Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. This section needs additional citations for verification. The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year. patent, however Kilby's method was not scalable and the semiconductor industry adopted Fairchild's process to manufacture integrated circuits). 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. Hoerni's 2N1613 was a major success, with Fairchild licensing the design across the industry. Within a few years every other transistor company paralleled or licensed the Fairchild planar process. One such casualty was Philco's transistor division, whose newly built $40 million plant to make their germanium PADT process transistors became nonviable. The planar process made most other transistor processes obsolete. Īt the same time Jean Hoerni developed the planar process which was a major improvement – transistors could be made more easily, at a lower cost and with greater performance and reliability. More were sold to Autonetics to build the guidance system for the Minuteman ballistic missile.
The first batch of 100 was sold to IBM for $150 apiece in order to build the computer for the B-70 bomber. Their first transistors were of the silicon mesa variety, innovative for their time, but exhibiting relatively poor reliability.įairchild's first marketed transistor was the 1958 2N697, a mesa transistor developed by Moore, and it was a success. 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. 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.
In 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor division was started with plans to make silicon transistors at a time when germanium was still the most common material for semiconductor use.Īccording 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. company with considerable military contracts. Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. The eight men were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. A core group of Shockley employees, later known as the traitorous eight, became unhappy with his management of the company. While Shockley was effective as a recruiter, he was less effective as a manager.
Shockley then founded the core of the new company with what he considered the best and brightest graduates coming out of American engineering schools. 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. In 1955, William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, funded by Beckman Instruments in Mountain View, California his plan was to develop a new type of "4-layer diode" that would work faster and have more uses than then-current transistors. The building at 844 East Charleston Road, Palo Alto, California, where the first commercially practical integrated circuit was invented
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