Shanbhag: Jack S. Kilby Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Professorship: Jack S. Kilby Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Jack S. Kilby was born in Great Bend, Kansas. He came to the University of Illinois in 1941, but his studies were interrupted for service during World War II. He completed his bachelor’s in electrical engineering in 1947.
While working at his first job with the Centralab division of Globe Union in Milwaukee, Kilby completed his master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
In 1958, he joined Texas Instruments in Dallas. His work focused on miniaturization. At that time, TI made resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes, so Kilby looked at the possibility of some repackaging. During his first summer at TI, Kilby conceived and built the first integrated circuit in which all of the components, both active and passive, were fabricated in a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip.
This invention enabled the field of microelectronics to become the heart of modern technology. The integrated circuit has had impact on communications, the computer industry, medical science, radar, and entertainment. The technological advancements enabled by the integrated circuit continue to be explored and enhanced to this day.
From 1978-1984 Kilby worked as a Distinguished Professor in Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Kilby was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1967, and received NAE’s Charles Stark Draper Prize in 1975. He was a Fellow of IEEE and received the IEEE’s Medal of Honor in 1986. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1969 and the National Medal of Technology in 1990. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1982. He received the Kyoto Prize in 1993. In 2000, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the integrated circuit.
From the University of Illinois, Kilby received the College of Engineering Alumni Award for Distinguished Service in 1971, the University of Illinois Alumni Achievement Award in 1973, and ECE’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2000.
Kilby passed away on June 20, 2005, after a brief battle with cancer.
Faculty: Naresh R. Shanbhag
Naresh R. Shanbhag received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi (1988), MS from the Wright State University (1990), and his PhD degree from the University of Minnesota (1993) all in electrical engineering.
In 1993 he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, where he was the lead chip architect for AT&T's 51.84 Mb/s transceiver chips over twisted-pair wiring for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)-LAN and very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) chip-sets.
In 1995, he joined the University of Illinois. His current research focuses on the design of robust and energy-efficient integrated circuits and systems for communications, including VLSI architectures for error-control coding, and equalization, noise-tolerant integrated circuit design, error-resilient architectures and systems, and system-assisted mixed-signal design. He has more than 200 publications in this area and holds ten US patents. He is also a co-author of the research monograph Pipelined Adaptive Digital Filters (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).
Dr. Shanbhag is an IEEE Fellow. He has won many best paper awards. He also received the 2010 Richard Newton GSRC Industrial Impact Award, the 1999 Xerox Faculty Award, the Distinguished Lectureship from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 1997, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1996, and the 1994 Darlington Best Paper Award from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.
Since 2006 he has been leading a research theme on Alternative Computational Models in the Post-Si Era, in the Department of Defense and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) sponsored Microelectronics Advanced Research Corporation (MARCO) center under their Focus Center Research Program (FCRP).
In 2000, Dr. Shanbhag co-founded and served as the chief technology officer of Intersymbol Communications, Inc., a venture-funded fabless semiconductor startup that provides DSPenhanced mixed-signal ICs for electronic dispersion compensation of OC-192 optical links. In 2007, Intersymbol Communications, Inc., was acquired by Finisar Corporation, Inc.