Draper Prize

An extremely important development was the independent discoveries of the solid state integrated circuit concept in 1958 by J. Kilby of Texas Instruments Corp. and R. Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. This made it possible to produce extremely small and powerful digital data processing units that are the centerpiece of a computer (the processor). For this extremely important development, they shared the prestigious C. D. Draper prize awarded by the National Academy of Engineering. In 2001, Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize, but this was not shared with Noyce since the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthiunously. 

---