Fairchild Semiconductor
More info
- Creator
- The "traitorous eight", incl. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore
- Released
- 1957
- Owner
- Fairchild Camera and Instrument (at founding)
The chip company that made the integrated circuit practical, and then seeded half of Silicon Valley with its own staff.
In 1957 eight researchers walked out of William Shockley's lab, fed up with how he ran it. He called them "the traitorous eight". Their funding came from Sherman Fairchild's camera and instrument company. Jean Hoerni's planar process (1959) let transistors be built in a flat layer of silicon, and Robert Noyce extended it into a monolithic integrated circuit. Gordon Moore wrote his 1965 paper, the origin of Moore's law, while he was Fairchild's research director.
The parent company kept the profits, and the talent left. Noyce and Moore founded Intel in 1968, Jerry Sanders started AMD a year later, and the spin-offs are still called "Fairchildren". Fairchild itself went through several owners before ON Semiconductor bought it in 2016.