born Nov. 8, 1923, Jefferson City, Mo., U.S.
U.S. inventor.
He studied at the University of Wisconsin. In 1958 he joined Texas Instruments; there he built the first integrated circuit , a device in which all of a circuit's components are integrated on a single semiconductor surface. He also coinvented a handheld calculator with a thermal printer that is used in portable data terminals. The owner of more than 60 patents, he received the National Medal of Science (1970), the Kyoto Prize (1993), and the Nobel Prize for Physics (2000), shared with Herbert Kroemer (b. 1928) and Zhores Alferov (b. 1930).