Kilby's invention: a transistor and other components on a slice of germanium.
An IC from an Intel 8742, an 8-bit microcontroller that includes a CPU, 128 bytes of RAM, 2048 bytes of EPROM, and I/O in the same chip.
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In 1957 Robert Noyce co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, and in 1958 Jack Kilby started working at Texas Instruments. Both men had backgrounds in Electronic Engineering, and neither one knew that they were both working on the same idea. To make advancements in computing, the need for more electrial components was increasing in the computer's already complex circuitry. Jack Kilby invented the first monolithic IC using germanium for the semiconductor material while 6 months later Rober Noyce used silicon. Both men applied for patents in 1959, and received the following: "Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments received U.S. patent #3,138,743 for miniaturized electronic circuits. Robert Noyce and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received U.S. patent #2,981,877 for a silicon based integrated circuit." After several years of legal battles, both companies decided to cross licence their technologies. In 1961 Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation released the first comercially available IC. In 1967, Jack Kilby invented the portable calculator which used the ICs. In 1968, Robert Noyce founded Intel, the company that created the microprocessor.
"The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie finger. Today an IC smaller than a penny can hold 125 million transistors." Ref: 1
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