Jean Hoerni
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The planar process
- Nationality
- Swiss-American
The physicist among the traitorous eight who invented the planar process — the technique that made the integrated circuit manufacturable.
Hoerni (1924–1997), a Swiss-American physicist with doctorates from both Cambridge and Geneva, was one of the traitorous eight who left Shockley Semiconductor in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
His great contribution came in 1959: the planar process, in which a protective layer of silicon dioxide is left on top of the silicon and diffusion happens through windows etched in the oxide. It made transistors cleaner, more stable and — crucially — wirable together on a single piece of silicon. Robert Noyce's monolithic circuit built directly on Hoerni's method, and essentially every chip made today follows the same principle. Hoerni later started several companies of his own and funded the building of schools in the mountains of Pakistan.