The transistor was a miniaturized miracle, but circuitry would become even smaller. After attending a transistor seminar at Bell Labs, Texas Instruments researcher Jack Kilby started experimenting with silicon-based transistors.

On July 28, 1958, Kilby struck upon the idea that resistors, capacitors and transistors could all be mounted on the same chip if made of the same material.
In February 1959, Kilby and Texas Instruments filed a patent for the "Miniaturized Electronic Circuit." The following month, the new microchip, the size of a paper clip, was presented at the Institute of Radio Engineers convention. Four months later, a protégé and former employee of transistor co-inventor William Shockley, Robert Noyce of the newly formed Fairchild Semiconductors, located in the sleepy valley community of Mountain View near Palo Alto, Calif., separately filed for a patent for a similar integrated circuit.

Noyce and Fairchild won a lengthy patent fight with Texas Instruments based on certain interconnection technologies. But the scientific community accepted that both Kilby and Noyce had separately but simultaneously invented the integrated circuit, the basis for all future computerized devices.
Ten years later, Noyce and fellow Fairchild researcher Gordon Moore left to found their own chip company called Integrated Electronics, a name later shortened to Intel.