Fairchild Semiconductor

Fairchild Semiconductor was a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, formed in 1957, that introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (although at almost the same time as one from Texas Instruments) and would go on to become one of the major players in the evolution of Silicon Valley in the 1960s. In the 1970s Fairchild increasingly turned to "high end" customers, and thereby lost out in the developing microprocessor market. By the late 1980s they were a shell of their former selves, and now exists in name only for a fab on the US east coast.

History

In 1956 William Shockley opened Shockley Transistor in Palo Alto and went about staffing it with the brightest engineers he could find. His plan was to introduce a new type of "4-layer diode" that would work faster and have more uses than current transisors.

Only a year later the staff was already fed up with Shockley's increasingly bizzare management style. In one famous incidend Shockley's secretary cut her finger and he became convinced it was a plot to injure him, and ordered everyone in the company to take a lie detector test. It was later demonstrated she had cut herself on a broken thumbtack, but this proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back, and a group of engineers decided they had enough.

Arnold Beckman, who had put up the money for Shockley Transistor, decided that Shockley would be removed from the day-to-day operations and started looking for a office manager. But this simply served to anger Shockley, who felt he was being sold out. Two months later Beckman changed his mind and backed Shockley as the director.

The group, later known widely as the traitorous eight, decided that was that, and all quit. The eight men were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Gene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. Given funding by Fairchild, an eastern-US company which considerable military contracts, they formed Fairchild Semiconductor with plans on making silicon transistors -- at the time germanium was still a common material for semiconductor use.

Their first transistors were soon on the market, and the first batch of 100 was sold to IBM for $150 a piece. However only two years later they had managed to build a circuit with four transisors on a single wafer of silicon, thereby creating the first silicon integrated circuit. The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year.

During the 1960s many of the original founders would leave Fairchild to strike out on their own. Known as the "fairchildren" they formed many of the companies that grew to prominance in the 1970s. Among the the last of the original founders to leave were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who left in 1968 to form Intel.

At this point much of the brainpower of the company was gone. Intel would soon introduce the microprocessor, which Fairchild only copied, poorly, after a few years as the Fairchild F8. Their original lead was now squandered, and by the end of the 1970s they had no new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for space applications.

For a time, the company played a leading role in the development of integrated circuits using bipolar technology. These circuits were used worldwide, for example, in the Cray supercomputers.

In 1976 the company released the first video game system to use ROM cartridges, the Channel F.

[Schlumberger purchased some divisions]

[Lawsuit with Data General? ]

Alumni

Robert Noyce -- Gordon Moore -- Jean Hoerni -- Jim Early -- Lester Hogan --

Jerry Sanders --