Nobel laureate Jack Kilby, whose invention of the integrated circuit opened the way for today’s computers, video games, DVD players, and cell phones, died Monday of cancer. He was 81.

In 1958, his first year working with Texas Instruments in Dallas, Kilby used borrowed equipment to build the first integrated circuit, in which all the components were fabricated in a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip. He later was co-inventor of the hand-held calculator.

Kilby’s fingernail-size integrated circuit, a forerunner of the microchip used in today’s computers, replaced the bulky and unreliable switches and tubes that had been used in the first computing devices.

Integrated circuits can be found in all manner of digital devices, from TVs to microwave ovens. Sales of integrated circuits totaled $179 billion in 2004, supporting a global electronics market of more than $1.1 trillion, according to TI.

Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his work, which according to the Nobel citation “has laid the foundation of modern information technology, particularly through their invention of rapid transistors, laser diodes and integrated circuits.”

Kilby’s more than 60 U.S. patents included one filed in 1959 for an integrated circuit made of the element germanium. A few years later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor received a patent for a similar but more complex circuit made of silicon. Noyce later co-founded Intel Corporation, whose chips are used in many of today’s computers.

After winning the Nobel, Kilby said of his invention, “I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but I didn’t understand how much it would permit the field to expand.”

In 1970, in a White House ceremony, he received the National Medal of Science. In 1982, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Kilby spent his later years as a consultant to TI, working on industry and government assignments throughout the world. A few years ago, Dallas based TI named a $154 million, 584,000-square-foot research and development complex Kilby Center in his honor.

Known by colleagues as a humble giant and a man of few words, the 6-foot-6-inch Kilby said he never craved fame or wealth.

Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kan. He earned degrees in electrical engineering from the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin and began his career in 1947 with the Centralab Division of Globe Union Incorporated in Milwaukee, developing ceramic-based, silk-screened circuits for consumer electronic products.