From New York Times:
Jack S. Kilby, an electrical engineer whose invention of the integrated circuit gave rise to the information age and heralded an explosion of consumer electronics products in the last 50 years, from personal computers to cellphones, died Monday in Dallas. He was 81.
His death, after a brief battle with cancer, was announced yesterday by Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based electronics company where he worked for a quarter-century.
The integrated circuit that Mr. Kilby designed shortly after arriving at Texas Instruments in 1958 served as the basis for modern microelectronics, transforming a technology that permitted the simultaneous manufacturing of a mere handful of transistors into a chip industry that routinely places billions of Lilliputian switches in the area of a fingernail.
His achievement – the integration – yielded a thin chip of crystal connecting previously separate components like transistors, resistors and capacitors within a single device. For that creation, commonly called the microchip, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.