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82 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2021 e integrated circuit is credited to both Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. Kilby was an experi- mentalist who had worked at CentraLab in Mil- waukee, and a purveyor of ceramic insulators with printed conductors (true printed circuits, if you will). He was evidently inspired by his work in ceramic printed circuits and saw how the technology could be used to integrate dis- crete transistors to make a functional circuit block; thus, he was the first to reduce the con- cept and demonstrate it in his first few months at his new employer, Texas Instruments. Noyce had a similar vision at Fairchild Semiconduc- tor, a company he co-founded, but he used a more thought-out engineering approach to develop ICs. e challenge for both approaches upon completion of the IC was how to protect it and make it more useful; thus, the IC package was born. TI was again first out of the gate, deliver- ing ICs in ceramic packages with flat periph- eral leads on two sides. ese were used on NASA's Apollo computers and the ICs were surface mounted. Fairchild had a different and IC Package Footprints: Why So Many and How Many Is Enough? Flexible Thinking FLEX007 Feature Column by Joe Fjelstad, VERDANT ELECTRONICS