overlook that minor detail though, because Kilby did, after all, come up with the most valuable invention of the past half-century: the microchip. Jack Kilby’s idea sparked the information age.
The tiny silicon chip at the heart of all digital devices has arguably become the most important industrial commodity since crude oil. Without it, there could be no personal computer or cell phone, no Internet or Playstations. The semiconductor integrated circuit has changed the world as fundamentally as did the light bulb, the telephone and the horseless carriage. But somehow the man who made the microchip has never achieved the recognition that Edison, Bell and Ford enjoyed. Now at age 77, Jack Kilby may receive the attention he deserves, thanks to the Nobel Prize.
JACK ST. CLAIR KILBY grew up in Great Bend, Kan. His father ran a local electric utility, and Jack decided at Great Bend High School that he, too, would be an electrical engineer. He set his sights on that mecca for budding engineers, MIT. So in the summer of 1941, Jack boarded a train to Cambridge, Mass., to prepare for MIT’s entrance exam.
He flunked.
Six decades later, with five dozens patents in his name, with his picture hanging along with Edison’s in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, with virtually every engineering prizes on his shelves, Kilby still remembers that failure. “The minimum passing grade was 500,” Kilby recalls, “and I got 497.”
A few months later World War II began, and Corporal Kilby was assigned to the radio repair shop at a U.S. Army outpost on a tea plantation in India. After V-J Day, he went to the University of Illinois, majoring in “double E”: electrical engineering. It was a heady time in electronics. In 1947, three Americans invented the transistor, the first commercially important semiconductor device. In short order, there were courses on quantum physics and solid-state circuits—for physics majors only.
“They weren’t going to expose that funny stuff to simple-minded engineers,” Kilby says.
Upon graduation Kilby went to work for a small electronic-components maker called Centralab, for the excellent reason that it was the only electronics firm that offered him a job. After a few years Kilby sent an application to Texas Instruments in Dallas, and was thrilled to be hired in 1958. He was 34.
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS was already an important company, although not nearly as big and rich as Kilby would make it. The firm put Kilby to work on the most important problem in electronics—known as “the interconnections problems,” or “the wiring problem.”
Inspired by the transistor, engineers were designing circuits for new electronic devices—high-speed computers powerful enough to run world-wide communication networks or steer rockets to the moon. But these high-tech marvels existed only on paper and called for miles of wire and millions of soldered connections. Nobody could build them.
All over the world, engineers were searching for a solution. The Army, Navy and Air Force spent millions of dollars on the problem. But Jack Kilby had one great advantage: “I was the ignorant freshman in the field. I didn’t know what everybody else considered impossible, so I didn’t rule anything out.”
Sitting in the semiconductor lab, Kilby came up with the answer: eliminate the wires. It was such a daring break with the history of electronic circuits that he first thought it couldn’t work. But he realized all the basic elements of a circuit could be made of the same material—silicon. And if all of the elements could be carved into a single slice of that material, then the interconnections could be laid down, or even printed, on a little silicon chip.
No wires. No soldering. And that meant a huge number of components could be compressed into a tiny space. You could put a whole computer circuit on a chip the size of a baby’s fingernail.
On July 24, 1958, Kilby scrawled this idea in his lab notebook: “The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor.” That’s the sentence that brought its author the Nobel Prize.
For an engineer it wasn’t enough just to write down the idea. “A scientist wants to understand things,” Kilby once said. “An engineer wants to make things work.” And so one of the lab’s newest engineers timidly asked his boss if he could build a test model of his “integrated circuit.” The boss agreed, but didn’t want to waste big money. He told Kilby to construct simple circuit called a phase-shift oscillator. This common device turns direct current into alternating current.
On September 12, a group of Texas Instruments brass showed up in the lab to see if Jack Kilby’s curious little circuit-on-a-chip was the real thing.
Kilby was nervous as he hooked up various wires. He checked the connections. He checked them again. He took a deep breath. He gave a here-goes-nothin’ shrug. He turned on the power.
Instantly a bright green snake of light started slithering across the screen, representing an undulating sine curve from the alternating current. The microchip had worked. A new era in electronics was born.
Several months later another American, Robert Noyce, arrived at roughly the same solution. Noyce’s approach turned out to be easier to manufacture. Accordingly, Bob Noyce is generally described as co-inventor of the chip. Noyce went on to co-found Intel, the multinational microprocessor giant, and would no doubt be sharing the Nobel Prize with Kilby, had he not died in 1990, for Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.
JUST 43 YEARS AGO, the microchip didn’t exist. Today, the integrated circuit market is a $177-billion global industry, and the chip is ubiquitous.
As for Jack Kilby, the American who launched a technological revolution? He has never accrued large amounts of money, and this hasn’t bothered him. He is an engineer, a problem-solver, and he has continued taking on universally important problems. He co-invented one of the first significant consumer applications of chip technology—the hand-held calculator. He tried to build a cheap solar cell that would turn sunshine into electricity. The Kilby “electronic check writer,” Patent No. 3920979, has yet to earn its first dime.
In Dallas, Jack Kilby is something of a celebrity these days; the media like to refer to him as “the Texas Edison.” But most of his countrymen have never heard of him.
Somehow our media-saturated society, with its insatiable appetite for new faces, has managed to overlook a genuine national hero—Jack St. Clair Kilby, a man who improved the daily lot of the whole world with a good idea.
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