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Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument by the "traitorous eight" who defected from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. It became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of integrated circuits.
- Founding
- Jean Hoerni’S Planar Process
- Robert Noyce’s Integrated Circuit
- Gordon Moore’s “Law”
- An Innovation Machine
- Manufacturing and Marketing Innovation
- “A Company of Legend”
- Coda
- References
- Further Reading
With funding from Southern California industrialist Arnold Beckman, William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories established his Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, in 1955. He attracted a group of bright young engineers and scientists that he trained in the art of working with silicon s...
In 1959 co-founder Jean Hoerni invented a transistor structure covered with an insulating layer of silicon dioxide (glass) to protect the chip. Known for their flat surface profile as “planar” devices, they were more reliable and offered superior electrical characteristics to competing products. By the end of 1961, their success vaulted Fairchild t...
Fairchild co-founder Robert Noyce conceived the ideaof using aluminum metal deposited on top of Hoerni’s layer of glass to selectively interconnect transistors, resistors, and other components formed in the underlying silicon wafer to create an integrated electronic circuit (IC). Fairchild introduced its first IC, or microchip, a digital logic func...
In 1965 Director of R&D Gordon Moore wrote an article for Electronics magazine that described a doubling in each of the prior four years in the number of transistors that could be fabricated economically on a chip. If this rate continued, he projected that the number of transistors per chip would reach 65,000 in 1975.4 In 1975 Moore, by then presid...
Through the decade of the 1960s, the company continued to innovate in other important areas of semiconductor technology. Fairchild scientists, led by Bruce Deal, Andy Grove, and Ed Snow, pioneered reliable metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) production. Federico Faggin and Tom Klien built the first commercial silicon-gate devices. Frank Wanlass patente...
Fairchild opened its first plant outside the Bay Area in South Portland, Maine, in 1962. As one of the first US technology companies to expand into Asia, C. E. (Ed) Pausa led the construction of a factory in Hong Kong in 1964. Two years later Hong Kong employed 5,000 workers versus 3,000 in California. The success of this venture attracted other co...
According to journalist Michael Malone, “Fairchild Semiconductor was a company of legend – perhaps the most extraordinary collection of business talent ever assembled in a startup company. If Fairchild had a corporate culture it could only be described as volatility incarnate... brilliant young engineers and marketers working long days, and partyin...
Starved by the parent company for funds for investment in new production facilities, for equity to retain key employees, and torn by internal organizational issues, by the late 1960s the semiconductor division encountered serious problems with introducing new products and satisfying fast growing customer demand. As Gordon Moore explained: “Fairchil...
Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corporation, Annual Report 1961.Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley(The MIT Press, 2006).Eldon C. Hall, Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer(American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc., 1996).Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics Magazine, vol. 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965).Arnold Thackray, David Brock, Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary(Basic Books, New York, 2015).Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley(Oxford, 2005).Christophe Lécuyer and David Brock, Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor(MIT Press, 2010).David Laws and Michael Riordan, “Making Micrologic: The Development of the Planar IC at Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957-1963,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing(January 2012): 20-36.Dec 20, 2016 · National spun off several older commodity product lines to a group of managers at the former Fairchild plant in South Portland, Maine, in 1997 and the reconstituted Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc. was reborn there as an independent company.
Founded in 1957 by eight former employees of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, Fairchild pioneered a host of industry leading semiconductor products including transistors, LEDs, and ICs.
Oct 26, 2024 · Founded in 1957 in Santa Clara, California, Fairchild was among the earliest firms to successfully manufacture transistors and integrated circuits. Its final headquarters were in Sunnyvale, California, while research and production facilities were located across the United States and in Asia.
Oct 30, 2007 · Mr Kleiner located a building in Palo Alto and, although the money had not yet come through, Fairchild Semiconductor was founded. “It was the most interesting year of my life,” Mr Last says.
Mar 26, 2024 · With backing from businessman Arthur Rock and Fairchild Camera and Instrument‘s Sherman Fairchild, the "traitorous eight" founded Fairchild Semiconductor on October 1st, 1957 in Palo Alto, California.
