The building at 844 East Charleston Road, Palo Alto, California, where the first commercially practical integrated circuit was invented
In 1955, William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, funded by Beckman Instruments in Mountain View, California;[6] his plan was to develop a new type of "4-layer diode" that would work faster and have more uses than then-current transistors. At first he attempted to hire some of his former colleagues from Bell Labs, but none were willing to move to the West Coast or work with Shockley again at that time. Shockley then founded the core of the new company with what he considered the best and brightest graduates coming out of American engineering schools.
According to Sherman Fairchild, Noyce's impassioned presentation of his vision was the reason Sherman Fairchild had agreed to create the semiconductor division for the traitorous eight. Noyce advocated the use of silicon as substrate– since the material costs would consist of sand and a few fine wires, the major cost would be in the manufacturing process. Noyce also expressed his belief that silicon semiconductors would herald the start of disposable appliances that, due to cheap electronic components, would not be repaired but merely discarded when worn out.[8]
Their first transistors were of the silicon mesa variety, innovative for their time, but exhibiting relatively poor reliability.
Fairchild's first marketed transistor was the 1958 2N697, a mesa transistor developed by Moore,[9] and it was a success. The first batch of 100 was sold to IBM for $150 apiece in order to build the computer for the B-70 bomber. More were sold to Autonetics to build the guidance system for the Minuteman ballistic missile.[10]
At the same time Jean Hoerni developed the planar process, which was a major improvement: planar transistors could be made more easily, at a lower cost and with greater performance and reliability, making other transistors obsolete. One such casualty was Philco's transistor division, whose newly built $40 million plant to make their germanium PADT process transistors became nonviable. Within a few years, every other transistor company paralleled or licensed the Fairchild planar process. Hoerni's 2N1613 was a major success, with Fairchild licensing the design across the industry.
In 1960, Fairchild built a circuit with four transistors on a single wafer of silicon, thereby creating the first silicon integrated circuit (Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had developed an integrated circuit made of germanium on September 12, 1958, and was awarded a U.S. patent, however Kilby's method was not scalable and the semiconductor industry adopted Fairchild's process to manufacture integrated circuits). The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year.
1957, Diagram of one of the SiO2 transistor devices made by Frosch and Derick
Fairchild's Noyce and Texas Instrument's Kilby had independently invented the integrated circuit (IC) based on bipolar technology. In 1960, Noyce invented the planar integrated circuit. The industry preferred Fairchild's invention over Texas Instruments' because the transistors in planar ICs were interconnected by a thin film deposit, whereas Texas Instruments' invention required fine wires to connect the individual circuits. Noyce's invention was enabled by the planar process developed by Jean Hoerni.[12] In turn, Hoerni's planar process was inspired by the surface passivation method developed at Bell Labs by Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick in 1955[13][14] and 1957.[15][16]
At Bell Labs, the importance of Frosch and Derick technique and transistors was immediately realized. Results of their work circulated around Bell Labs in the form of BTL memos before being published in 1957. At Shockley Semiconductor, Shockley had circulated the preprint of their article in December 1956 to all his senior staff, including Jean Hoerni,[17][18][19][20] who would later invent the planar process in 1959 while at Fairchild Semiconductor.[21][22]
In 1948, Bardeen and Brattain patented at Bell Labs an insulated-gate transistor (IGFET) with an inversion layer, this concept forms the basis of CMOS technology today.[23] In 1963, Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass built CMOS MOSFET logic.[24][25]
In 1963, Fairchild hired Robert Widlar to design analog operational amplifiers using Fairchild's process. Since Fairchild's processes were optimized for digital circuits, Widlar collaborated with process engineer Dave Talbert. The collaboration resulted in two revolutionary products– μA702 and μA709.[26] Hence, Fairchild dominated the analog integrated circuit market, having introduced the first IC operational amplifiers, or "op-amps", Bob Widlar's μA702 (in 1964) and μA709. In 1968, Fairchild introduced David Fullagar's μA741, which became the most popular IC op amp of all time.[27]
By 1965, Fairchild's process improvements had brought low-cost manufacturing to the semiconductor industry– making Fairchild nearly the only profitable semiconductor manufacturer in the United States. Fairchild dominated the market in DTL, op-amps and mainframe computer custom circuits. In 1965, Fairchild opened a semiconductor assembly plant on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico.[28][29] At its peak, the plant employed over a thousand Navajos, the majority of whom were women. In The Shiprock Dedication Commemorative Brochure released by the Fairchild company, the Diné (Navajo) women circuit makers were celebrated as "culture workers who produced circuits as part of the 'reproductive' labor of expressing Navajo culture, rather than merely for wages." This claim was based on the opinion that circuits of the electronic chips had a mere resemblance with the complex geometric patterns on the Navajo rugs. Paul Driscoll, the Shiprock plant manager, spoke of the "untapped wealth of natural characteristics of the Navajo...the inherent flexibility and dexterity of the Indians." Although highly successful during its operation, the plant was closed in 1975.[30] While the Fairchild corporation claims the Diné women were chosen to work in the Shiprock plant due to their "'nimble fingers'" as previously noted, the women of the Shiprock reservation were actually chosen as the workforce due to a lack of labor rights asserted by the women in addition to "cheap, plentiful workers and tax benefits".[31]
Fairchild had not done well in the digital integrated circuit market. Their first line of ICs was the "micrologic" resistor–transistor logic (RTL) line which was used in the Apollo Guidance Computer. It had the advantage of being extremely simple– each inverter consisted of just one transistor and two resistors. The logic family had many drawbacks that had made it marginal for commercial purposes, and not well suited for military applications: the logic could only tolerate about 100 millivolts of noise– far too low for comfort. It was awhile before Fairchild relied on more robust designs, such as diode–transistor logic (DTL) which had much better noise margins.
Sales due to Fairchild semiconductor division had doubled each year and by the mid-1960s comprised two-thirds of total sales of the parent company. In 1966, Fairchild's sales were second to those of Texas Instruments, followed in third place by Motorola. Noyce was rewarded with the position of corporate vice-president and hence became the de facto head of the semiconductor division.
However, internal trouble at Fairchild began to surface with a drop in earnings in 1967. There was increasing competition from newer start-ups. The semiconductor division, situated in Mountain View and Palo Alto, California, was actually managed by executives from Syosset, New York, who visited the California sites once a year, even though the semiconductor division earned most of the profits of the company. Fairchild's president at that time, John Carter, had used all the profits to fund acquisitions of unprofitable ventures.
Noyce's position on Fairchild's executive staff was consistently compromised by Sherman Fairchild's faction. Charles E. Sporck was Noyce's operations manager. Sporck was reputed to run the tightest operation in the world. Sporck, Pierre Lamond and most managers had grown upset and disillusioned with corporate focus on unprofitable ventures at the expense of the semiconductor division. Executives at the semiconductor division were allotted substantially fewer stock options compared to other divisions. In March 1967, Sporck was hired away by Peter J. Sprague to National Semiconductor. Sporck brought with him four other Fairchild personnel.[32] Actually, Lamond had previously assembled a team of Fairchild managers in preparation to defect to Plessey, a British company. Lamond had recruited Sporck to be his own boss. When negotiations with Plessey broke down over stock options, Lamond and Sporck succumbed to Widlar's and Talbert's (who were already employed at National Semiconductor) suggestion that they look to National Semiconductor.[33] Widlar and Talbert had earlier left Fairchild to join Molectro, which was later acquired by National Semiconductor.[34]
In the fall of 1967, Fairchild suffered a loss for the first time since 1958 and announced write-offs of $4 million due to excess capacity, which contributed to a total loss of $7.6 million. Profits had sunk to $0.50 a share, compared to $3 a share the previous year, while the value of the stock dropped in half. In October 1967, the board ordered Carter to sell off all of Fairchild's unprofitable ventures. Carter responded to the order by resigning abruptly.
Furthermore, Fairchild's DTL technology was being overtaken by Texas Instruments's faster TTL (transistor–transistor logic).
While Noyce was considered the natural successor to Carter, the board decided not to promote him. Sherman Fairchild led the board to choose Richard Hodgson. Within a few months Hodgson was replaced by a management committee led by Noyce, while Sherman Fairchild looked for a new CEO other than Noyce. In response, Noyce discreetly planned a new company with Gordon Moore, the head of R&D. They left Fairchild to found Intel in 1968 and were soon joined by Andrew Grove and Leslie L. Vadász, who took with them the revolutionary MOS Silicon Gate Technology (SGT), recently created in the Fairchild R&D Laboratory by Federico Faggin who also designed the Fairchild 3708, the world’s first commercial MOS integrated circuit using SGT. Fairchild MOS Division was slow in understanding the potential of the SGT which promised not only faster, more reliable, and denser circuits, but also new device types that could enlarge the field of solid state electronics– for example, CCDs for image sensors, dynamic RAMs, and non-volatile memory devices such as EPROM and flash memories. Intel took advantage of the SGT for its memory development. Federico Faggin, frustrated, left Fairchild to join Intel in 1970 and design the first microprocessors using SGT. Among the investors of Intel were Hodgson and five of the founding members of Fairchild.
Sherman Fairchild hired Lester Hogan, who was the head of Motorola semiconductor division. Hogan proceeded to hire another hundred managers from Motorola to entirely displace the management of Fairchild.
The loss of these iconic executives, coupled with Hogan's displacement of Fairchild managers demoralized Fairchild and prompted the entire exodus of employees to found new companies.
Many of the original founders, otherwise known as the "fairchildren", had left Fairchild in the 1960s to form companies that grew to prominence in the 1970s. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were among the last of the original founders to leave, at which point the brain-drain of talents that had fueled the growth of the company was complete.
A Fairchild advertisement of the time showed a collage of the logos of Silicon Valley with the annotation "We started it all". It was later, in 1971, Don Hoefler popularizated the name "Silicon Valley USA" in Electronic News.[35] He notes he did not invent the name. See also Gregory Gromov[36] and TechCrunch 2014 update[37] of Hoefler's article.[35]
1970s
Hogan's action to hire from Motorola had Motorola file a lawsuit against Fairchild, which the court then decided in Fairchild's favor in 1973. Judge William Copple ruled that Fairchild's results were so unimpressive that it was impossible to assess damages "under any theory". Hogan was dismissed as president the next year, but remained as vice chairman.[38]
In 1973, Fairchild became the first company to produce a commercial charge-coupled device (CCD) following its invention at Bell Labs. Digital image sensors are still produced today at their descendant company, Fairchild Imaging. The CCD had a difficult birth, with the devastating effects on Fairchild of the 1973–75 recession that followed on the 1973 oil crisis.[39]
After Intel introduced the 8008 8-bit microprocessor, Fairchild developed the Fairchild F8 8-bit microprocessor, which was according to the CPU Museum "in 1977 the F8 was the world's leading microprocessor in terms of CPU sales."[40]
In 1976, the company released the first video game system to use ROM cartridges, the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (or VES) later renamed Channel F, using the F8 microprocessor. The system was successful initially, but quickly lost popularity when the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (or VCS) was released.
By the end of the 1970s they had few new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for military and space applications and isoplanar ECL products used in exotic applications like Cray Computers.[41] Fairchild was being operated at a loss, and the bottomline subsisted mostly from licensing of its patents.
In 1979, Fairchild Camera and Instrument was purchased by Schlumberger Limited, an oil field services company, for $425 million. At this time, Fairchild's intellectual properties, on which Fairchild had been subsisting, were expiring.
1980s
In 1980, under Schlumberger management, the Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research (FLAIR) was started within Fairchild Research.[42] In 1985 the lab was separated to form Schlumberger Palo Alto Research (SPAR).
Fairchild research developed the Clipper architecture, a 32-bit RISC-like computer architecture, in the 1980s, resulting in the shipping of the C100 chip in 1986. The technology was later sold to Intergraph, its main customer.
Schlumberger sold Fairchild to National Semiconductor in 1987 for $200 million.[43] The sale did not include Fairchild's Test Division, which designed and produced automated test equipment (ATE) for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, nor did it include Schlumberger Palo Alto Research.
In the early 1980s, Fairchild was one of several silicon valley tech companies involved in a lawsuit brought on by residents of San Jose, California. The case pertained to industrial solvent contamination of ground water and soil in San Jose's Los Paseos neighborhood. A settlement was reached and the area designated a superfund. Superfund site cleanup ended in 1998.[44]
1990s
In 1997, the reconstituted Fairchild Semiconductor was reborn as an independent company, based in South Portland, Maine, with Kirk Pond as CEO.
On March 11, 1997, National Semiconductor Corporation announced the US$550 million sale of a reconstituted Fairchild to the management of Fairchild with the backing of Sterling LLC, a unit of Citicorp Venture Capital. Fairchild carried with it what was mostly the Standard Products group previously segregated by Gil Amelio.
The Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation announced November 27, 1997, that it would acquire the semiconductor division of the Raytheon Corporation for about $120 million in cash. The acquisition was completed on December 31, 1997.[45]
In December 1998, Fairchild announced the acquisition of Samsung's power division, which made power MOSFETs, IGBTs, etc.[46] The deal was finalized in April 1999 for $450 million.[47] Fairchild remained an important supplier for Samsung.[48]
In August 1999, Fairchild Semiconductor again became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol FCS. Fairchild's South Portland, Maine, and Mountaintop, Pennsylvania, locations are the longest continuously operating semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world, both operating since 1960.[citation needed]
2000s
On March 19, 2001, Fairchild Semiconductor announced that it had completed the acquisition of Intersil Corporation's discrete power business for approximately $338 million in cash. The acquisition moved Fairchild into position as the second-largest power MOSFET supplier in the world, representing a 20 percent share of this $3 billion market that grew 40 percent last year.[when?]
On September 6, 2001, Fairchild Semiconductor announced the acquisition of Impala Linear Corporation, based in San Jose, California, for approximately $6 million in stock and cash. Impala brought with it expertise in designing analog power management semiconductors for hand-held devices like laptops, MP3 players, cell phones, portable test equipment and PDAs.
On January 9, 2004, Fairchild Semiconductor CEO Kirk Pond was appointed as a Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, elected by member banks to serve a three-year term.[49]
On April 13, 2005, Fairchild announced appointment of Mark Thompson as CEO of the corporation. Thompson would also be President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors of Fairchild Semiconductor International. He originally joined Fairchild as Executive Vice President, Manufacturing and Technology Group.[50]
On March 15, 2006, Fairchild Semiconductor announced that Kirk P. Pond would retire as Chairman at the company's annual stockholders' meeting on May 3, 2006. Pond would continue as a member of the company’s board of directors.[51] Mark Thompson (then CEO) became Chairman.
On September 1, 2007, New Jersey–based RF semiconductor supplier Anadigics acquired Fairchild Semiconductor's RF design team, located in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, for $2.4 million.
2010s
In April 2011, Fairchild Semiconductor acquired TranSiC, a silicon carbide power transistor company originally based in Sweden.
On November 18, 2015, ON Semiconductor made an offer to acquire Fairchild Semiconductor for $2.4 billion (or $20 per share) after a few months of speculation that Fairchild was seeking a potential buyer.
On April 10, 2016, Fairchild Semiconductor moved its headquarters from San Jose (3030 Orchard Pkwy.) to Sunnyvale (1272 Borregas Ave.).
On September 19, 2016, ON Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor jointly announced that ON Semiconductor had completed its announced $2.4 billion cash acquisition of Fairchild.
In the fall of 2016, the Fairchild 'ON' Semiconductor International closed the West Jordan, Utah, manufacturing plant.[52]
Landmark status
The historic marker at the Fairchild building at which the traitorous eight set up shop and the first commercially practical integrated circuit was invented
On May 8, 1991, the State Historic Preservation Office designated the site of invention of the first commercially practicable integrated circuit as a California historical landmark #1000. A description on the commemorative plaque reads: "At this site in 1959, Dr. Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation invented the first integrated circuit that could be produced commercially. Based on 'planar' technology, an earlier Fairchild breakthrough, Noyce's invention consisted of a complete electronic circuit inside a small silicon chip. His innovation helped revolutionize 'Silicon Valley's' semiconductor electronics industry, and brought profound change to the lives of people everywhere."[3]
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip, computer chip, or simply chip, is a small electronic device made up of multiple interconnected electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors. These components are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Integrated circuits are used in a wide range of electronic devices, including computers, smartphones, and televisions, to perform various functions such as processing and storing information. They have greatly impacted the field of electronics by enabling device miniaturization and enhanced functionality.
Robert Norton Noyce, nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He was also credited with the realization of the first monolithic integrated circuit or microchip made with silicon, which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electrical signals and power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material, usually with at least three terminals for connection to an electronic circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Some transistors are packaged individually, but many more in miniature form are found embedded in integrated circuits. Because transistors are the key active components in practically all modern electronics, many people consider them one of the 20th century's greatest inventions.
Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics which work primarily with analog signals. Despite the name, digital electronics designs includes important analog design considerations.
A semiconductor device is an electronic component that relies on the electronic properties of a semiconductor material for its function. Its conductivity lies between conductors and insulators. Semiconductor devices have replaced vacuum tubes in most applications. They conduct electric current in the solid state, rather than as free electrons across a vacuum or as free electrons and ions through an ionized gas.
Computer engineering is a branch of electrical engineering that integrates several fields of electrical engineering, electronics engineering and computer science required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineering is referred to as Electrical and Computer engineering OR Computer Science and Engineering at some universities
National Semiconductor Corporation was an American semiconductor manufacturer, which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications.
The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. William Shockley had in 1956 recruited a group of young Ph.D. graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular. This was accentuated by Shockley's research focus not proving fruitful. After the demand for Shockley to be replaced was rebuffed, the eight left to form their own company.
Jean Amédée Hoerni was a Swiss-born American engineer. He was a silicon transistor pioneer, and a member of the "traitorous eight". He developed the planar process, an important technology for reliably fabricating and manufacturing semiconductor devices, such as transistors and integrated circuits.
Jay Taylor Last was an American physicist, silicon pioneer, and member of the so-called "traitorous eight" that founded Silicon Valley.
A mixed-signal integrated circuit is any integrated circuit that has both analog circuits and digital circuits on a single semiconductor die. Their usage has grown dramatically with the increased use of cell phones, telecommunications, portable electronics, and automobiles with electronics and digital sensors.
The planar process is a manufacturing process used in the semiconductor industry to build individual components of a transistor, and in turn, connect those transistors together. It is the primary process by which silicon integrated circuit chips are built, and it is the most commonly used method of producing junctions during the manufacture of semiconductor devices. The process utilizes the surface passivation and thermal oxidation methods.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, later known as Shockley Transistor Corporation, was a pioneering semiconductor developer founded by William Shockley, and funded by Beckman Instruments, Inc., in 1955. It was the first high technology company in what came to be known as Silicon Valley to work on silicon-based semiconductor devices.
Robert John Widlar was an American electronics engineer and a designer of linear integrated circuits (ICs).
John Haslett Hall was a pioneer in the development of low power CMOS integrated circuits. Hall was a pioneering semiconductor process and device design expert. He founded or co-founded multiple innovative Silicon Valley companies, including Intersil, MicroPower Systems, Linear Integrated Systems, Inc., and Integrated Wave Technologies, Inc.
Carl John Frosch was a Bell Labs researcher who along Lincoln Derick build the first silicon dioxide field effect transistors. In 1955 they accidentally discovered that silicon could be protectively coated by silicon dioxide by the right exposure to oxygen when hot, and patented the method. Such protective coating overcame a problem of surface states found in active silicon circuit elements. The discovery also revealed the potential for the process of silicon etching.
A transistor is a semiconductor device with at least three terminals for connection to an electric circuit. In the common case, the third terminal controls the flow of current between the other two terminals. This can be used for amplification, as in the case of a radio receiver, or for rapid switching, as in the case of digital circuits. The transistor replaced the vacuum-tube triode, also called a (thermionic) valve, which was much larger in size and used significantly more power to operate. The first transistor was successfully demonstrated on December 23, 1947, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs was the research arm of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). The three individuals credited with the invention of the transistor were William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The introduction of the transistor is often considered one of the most important inventions in history.
This article details the history of electronics engineering. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (1972) defines electronics as "The science and technology of the conduction of electricity in a vacuum, a gas, or a semiconductor, and devices based thereon".
The first planar monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip was demonstrated in 1960. The idea of integrating electronic circuits into a single device was born when the German physicist and engineer Werner Jacobi developed and patented the first known integrated transistor amplifier in 1949 and the British radio engineer Geoffrey Dummer proposed to integrate a variety of standard electronic components in a monolithic semiconductor crystal in 1952. A year later, Harwick Johnson filed a patent for a prototype IC. Between 1953 and 1957, Sidney Darlington and Yasuo Tarui proposed similar chip designs where several transistors could share a common active area, but there was no electrical isolation to separate them from each other.
The field-effect transistor (FET) is a type of transistor that uses an electric field to control the current through a semiconductor. It comes in two types: junction FET (JFET) and metal-oxide-semiconductor FET (MOSFET). FETs have three terminals: source, gate, and drain. FETs control the current by the application of a voltage to the gate, which in turn alters the conductivity between the drain and source.
↑ Nakamura, Lisa (January 2, 2014). "Indigenous Circuits". Computer History Museum. Retrieved January 21, 2016.
↑ Shirriff, Ken (September 2024). "The Pentium as a Navajo weaving". Fairchild and Shiprock: Marilou Schultz is currently creating another weaving based on an integrated circuit, shown below. Although this chip, the Fairchild 9040, is much more obscure than the Pentium, it has important historical symbolism, as it was built by Navajo workers at a plant on Navajo land.
↑ Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, by Christophe Lécuyer, published by MIT Press, 2006. ISBN0-262-12281-2, ISBN978-0-262-12281-8; page 260
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US$1.370 billion (2015) [2] 
–US$15.1 million (2015) [2] 
