The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
by Leslie Berlin · 9 Jun 2005
.21 ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1957, the Shockley defectors, representatives from Fairchild Camera and Instrument, and Bud Coyle and Arthur Rock met to sign papers establishing Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. The firm incorporated with 1,325 shares of stock. Hayden, Stone owned 225 shares, purchased for $5 per share. Each of the founders
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startups of the financiers’ choosing, but the Northern California roots of venture capital—the pairing of brains and dollars—were established with the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor. After the signing, the entire group went to Rickey’s for a celebration. The flowing champagne and rousing toasts recalled the festivities, held in
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Corporation is formally organized.” Through Noyce, Hodgson offered the new company use of Camera and Instrument’s surplus shop equipment and assured the founders that Fairchild Semiconductor employees would be covered under the larger company’s benefits. Noyce earned more than the other founders, and he alone among them held a
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and avionic jostling) in the digital computers for its missiles and airplanes.31 Shortly after Camera and Instrument lost the B-58 camera contract, Fairchild Semiconductor marketing manager Tom Bay came across an article detailing the difficulties that IBM’s Federal Systems Division faced in its efforts to build a navigational
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, in effect, build the company around IBM’s needs.32 Breakaway 93 Noyce’s assurances did not overcome the IBM engineers’ immediate doubts about Fairchild Semiconductor, a complete unknown distinguished in the industry only by the rebellious history of its founders. Although IBM had no real alternative supplier to Fairchild (the
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to pay $150 for each transistor, this at a time when basic germanium devices were selling for less than $5. Fairchild Semiconductor was in business.33 THE IBM ORDER made Fairchild Semiconductor. IBM left little to chance, carefully specifying not only the device’s electrical parameters, but also the packaging and testing procedures
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the young company should use in manufacturing the transistors. Noyce and the other scientists at Fairchild Semiconductor agreed they could only achieve the sort of reliability and speed that IBM wanted if they built double-diffused silicon transistors: devices, that is, built
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company than did the founders. Soon some dozen engineers from Hughes, most of them specialists in manufacturing—the eight founders’ weak point—were on the Fairchild Semiconductor payroll.42 Baldwin’s job was not easy. After an initial $50,000 loan, Camera and Instrument transferred funds to Semiconductor only to reimburse
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company with only one customer of any significance (IBM), pursuing science for its own sake was an ill-afforded luxury. Thus early research at Fairchild Semiconductor was almost all process oriented, with building a saleable product the fundamental goal of the research lab. Noyce and several of the other researchers directly
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of identical discrete components (transistors, for example) side by side on a silicon wafer. All these companies used a process similar to the one Fairchild Semiconductor employed to build its mesa transistors. Before the integrated circuit, the last step of the production process was a painstaking assembly line affair. Hundreds of
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Moore at Shockley: how to protect a transistor’s junctions without contaminating them. The question had clearly preoccupied Hoerni since the very earliest days of Fairchild Semiconductor; in December 1957, when the company was scarcely two months old, Hoerni had proposed that “the building up of an oxide layer . . . on the
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run as general manager came in September, when Fairchild Camera and Instrument exercised its option to acquire all outstanding capital stock of Fairchild Semiconductor. In just the previous nine months, Fairchild Semiconductor had sold $6.5 million worth of its high-speed silicon devices, each of which cost 13 cents to build, for $
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manufacture of pure silicon ingots. The number of tenants in the Stanford Industrial Park increased sixfold in five years.62 The concentration of firms benefited Fairchild Semiconductor, which could use the mass spectrometer at Lockheed and ask the Bay Area Pollution Control Lab to perform a series of important experiments on
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to build his own furnaces and Noyce had to scrounge for photolithography lenses at a camera shop.63 Sweeping developments unrelated to electronics also benefited Fairchild Semiconductor and Bob Noyce. The increasing mechanization of agriculture in California freed up thousands of low-skilled workers for work in electronics assembly plants. An
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to build, and when to introduce them. But the Fairchild founders had no influence over some of the biggest decisions affecting their company because Fairchild Semiconductor now belonged to Camera and Instrument and had no representative on the parent company’s board. John Carter controlled the size of the Semiconductor budget
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his friends and former employees to court, he said.85 Noyce’s sadness at his colleagues’ departures was certainly eased by the fantastic performance of Fairchild Semiconductor throughout 1961. In that single year, Semiconductor doubled both its share of the world semiconductor market and the size of its product line. Largely
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products eventually found their way into government hands. The multimillion-dollar Minuteman contract for transistors cemented the company’s success, and the vast majority of Fairchild Semiconductor’s other early customers were aerospace firms buying products to use in their own government contract work. In 1960, 80 percent of Fairchild’s transistors
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used in defense functions as well. The company worked closely with military contractors in designing and building its products. Even by the mid-1960s, when Fairchild Semiconductor assiduously courted the industrial and commercial markets, its products nonetheless could also be found in surveillance radar and transmitters for space vehicles; in Polaris, Minuteman
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all televisions be equipped with UHF tuners, a law that effectively forced the introduction of transistors into every television in the United States— could benefit Fairchild Semiconductor, he believed there was something “almost unethical” about using government contract money to fund R&D projects. “Government funding of R&D has a
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meetings in Syosset and the requirements of the instrumentation division, Noyce began to split his time in A Strange Little Upstart 143 half between the Fairchild Semiconductor offices and Camera and Instrument headquarters in New York. Betty Noyce declared this the perfect reason to move back east. The state of California had
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very comfortable doing that.” The incorporation was a much more subdued affair than the ceremonial dollar-bill signing that Bud Coyle had choreographed to launch Fairchild Semiconductor. Neither Noyce, nor Moore, nor Rock assigned great value to symbolism or ceremony. They signed only legally required papers, which one of the attorneys
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moving into the Union Carbide building, a 30,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at 365 Middlefield Road in Mountain View, not far from the original Fairchild Semiconductor headquarters. The building was a distinctly Spartan arrangement: even the offices of the “high muckety-mucks” (as Noyce laughingly referred to the management team)
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to this lower San Francisco peninsula area.” Gordon Moore has jokingly called the desire not to move “the entrepreneurial spirit that drove the formation of Fairchild Semiconductor.” Gordon Moore interview by Alan Chen. 92. Not going to give away the store: Fairchild Founder A, interview by Christophe Lécuyer. 93. Chickening out:
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Electronic News, 17 Feb. 1958, 1. Had considered six months before: Fairchild Camera and Instrument Annual Report 1957. Fairchild primed and eager: Noyce quoted in “Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation: Company Profile,” Solid State Journal, Sept./Oct. 1960, 1. Get the company into electronics: Richard Hodgson, interview by author. Just right personality: Fairchild Founder
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Hodgson, interview by author. Arnold Beckman later apparently rued his largesse. In 1962, after Shockley Transistor had been sold for underperformance, and the fortunes of Fairchild Semiconductor continued to soar, he said of “labor pirating”: “Employer and employee alike should re-examine the moral precepts involved to determine what constitutes good ethical
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is so articulate, never a doubt in his mind: Tom Bay, interview by author. 33. Private meeting: Richard Hodgson, interview by author, 19 May 1999; “Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation: Company Profile,” Solid State Journal, Sept./Oct. 1960, 1. 34. IBM left little to chance: Lecuyer, “Making Silicon Valley,” 166. 35. Develop own
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a photography store: Gordon Moore, interview by Alan Chen. 37. Work with Eastman Kodak: Lecuyer, “Making Silicon Valley,” 170. 38. Low transistor yields: At Fairchild Semiconductor in 1960, for example, Gordon Moore reported that yields were 85 percent at wafer test—and of this percentage, on 54 percent were fully operational
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interview by author. 46. We scooped the industry: Last “meeting notes” notebook, courtesy Jay Last. Details on Wescon and introduction of the Fairchild transistor: Lecuyer, “Fairchild Semiconductor,” 171. Chapter 5: Invention 1. All Fairchild notebooks: Anon. 2. On Shockley’s research method: Sheldon Roberts, interview by Christophe Lecuyer, 6 July 1996. 3
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Jean Hoerni, lab notebook #3, 3. 16. Quotes and descriptions of tap testing: Moore notebook #6, entry dated 3 July 1959. Attended a conference: Lecuyer, “Fairchild Semiconductor,” 175. 17. Hoerni’s patent disclosures: Hoerni, “Method of Protecting Exposed p-n Junctions at the Surface of Silicon Transistors by Oxide Masking Techniques,” 14
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Bob Ristelhueber, “Noyce Remembered: Unusual Ideas, Unusual Approaches,” Electronic News, 11 June 1990, 4. 29. I could direct the work: Noyce, 1965 Lindgren interview. 30. Fairchild Semiconductor growth: Fairchild Camera and Instrument Annual Report 1959. Fairchild-Rheem lawsuits: suit filed on 15 July 1959 in the Supreme court of California and for
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the city and county of San Francisco entitled “Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, A Corporation (plaintiff) vs. E. M. Baldwin et al.,” #491279. 328 Notes to Pages 107–112 31. Met with representatives: “Top Scientist from
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was signed, courtesy Jay Last. Tiny area of disquiet, the reward seemed too much: Noyce, 1965 Lindgren interview. 49. Answered questions with ease: Leadwire (Fairchild Semiconductor internal newsletter), Nov. 1959. People used to do things: Richard Hodgson, interview by author. It’s a very satisfying thing: Noyce quoted in Reid, The
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Alto to Service Producers,” 18 Sept. 1961. Stanford Industrial Park tenants: Findlay, Magic Lands, 140. 330 Notes to Pages 119–123 63. Resources available to Fairchild Semiconductor: “Progress Report, Chemistry Section, 1 Feb. 1960,” Box 5, File 1, Fairchild R&D Reports, M1055, SSC; “Progress Report, Micrologic Section, 1 July 1960,”
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“Drs. Hoerni, Last Resign Posts at Fairchild to Join Teledyne,” Electronic News, 13 Feb. 1961. Semiconductor doubled its share: “Strong Position of Firm Cited by Fairchild Semiconductor VP,” Electronic News, 20 March 1961, 16. Record profits and sales: Fairchild Camera and Instrument Annual Report 1961. 1962 figures: Fairchild Camera and Instrument Annual
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: Pollack, “Small Lobby’s Large Voice.” 50. Outcome of proposed Fairchild sale: Richards, “Bottom Line Indicated Who Would Buy Fairchild.” Charlie Sporck says, “We bought Fairchild Semiconductor, with all of that company’s properties, for $122 million. . . . [W]e gradually sold off parts of Fairchild for more than $150 million, and
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“US Consortiums Mimic Japanese Organisation.” Far Eastern Economic Review. 24 May 1990. “Fairchild Camera—Portrait of a Growth Company.” Financial World, 12 September 1962, 10. “Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation: Company Profile.” Solid State Journal, September/October 1960, 1. “Fifty Years of Electronics,” a special issue of Electronics, 17 April 1980, 326. “Hottest Thing
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. “New Leaders in Semiconductors.” Business Week, 1 March 1976. “Robert Noyce: Special Tribute,” San Jose Mercury News, 17 June 1990. Berlin, Leslie. “Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957–1968.” Business History Review 75 (Spring 2001): 63–101. Bonner, Miller, W. Lane Boyd, and Janet A. Allen. “Robert N. Noyce, 1927– 1990,”
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from the National Business Hall of Fame.” No date [1988, 1989, or early 1990]. Video, SEMATECH archives. “A Briefing on Integrated Circuits.” Video distributed by Fairchild Semiconductor. 1966, courtesy Harry Sello. Noyce interview for “The Machine that Changed the World.” Video, Intel archives. “Silicon Valley.” Written, Produced, and Directed by Julio
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124, 147–48, 151; management of, 106, 112–13, 128, 142–43, 146–47, 149, 150–53 Fairchild Recording Equipment Corporation, 83 Fairchildren. See Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, spinoffs of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, 1, 105, 119; decline of, 150–51; development-manufacturing divide, 125–28; diode plant of, 123; and Fairchild Camera, 112–13, 120
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, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, and Jay Last. Courtesy Julius Blank. This check is an early installment on Fairchild Semiconductor’s first sale: 100 transistors, sold to IBM for $150 apiece. Equivalent transistors today cost less than a hundred-thousandth of a penny. Family photos
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. In September 1961, Stanford provost Frederick Terman joined Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor research head Gordon Moore in breaking ground for the company’s new Research and Development building. Family photos. The other Fairchild founders look at Noyce
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, who poses near equipment in the production area. Courtesy Julius Blank. Above: Noyce in 1959, explaining Fairchild Semiconductor’s breakthrough planar process to John Carter, CEO of the firm’s parent company. Carter knew almost nothing about semiconductors. Family photos. Left: Noyce in
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Noyce’s integrated circuit patent. The first integrated circuit available as a monolithic chip, Fairchild’s 1961 resistor-transistor logic (RTL) flip flop. Courtesy Fairchild Semiconductor. A Fairchild Semiconductor employee in May 1963 uses a microscope to package chips in the gold “headers” lying in the tray to her right. She is wearing a
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head Charlie Sporck speak to employees at Fairchild’s Portland, Maine facility. A casual style was a hallmark of Noyce’s approach to management. Courtesy Fairchild Semiconductor. Walker’s Wagon Wheel was one of several famous after-hours meeting places for semiconductor engineers and other workers. Some firms’ lawyers, concerned corporate
Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created
by Jeffrey Zygmont · 15 Mar 2003
men were oppo- sites. Hoerni was urbane and overeducated, garrulous, headstrong, and aloof. He worked for a tenuous, unestablished rival to TI, a company called Fairchild Semiconductor. At the time of Kilby's invention, Fairchild was so small that it scarcely registered as a competitive challenge to the Texan. Fairchild was still
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transistors. They felt outrage over the change. Eight of them defected as a group in 1957, just one year into their tenure. They set up Fairchild Semiconductor, aiming to complete the work they had begun. In addition to Hoerni, Moore, and Noyce, they included Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last
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Fairchild advanced the cash through the auspices of his Camera and Equipment company. Its collateral was the option to purchase the semiconductor operation outright, should Fairchild Semiconductor become successful. Each of the traitorous eight founders received ten percent ownership in the tenuous new venture, with the final twenty percent share going to
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had made the match with Fairchild. Eventually, Camera and Equipment would sink about $3.5 million into Fairchild Semiconductor. After twenty-four months, it would exercise its option, purchasing the operation outright. But at the start, Fairchild Semiconductor ran on a shoestring. On October 2, 1957, Fairchild Camera Executive Vice President Richard Hodgson sent
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principle of Fairchild: "Build a better transistor and you'll find somebody who will buy it." The Wild West 35 Thus infused with starry optimism, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation opened shop in October 1957. It occupied a lackluster rented building on Charleston Street in Palo Alto when the town still was growing out
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breath. Robert Noyce got the job of compiling the patent application because Noyce directed the company's research and development. After they had set up Fairchild Semiconductor, after they 42 MICROCHIP had given Noyce the lead in negotiating terms with Fairchild Camera and Equipment and shouldering the early administrative burden, the eight
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in early semiconductors, with so much still undiscovered, contenders weren't assured success. They had to beat rivals who wanted to win just as badly. Fairchild Semiconductor's early victories came from the exceptional qualities of its founders, beginning with Bob Noyce. For one thing, the team was intrepid, moving rapidly along
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Baldwin's desertion, the team of Fairchild founders decided to stick this time with homegrown leadership. Naturally they picked Noyce. He became general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor just after he had conceived of integrated circuits early in 1959. Gordon Moore moved into Noyce's old job of R&D director. The change
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a band of defectors. In this case they were rather prominent defectors: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the leaders who had built up Fairchild Semiconductor. (Another of Fairchild's leaders, Charlie Sporck, had left before them, taking over as chief executive of National Semiconductor, a moribund company that Sporck salvaged
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see things would change fairly dramatically if somebody came in from the outside," he relates. Thus on July 18, 1968, the two former employees of Fairchild Semiconductor incorporated as Intel Corporation. The name came from a clever combination of the words integrated and electronics. Robert Noyce started as president and chief executive
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into microscopic silicon—a wholly separate discipline—still remained. To put the project on a crash course toward completion, Intel went back to its well: Fairchild Semiconductor. In April 1970 it hired away Federico Faggin. Thirty-nine years old, Fag- gin had a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Padua
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just one-sixth the size of Intel, a colossus that makes about $26 billion annually selling chips. Both Advanced Micro and Intel spilled out of Fairchild Semiconductor at about the same time. In 1969, a year after Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce cut out to create Intel, flamboyant Jerry Sanders led a
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follow); ibid. Chapter Two: The Wild West page 23 But Fairchild made silicon transistors . . .; information regarding the founding principles of Fairchild Semiconductor and its early achievements comes from the commemorative booklet Fairchild Semiconductor, item MISC-581 of the Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. page 23 But the same shoddy
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young organization fissured . . . ; Gordon Moore, interviewed April 19, 2001, in Santa Clara, California. Supporting information on the defection from Shockley Laboratory and the formation of Fairchild Semiconductor is from the article "The Role of Fairchild in Silicon Technology in the Early Days of 'Silicon Valley'" by Gordon Moore, Proceedings of the IEEE
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Shockley's standing. page 33 Noyce finessed details . ..; information on Noyce's role and the structure of the deal that set up Fairchild Semiconductor are drawn primarily from the booklet Fairchild Semiconductor, item MISC-581 of the Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, with support from the Noyce sources listed above. page
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Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries. page 56 By the time Fairchild brought out . . . ; information on Fairchild's business position from the booklet Fairchild Semiconductor. page 57 Fairchild considered itself . . . ; Moore. page 57 "After we got the first family of ... ; ibid. Chapter Five: Chipping Away page 58 Texas Instruments had
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I, 71 Exxon, 192 238 Index Faggin, Federico, 122-123, 126-128, 197 Fairchild, Sherman M., 33 Fairchild Camera and Equipment, 33-34, 42, 107 Fairchild Semiconductor, 25, 32, 33, 35, 41-42, 43, 49-57, 58, 73, 107, 108, 122, 125-126, 153, 173,216-217 and commercial microchips, 58 and
The Big Score
by Michael S. Malone · 20 Jul 2021
—now weavers of the fabric of modern life—were encountered first in these pages. For some of these stories, such as the outrageous culture of Fairchild Semiconductor, this book was the first time they were ever told. As the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize–winning editor Paul Gigot later wrote about
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profile the Silicon Valley pioneer for the special “50 Who Made a Difference” issue of the magazine. Rather, it had begun two decades earlier, when Fairchild Semiconductor burst on the scene to become the hottest young company in America, and most of all, when Noyce kicked out the last shivering piling holding
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, Four-Phase, Intersil, American Microsystems, and Signetics combined. It is the largest, most innovative, and most exciting semiconductor company in the world. This elusive, mythical Fairchild Semiconductor has nothing to do with that empty husk of a company called Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. that now occupies its old headquarters in Mountain
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View. It also bears little relation to the company upon which it is based: the Fairchild Semiconductor of 1957 to 1970. The real firm was plagued by numerous problems—weak management, poor manufacturing skills, and the immaturity and inexperience of its executives
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. In the mythical company, these same executives are what they became with time: the leaders of Silicon Valley. The mythical Fairchild Semiconductor is a “what if” game played by the Valley for years. It goes something like this: What if Fairchild hadn’t blown up? What if
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as though the old Fairchild days are more immediate in their minds than whatever glorious work they’re at in the present. What was this Fairchild Semiconductor that it could hold such a grip on the minds of Valley leaders so many years and so many successes after they left it? What
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diaspora of its talent could create several dozen major companies, the largest of them some of the most important corporations in the world? The real Fairchild Semiconductor was remarkably small (less than $100 million even in the late sixties) and technically unsophisticated by modern standards. In an era when Steve Jobs’s
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learn from their mistakes. That was good, because the next time around, when they were on their own, the same mistake would be fatal. At Fairchild Semiconductor, more than HP on one extreme or Shockley Labs on the other, was the freewheeling, throttle-to-the-firewall business style of Silicon Valley forged
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two in 1936, creating the aviation-oriented Fairchild Industries and (the name changed in 1944) Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., the latter the parent of Fairchild Semiconductor. By the time Fairchild Camera and Instrument was approached by the Traitorous Eight, Sherman Fairchild was 60 years old and his interests had moved beyond
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Hoerni, to discover the best structure for the transistor. Moore’s team won because his yield rates were higher. The firm was on its way. Fairchild Semiconductor may have been a very tiny operation in those days, not noticed by cars driving past on Charleston, but its name already was looming large
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. That news was enough for the smallest company in the electronics business to attract the attention of the biggest—and in January 1958 IBM gave Fairchild Semiconductor its first order, for 100 mesa silicon transistors to use as memory drivers in IBM computers. Fairchild was now underway as a company, with the
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even from the beginning he was able to get enough into place to at least handle the orders coming in. By the end of 1958, Fairchild Semiconductor had half a million dollars in sales and 100 employees. The latter number is more important as a comparative growth measure, given the interim inflation
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stealing profits out of Mountain View to support the rest of Fairchild Camera and Instrument—as well as to back his unsuccessful follow-ups to Fairchild Semiconductor. Furthermore, after the initial buyout, Carter became tight with company stock, apparently unable to recognize that this was the only legal tender that counted in
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international espionage.) But for the time being, Fairchild was the hottest new company around. * * * The period from 1961 to 1963 was the critical time for Fairchild Semiconductor. There was one more spin-off during this period, Molectro; but in keeping with the style of its predecessors, it was soon in bad shape
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, and perhaps Silicon Valley. Fairchild required all of its departing employees to fill out a six-page questionnaire containing detailed questions about their experiences at Fairchild Semiconductor and their future plans. Widlar neatly cut through the horseshit. On each page, in giant block letters, he scrawled: i want to get rich “x
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never signed his name). And then he was gone, to reappear several years later with even more outrageous antics at National Semiconductor. * * * Despite the stories, Fairchild Semiconductor was an intensely serious company. It had to be. The semiconductor industry was heating into a blast furnace in which a company had to innovate
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executive, left Mountain View and was given charge of instrumentation and the other “funny” (i.e., lesser) divisions. Charlie Sporck was named general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor. In retrospect, this move, which probably seemed so logical at the time, was the worst thing that could have happened to Fairchild. Before, each of
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the casualness of California life with the youth and boundless energy of young electronics whiz kids. Tom Wolfe captured the differences between Fairchild corporate and Fairchild Semiconductor well, if a bit hyperbolically: One day John Carter came to Mountain View for a close look at Noyce’s semiconductor operation. Carter’s office
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’s uniform—the black suit, the white shirt, the black necktie, and the black visored cap. That in itself was enough to turn heads at Fairchild Semiconductor. Nobody had ever seen a limousine and a chauffeur out there before. But that wasn’t what fixed the day in everybody’s memory. It
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on hard times and sold out to Philco-Ford in 1966, it nevertheless made millionaires of its founders—a lesson for budding entrepreneurs at Fairchild. Fairchild Semiconductor was adapting to the changes resulting from promotions at the top. The critical adjustment was in finding a new director of marketing to fill Tom
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, and Jerry Sanders was 29, and Cox was 30, and Jim Martin was 31. Noyce was 37, and he was among the oldest guys at Fairchild Semiconductor. It was amazing. I’d never gone into a large company before where nobody was old. Nobody was even 40, and the girls on the
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. Brilliant, crazy Widlar, the genius, the madman, who epitomized Fairchild’s innovative greatness and its hell-raising style. It was clear to everyone now that Fairchild Semiconductor was no longer the mischievous child prodigy of American business. At the top, Charlie Sporck was doing everything he could to keep the company together
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leaving in August, taking with him R&D boss Gordon Moore and process development expert Andy Grove. With Noyce and Moore went the last of Fairchild Semiconductor’s original founders. The Fairchild Camera executive troika set about looking for a new chief executive officer to replace Noyce. According to corporate counsel Roger
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the day the announcement was made, August 8, 1968, as a sign of how relieved the market was to see a sign of organization at Fairchild Semiconductor, Fairchild Camera and Instrument stock jumped 20 points. And as an indication of the respect for Hogan, Motorola’s stock fell 15 points. Less than
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.” Fairchild had now sprung leaks from every department, from every office. By the time Hogan learned of his error, it was too late. The legendary Fairchild Semiconductor had died—to be replaced by a ghost. The many employees who had left were now finding work at Sporck’s National Semiconductor or Sanders
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with a certain brash style. As time passed, and the Fairchildren began to identify with their new companies, the pain of their final years at Fairchild Semiconductor diminished. So did the feuds and rivalries—mainly because they had been supplanted by new feuds and rivalries. For the leaders of Silicon Valley’s
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death when they were on their own. And like college, Fairchild was looked upon fondly as a simpler, purer time. So, with time, the old Fairchild Semiconductor began to take on a new image: that of a corporate Paradise Lost—and, by extension, youth and innocence gone forever. In memory, Fairchild, which
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Hogan a picture available to few corporate executives: the complete corporate financial picture of a competitor. The numbers surprised Hogan. After all, during this period Fairchild Semiconductor was generally considered to be one of the most innovative technological business entities on the planet. But what Hogan found was that “the
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[Fairchild] semiconductor division hadn’t done too well the last three years. It turned out their sales had been flat, at $120 million, for three years and
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whole corporate picture.” Noyce himself paid a visit to try to talk Hogan into taking the Fairchild presidency. Hogan was confused. After all, wasn’t Fairchild Semiconductor Noyce’s child? “I said, ‘You’re nuts, you should be the president of the company.’ And Bob said, ‘I’m quitting. I’m going
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was quite successful as a salesman, and his talent was noticed by competitors, in particular by the local salesman for a young northern California company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Despite his disappointment with his beat, Sanders had no intention of leaving Motorola. However, when Fairchild offered him a free weekend trip out to the
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promoted Valentine had also made other changes on executive row. In particular, Sanders’s two mentors were made increasingly inaccessible: Bob Noyce, in recognition of Fairchild Semiconductor’s preponderant contributions to the parent company’s profits, was named a group vice president, responsible for several divisions. It was expected then, among Fairchild
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you that I didn’t want to leave semiconductors, which was true, and I’d like to tell you that I wanted to stay at Fairchild Semiconductor, but the real truth was that there was no way I was moving to New Jersey. I figured that I was now a California boy
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there’s little chance that Jerry Sanders would ever have been president of anything,” would in time come back to Fairchild Semiconductor, but by then the world had changed. To stay at Fairchild Semiconductor, Sanders had to leave southern California and move again back north. And there were other commitments as well. “I was
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compensation matter and in the job promotion. They were never again close. This period marked the beginning of the end of Sanders’s career at Fairchild Semiconductor. Not only had Sanders begun to develop a growing personal resentment of his treatment at the company but “there was a thunderstorm on the horizon
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Don Valentine above him and their relationship had long been chilled. Tom Bay was called back from New Jersey to serve as general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor. Though generally loved, “Tom was just not up to the job,” says Sanders. For the first time, Sanders seriously considered walking out of Fairchild. One
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I had better look for a work environment where making waves was attractive… I looked into the New York Times and saw an ad for Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. It turns out that Fairchild was looking for a production manager, so I wrote them and they arranged
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then come back East.” Sporck went home, packed up his young family, and headed West. A month later he was standing in the lobby of Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View. He was stunned to find that no one had heard of him, and no one had expected his arrival. “Which was kind
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manager. And just three years after that, when Noyce moved upstairs to run all of Fairchild, Sporck was made head man (division general manager) of Fairchild Semiconductor—a job equivalent to company president. During these years Fairchild thrived, much of it due to Sporck’s extraordinary manufacturing skill. But, bumped up to
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, 442 Fairchild, Sherman, 113–14 Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., 94, 115, 119, 135–36, 141, 150, 181, 254, 334 early history of, 113–14 Fairchild Semiconductor, 97, 111–39, 210, 443–44 buy-out at (1960), 119 competitive pressure and, 125–26 Corrigan as president of, 152, 180–81 Cox at
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, 125, 134, 136–38, 141–53 at Bell Labs, 143–48 at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., 141, 142 as Fairchild Semiconductor president, 136–37, 150–53, 179–80, 206–9 as Fairchild Semiconductor vice-chairman, 152, 180 gyrators invented by, 145–47 at Harvard, 142, 147–48 at Motorola, 148–50 Sanders and
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Business Machines), 26, 85, 162–63, 245, 248, 256, 290, 438–39 Amdahl and, 293–300, 302–3, 341–51 Apple Computer and, 413–17 Fairchild Semiconductor and, 115 4300 (E-Series) computer, 298–300, 303 H-Series computers, 299–300 Intel and, 187 Japanscam scandal and, 188 Memorex and, 302 plug
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Nixon, Richard M., 49 Noble, Dan, 148 Northern Telecom, 187 North Star Computers, 329, 331 Noyce, Elizabeth, 102 Noyce, Robert, 97–108, 155, 193 at Fairchild Semiconductor, 104–5, 126–27, 129, 130, 132–33, 135–36, 150, 200, 202 integrated circuit and, 118 Intel and, 164–66, 168, 170, 173–75
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–215, 356 background and youth of, 194–98 divorce, 213–14 at Douglas Aircraft Co., 199–200 at Fairchild Semiconductor, 120, 123–24, 126, 129, 131–32, 134, 136, 137, 155, 200–209 fired from Fairchild Semiconductor, 206–9 marriage, 202 at Motorola, 200 National Semiconductor’s job offer and, 205–6 personal characteristics
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Sporck, Charles E., 120, 123, 125–28, 130–33, 135, 173, 251–59 background and youth of, 252–53 on consumer business, 161–62 at Fairchild Semiconductor, 112, 113, 116, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126–28, 131–33, 254–55 at General Electric, 253 on Japanese threat, 256–57 at National Semiconductor
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words
who promised the chance of a resounding payoff to investors with a taste for audacious invention. The funding of the Traitorous Eight and their company, Fairchild Semiconductor, was arguably the first such adventure to take place on the West Coast, and it changed the history of the region. After Fairchild got its
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Valley the most durably productive crucible of applied science anywhere, ever. Thanks to venture capital, the Traitorous Eight were able to abandon William Shockley, launch Fairchild Semiconductor, and set this miracle in motion. By 2014, an astonishing 70 percent of the publicly traded tech companies in the Valley could trace their lineage
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glad to learn that my arm was broken in an unsuccessful attempt to pick up the check.”[99] By the second year of its existence, Fairchild Semiconductor was doing even better. Noyce and his colleagues came up with a revolutionary process that made it possible to combine multiple transistors in one tiny
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] The news was so excellent, in fact, that Fairchild Camera and Instrument decided to exercise its option, paying the agreed $3 million for all of Fairchild Semiconductor’s stock.[101] For Noyce and his co-founders, it was a bittersweet moment. The Traitorous Eight each received $300,000, fully six hundred times
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of an extraordinary expansion—between early 1959 and early 1960, its staff count hurtled from 180 to 1,400—a reasonable price-earnings multiple for Fairchild Semiconductor would have been at the top of IBM’s range, around 50. These rough numbers imply that because earnings were running at about $2 million
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forging a new kind of applied science and a new commercial culture. Chapter Two Finance Without Finance If liberation capital launched the Traitorous Eight and Fairchild Semiconductor, the following decade brought two further advances that forged the modern venture-capital profession. First, technology investors embraced the idea of an equity-only, time
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, embracing the equity culture of Davis & Rock. Meanwhile, Peter Drucker’s observations on the pitfalls of corporate venture investing were illuminated by the fate of Fairchild Semiconductor. It was as though the gods of fate relished full-circle endings. In a famous essay in Esquire, the master storyteller Tom Wolfe presents Robert
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work ethic, and a belief that every last employee had a stake in the firm. In Wolfe’s telling of this story, the problem with Fairchild Semiconductor’s East Coast overlords was that they could never fathom this egalitarian ethic. The East Coast had a feudal approach to corporate organization: there were
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the Traitorous Eight, Rock had grasped that owning a stake in their company was powerfully motivating to the scientists: that was why he had structured Fairchild Semiconductor so that all of them got stock. After Fairchild’s East Coast bosses exercised their option and assumed full ownership, Noyce continued to serve the
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after his release from water polo duty he joined the semiconductor business, determined to stay on the West Coast. He rose through the ranks at Fairchild Semiconductor and later at its rival National Semiconductor, developing a sideline investing his own money, including in the Rock-Palevsky bonanza, SDS. By 1972, his reputation
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to raise capital from Salomon Brothers, the New York investment bank. “What business school did you go to?” the Salomon guys asked. “I went to Fairchild Semiconductor Business School,” Valentine growled. “They used to look at me like I was completely nuts, not just partially nuts,” Valentine recalled later, with evident delight
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startup who recycles his wealth and experience into more startups. But what mattered most about Markkula was his web of connections. As a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, Markkula was an established member of the Valley’s charmed inner circle. Now that he had signed on with Jobs and Wozniak, Apple
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intensity is unsupported by history. The early stories in this book show how venture capitalists have succeeded with expensive hardware projects in the past: recall Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Tandem, 3Com, Cisco, and UUNET. In the first decades of the industry, VCs financed capital-intensive projects by writing appropriate term sheets. For their
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caught up in great-power rivalry. The geopolitics of venture capital has passed through two phases. In phase one, running roughly from the financing of Fairchild Semiconductor to the financing of Alibaba, there was barely any venture capital outside the United States, so the question of national competition was irrelevant. In phase
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reports that Fairchild lent $1.38 million, also providing an allowance of $3,000 per month for almost eighteen months. See Berlin, “Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor,” 76. Fairchild Semiconductor’s founding documents appear to corroborate Berlin’s numbers. See Bo Lojek, History of Semiconductor Engineering (New York: Springer, 2007), 105. BACK TO NOTE
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REFERENCE 93 Fairchild Camera’s option expired once Fairchild Semiconductor had three successive years of net earnings greater than $300,000 per year. After that, there was an additional period in which Fairchild Camera could
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buy Fairchild Semiconductor for $5 million. Berlin, Man Behind the Microchip, 89. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94 Malone, Big Score, 89. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95 Wolfe, “Tinkerings
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of Robert Noyce”; Meyer, “Eugene Kleiner,” 18; Berlin, “Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957–1968.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96 Jay Last and Jean Hoerni were Rock’s frequent climbing partners. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97 Wilson, New
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Venturers, 34. See also Christophe Lécuyer, “Fairchild Semiconductor and Its Influence,” in Lee et al., Silicon Valley Edge, 167. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98 Memorandum from Rock to Coyle, March 27, 1958, Rock
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and contained in his archive. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99 This number for earnings is the author’s estimate and is only approximate. In 1959, Fairchild Semiconductor employed about 40 scientists earning about $12,000 on average, meaning a salary bill of around $480,000. There were 140 other employees, with average
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perhaps half that, implying a total salary bill of about $1.3 million. (The staff head count in 1959 and 1960 is reported in Lécuyer, Fairchild Semiconductor and Its Influence, 180.) Costs of facilities, machinery, and raw materials might have added perhaps $1 million. This implies pretax earnings of $4.2 million
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have been about $2 million. I am grateful to Arthur Rock for advising on this estimation. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100 Berlin, “Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957–1968,” 81. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101 Eastman Kodak’s price-earnings multiple was lower than IBM’s, ranging between twenty-one and thirty
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,” Esquire, Dec. 1983, web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyce.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51 Berlin, Man Behind the Microchip, 120. Before Fairchild Semiconductor, West Coast technology firms such as Varian Associates had granted stock to engineers. Nicholas, VC, 192. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52 Last, interview by the
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vehicle. 1957 Reid Dennis forms “the Group,” a club of San Francisco brokers that backs technology startups. 1957 Arthur Rock finances the “Traitorous Eight,” creating Fairchild Semiconductor and kick-starting the West Coast chip industry. 1958 The U.S. federal government begins to subsidize venture funds known as Small Business Investment Companies
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defection of 1957. 1972 American Research and Development closes, signaling the triumph of Rock’s West Coast venture model. 1972 Don Valentine, a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor, establishes Sequoia Capital. 1972 Eugene Kleiner, a member of the Traitorous Eight, teams up with Hewlett-Packard executive Tom Perkins to found Kleiner Perkins. 1973
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–80, 263 IPO, 13 American Research and Development (ARD), 25, 28–31, 51–52, 98 Digital Equipment, 28–29, 31, 36–37, 45, 419n, 420n Fairchild Semiconductor, 35 financial and legal structure of, 30–31, 41, 45, 51–52, 419n, 421–22n share price, 31, 420n America Online (AOL), 143, 152, 441n
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, 45–46, 92, 398 Alibaba, 231, 233 Apple and Markkula, 85 Chinese law and, 231, 232, 233, 240 eBay, 170 Facebook and Milner, 275–77 Fairchild Semiconductor, 36–37, 45, 46, 54 Genentech, 77 Intel and Rock, 56–57, 84, 424n JD.com, 237 tax policy and, 92, 398 Emtage, Alan, 20
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and, 258–60 Zuckerberg’s pajama prank, 194–96, 207, 258 Fairchild, Sherman, 35–37, 56, 93, 420n Fairchild Camera and Instrument, 36–39, 41 Fairchild Semiconductor, 38–39, 52–55, 60, 392 after-tax earnings, 38, 421n employee stock ownership, 36–37, 45, 46, 54 founding by Traitorous Eight, 17–18
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, 79–80, 209, 220, 378–79, 382, 390, 422–23n Apple, 86–91, 229, 377 background of, 31–32 at Davis & Rock, 44–51, 382 Fairchild Semiconductor, 31–39, 52–55, 225 financial model of, 40, 46–48, 51, 225, 382 at Hayden, Stone, 31–33, 35–37, 44, 46, 225 Intel
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P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Arthur Rock kick-started the modern venture-capital industry, backing early hits such as Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and improvising an investment style that ignored the standard rules of finance. In 1968, Forbes posed the burning question on the minds of
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin · 7 Nov 2017 · 615pp · 168,775 words
Laureate William Shockley launched a company to build transistors. The very next year, eight of Shockley’s top young scientists and engineers left to launch Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon company in Silicon Valley.6 In the ensuing dozen years, Fairchild gained renown for the quality and innovative record of its
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gained at a large, established employer into service at a small startup. After roughly a year, Vineta Alvarez left Lockheed for the production line at Fairchild Semiconductor, the microchip company launched by eight former employees of Nobel Prize–winner William Shockley. She assembled printed circuit boards, but no one told her what
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, twenty-seven-year-old Mike Markkula was helping his former boss Jack Gifford plot a new startup. Three years earlier, Gifford had hired Markkula at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company where Fawn’s mother had assembled circuit boards whose purpose she did not know. Now Gifford was leaving Fairchild with plans to launch
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in an old Quonset hut—the same operation that would begin to decline a year later, when eight key scientists and engineers left to found Fairchild Semiconductor. At Stanford, Newman directed university relations and served on the president’s staff. Even this big job did not deplete his prodigious energy. In his
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same Shockley who had launched a company around the transistor he had coinvented and then hired the eight young men who would leave to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley had not yet fully descended into the paranoia and eugenic fervor that would later mar his reputation. (He would declare blacks intellectually inferior to
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, who had been consulting with Atari since the company’s disastrous 1974 fiscal year.62I A former marketing executive and self-described “designated talker” at Fairchild Semiconductor and National Semiconductor, Valentine now worked as a venture capitalist.63 He managed a fund called Sequoia at the venerable investment house Capital Group. Most
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Kleiner, with an accent that he called continental and others compared to Henry Kissinger’s, was one of the famous “traitorous eight” who had launched Fairchild Semiconductor after working for Nobel Laureate William Shockley. Kleiner had also been an original investor in Intel.VIII At fourteen, in Vienna, Austria, Kleiner had watched
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supported the following generation’s success. Three decades earlier, Coyle, along with his then junior associate, Arthur Rock, had brokered the deal that had launched Fairchild Semiconductor, of which Kleiner was one of eight cofounders. The Fairchild deal—funding eight young unknown scientists and engineers who had decided to leave their Nobel
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firm, including the CEO of Venrock, the Rockefeller family’s venture capital firm; the CEO of retail giant Macy’s; and the venture capitalist behind Fairchild Semiconductor, Scientific Data Systems, and Intel.III The offering’s investment bankers—Hambrecht & Quist and Morgan Stanley—were among the most respected in the world, “the
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–46, 159, 222, 309–12, 370 Alvarez, Vineta: Diehl’s recruitment of, 44–45 education and training of, 42 experience and skills of, 44 at Fairchild Semiconductor, 42, 45 at Lockheed, 42, 45 at ROLM, 41, 44–45, 159 at Sylvania, 42–44 Alvarez family, 41–42, 46, 159, 167, 370 Amazin
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.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game, 275, 345 Eubank, Vineta Alvarez, see Alvarez, Vineta Evans, Dave, 30, 290 Exidy, 172 Facebook, 77, 128, 363–66, 376 Fairchild Semiconductor, 4–5 Alvarez at, 42, 45 founding of, 60, 66, 190 Markkula at, 47–54, 146, 149–50, 154, 232–34 Rock as investor in
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–14, 232–33, 292–307, 371–73 Apple Computer and, xv, 50, 154, 206–12, 292–307, 357–59 as engineering student, 47–49 at Fairchild Semiconductor, 47–54, 146, 149–50, 154, 232–34 family of, 49, 146, 152–53, 232, 298–300, 372 at Hughes Aircraft, 47–51, 146, 180
The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
by T. R. Reid · 18 Dec 2007 · 293pp · 91,110 words
still largely an agricultural domain, with only a handful of electronics firms sprouting amid the endless peach and prune orchards. One of those pioneering firms, Fairchild Semiconductor, had been started late in 1957 by a group of physicists and engineers who guessed—correctly, as it turned out—that they could become fantastically
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’t possibly work. That winter, Noyce’s main sounding board was his friend Gordon Moore, a thoughtful, cautious physical chemist who was another cofounder of Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce would barge into Moore’s cubicle, full of energy and excitement, and start scrawling on the blackboard: “If we built a resistor here, and
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. Each of the eight young scientists put up $500 in earnest money, the corporate angel put up all the rest, and early in 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation opened for business, a mile or so down the road from Shockley’s operation. Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about
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happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore
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company, and anybody who held on to the founding group’s stake in the company is a billionaire several times over. The men who started Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 were determined to make the double-diffusion transistor, but they were also on the outlook for any other product that could turn a
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for an integrated circuit had been granted. But it had not been granted to Jack Kilby. Like their counterparts at Texas Instruments, the people at Fairchild Semiconductor took their sweet time at first about developing the monolithic idea into a practical integrated circuit. It was nearly two months after Bob Noyce had
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Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore—looked at the same numbers and decided to give it a try. By 1968, the men who had formed Fairchild Semiconductor were chafing at the controls imposed by their corporate superiors back east at the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. Noyce, Moore, and their colleagues knew
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tabulated, Noyce emerged as the consensus choice to be the group’s technical director. Accordingly, when the “traitorous eight” left Shockley in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the group turned to Noyce as soon as it became clear that somebody was going to have to act as a manager. His colleague Gordon
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time. Basically, you have to be in there participating and have the gut feel for what can be done.” Noyce’s first management position at Fairchild Semiconductor was director of research and development, a position considerably more important than it might sound because, for the first year or so, the firm was
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words
Instruments introduces silicon transistor and helps launch Regency radio. 1956 Shockley Semiconductor founded. First artificial intelligence conference. 1957 Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and others form Fairchild Semiconductor. Russia launches Sputnik. 1958 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) announced. Jack Kilby demonstrates integrated circuit, or microchip. 1959 Noyce and Fairchild colleagues independently invent microchip
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(1929– ) at Intel in 1970. Gordon Moore (far left), Robert Noyce (front center), and the other “traitorous eight” who in 1957 left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Bob had a certain way of listening and staring. He would lower his head slightly and look up with a gaze that seemed to be
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people to the promised land of Silicon Valley became a pariah who could not give a lecture without facing hecklers. The traitorous eight who formed Fairchild Semiconductor, by contrast, turned out to be the right people at the right place at the right time. The demand for transistors was growing because of
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radios that Pat Haggerty had launched at Texas Instruments, and it was about to skyrocket even higher; on October 4, 1957, just three days after Fairchild Semiconductor was formed, the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite and set off a space race with the United States. The civilian space program, along with the
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at Intel in 1978. CHAPTER FIVE THE MICROCHIP In a paper written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the transistor, published in 1957 just when Fairchild Semiconductor was formed and Sputnik launched, a Bell Labs executive identified a problem that he dubbed “the tyranny of numbers.” As the number of components in
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with hundreds of small advances in ways to manufacture semiconductors. This combination produced an invention that occurred independently in two different places, Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor. The result was an integrated circuit, also known as a microchip. JACK KILBY Jack Kilby was another of those boys from the rural Midwest who
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scale, which would turn Moore’s Law into a reality.24 Fairchild Camera and Instrument decided, not surprisingly, to exercise its right to buy out Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959. That made the eight founders rich but sowed seeds of discord. The corporation’s East Coast executives refused to give Noyce the right
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, he said, was to “get close to advanced technology again.”27 When Noyce called Arthur Rock, who had put together the financing deal that launched Fairchild Semiconductor, Rock immediately asked, “What took you so long?”28 ARTHUR ROCK AND VENTURE CAPITAL In the eleven years since he had assembled the deal for
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the traitorous eight to form Fairchild Semiconductor, Arthur Rock had helped to build something that was destined to be almost as important to the digital age as the microchip: venture capital. For
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and vice-presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate court and aristocracy.” By avoiding a chain of command, both at Fairchild Semiconductor and then at Intel, Noyce empowered employees and forced them to be entrepreneurial. Even though Grove cringed when disputes went unresolved at meetings, Noyce was
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of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. Shockley Nobel toast: Courtesy of Bo Lojek and the Computer History Museum Noyce: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos Moore: Intel Corporation Fairchild Semiconductor: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos Kilby: Fritz Goro/ The LIFE Picture Collection/ Getty Images Kilby’s microchip: Image courtesy of Texas Instruments Rock: Louis Fabian Bachrach
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: Defense Visual Information Center UNIVAC: U.S. Census Bureau Regency radio: © Mark Richards/CHM Shockley: Emilio Segrè Visual Archives / American Institute of Physics / Science Source Fairchild Semiconductor: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos Sputnik: NASA Kilby: Fritz Goro/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Licklider: MIT Museum Baran: Courtesy of RAND Corp. Spacewar: Courtesy
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Excite, ref1, ref2 Expensive Planetarium, ref1 Eyser, George, ref1 Facebook, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fairchild, Sherman, ref1, ref2 Fairchild Camera and Instrument, ref1, ref2, ref3 Fairchild Semiconductor, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 formation of, ref1, ref2 microchips sold to weapons makers by, ref1 Noyce’s resignation from, ref1 Farnsworth, Philo, ref1 Federal Communications
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris · 14 Feb 2023 · 864pp · 272,918 words
didn’t work, he would dump the whole enterprise. As a potential future subsidiary of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation it was to be called Fairchild Semiconductor—none of this “Shockley” nonsense. They would stay in Palo Alto, where they had already begun work. The group agreed, appointing Noyce a sort of
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a production point of view, Noyce’s was workable in a way that Kilby’s wasn’t. It’s an advantage that’s representative of Fairchild Semiconductor’s edge in the industry, which it acquired by shaping its process for military and space needs while still prioritizing production efficiencies. Fairchild’s immediate
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, and a financing system that their success helped build was already waiting for them. Waiting with it was Arthur Rock. After the lightning climb of Fairchild Semiconductor, investors saw there was a lot of quick money to be made in silicon in the Valley. Sherman Fairchild turned $1.5 million in cash
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to keep good opportunities in the family, making each other increasingly, outstandingly rich. If Shockley Labs was the Valley’s fertile pile of shit, then Fairchild Semiconductor was the silicon taproot, growing progressively more enterprises along with the deep financial roots to support them. Like Shockley himself, the Valley grew at the
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with a plausible idea. For the Silicon Valley electronics ecosystem, the Fairchild spin-offs were the start of a verdant flourishing to come, but for Fairchild Semiconductor’s California leadership, they were worrisome. The company was stuck: It needed a way to invest in increasing profit rates without gambling the firm’s
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), 111. 21. Ibid., 138. 22. Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock, Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 95. 23. Leslie R. Berlin, “Robert Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor, 1957–1968,” Business History Review 75, no. 1 (2001): 81. 24. Craig Addison and Jay T. Last, “Oral
The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World
by James Ashton · 11 May 2023 · 401pp · 113,586 words
eluded the title’s previewers was something that would prove in time to be a gamechanger. ‘Announcing the first of a new family,’ the company Fairchild Semiconductor proclaimed that week in its product brochure: ‘The Micrologic Flip-Flop’. This basic electronic storage circuit for a single bit of data that flipped between
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expand into the hot area of transistors, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company stumped up $1.5m to back the Traitorous Eight and, in late 1957, Fairchild Semiconductor was born. That was the easy part. There was no off-the-shelf technology of which to take advantage. From its 1,300 square metre
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could envisage the direction of travel was Gordon Moore. Another one of the Traitorous Eight, Moore was director of research and development (R&D) at Fairchild Semiconductor when he was asked by Electronics magazine to predict what would happen in his industry over the next decade. The resulting article, ‘Cramming more components
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calculators, it turned to Robert Noyce, who was venerated by Japanese engineers for his invention of the integrated circuit. Noyce needed the business too. At Fairchild Semiconductor he had grown restless and felt that the parent company Fairchild Camera and Instrument wasn’t reinvesting enough of the proceeds from his highly profitable
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Tilts Within a couple of years of the debut of its Micrologic Flip-Flop at the Institute of Radio Engineers’ annual convention in March 1961, Fairchild Semiconductor was preparing to take another step into the unknown. The defence and space industries provided early sustenance for the microchip industry but there was another
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reverse engineering – in other words, copying – its in-demand 8086 chip design. But AMD was led for many years by Jerry Sanders, a flamboyant former Fairchild Semiconductor salesman known for his fancy cars and crisp linen suits who looked upon Robert Noyce as a father figure long after he had departed to
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on part of the complicated global supply chain was trickier as technology sped across borders. What hadn’t changed since John F. Kennedy turned to Fairchild Semiconductor’s integrated circuits to power the Apollo programme 50 years earlier was that technical advantage in the industry translated into power on the world stage
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security, informed by investigations carried out by CFIUS. The amendment’s passage through Congress was propelled by worries over the proposed sale in 1987 of Fairchild Semiconductor to Fujitsu of Japan. At the time trade relations with Japan were rock-bottom, with several dumping suits filed in the memory-chip wars. Amid
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019
at the storefront just weeks before these Shockley lieutenants—Noyce, Last, Moore, Kleiner, plus four others—quit to start a company of their own called Fairchild Semiconductor, which quickly surpassed and outlasted Shockley’s operation. Before they went out the door, they invited the young professor to join them. He said no
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his inheritance of a massive amount of IBM stock. The eight scientists of Shockley became the founding employees—and shareholders—of a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor.24 Modern Silicon Valley started with Fairchild and the “Traitorous Eight” who founded it. Financed by an eccentric trust-funder in a deal brokered by
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that put the silicon in Silicon Valley, and the space race helped launch them into the stratosphere. FUNNY LITTLE COMPANIES This was what happened to Fairchild Semiconductor. Three months into their start-up’s existence, without having yet made a single chip, the Traitorous Eight landed a contract to manufacture 100 silicon
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man, William Hambrecht, to start a new breed of boutique investment bank, specializing in high-tech start-ups. And Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore departed Fairchild Semiconductor and its micromanaging investors to found a completely venture-financed company that didn’t have to pay fealty to an East Coast boss. They called
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. And they no longer needed defense contracts to survive. The king of the Fairchildren was Intel, founded when Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore decamped from Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 after years of chafing under the micromanagement of its East Coast parent company. In contrast, Intel was entirely venture-funded by local firms
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-year graduate student Gordon Moore was his freshman chemistry instructor. Rosen later joked about his feeble grade in the class from the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, “who obviously had never heard of grade inflation.” The next stop was Stanford, for a master’s in engineering, then off to Columbia
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quite literally spilled over into the public consciousness earlier in the 1980s, when news broke that highly toxic chemicals had seeped into well water underneath Fairchild Semiconductor’s fabrication plant near the working-class Los Paseos neighborhood of San Jose. Residents had already started noticing alarming spikes in miscarriages, stillbirths, and health
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of free enterprise at work, one sardonic critic observed that he was in fact “America’s first welfare billionaire.”17 While the silicon boys of Fairchild Semiconductor wore shirtsleeves and the computer guys of Digital looked like graduate students after an all-night coding session, Perot’s EDS battalions looked like IBM
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real estate had history: its first offices were sublet from HP, and it soon scaled up to grand headquarters on the newly-remediated site of Fairchild Semiconductor’s Mountain View manufacturing plant. The Wagon Wheel was just around the corner.5 There was no better product around with which to create an
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mentor, Stanford dean and provost Fred Terman, as William Hewlett looks on, 1952. Charles de Gaulle tours Palo Alto, 1960. The men and women of Fairchild Semiconductor, 1960. Radcliffe students use a dormitory teletype to access a remote mainframe computer, mid-1960s. An enterprising teacher persuaded the parents of Seattle’s Lakeside
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, 1, 105, 344, 366–73, 380, 386, 389, 391–95, 399–401, 403, 406, 409, 410 Facing Up to the Bomb, 248 Fairchild, Sherman, 41 Fairchild Semiconductor, 40–42, 50–52, 55, 67, 76, 88, 97, 100–101, 149, 176, 263, 268, 277, 305–6, 372 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 62–64
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Steve Jobs
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The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
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Gambling Man
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Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
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Dealers of Lightning
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The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age
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The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
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Capitalism in America: A History
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Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
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Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
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Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
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Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
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The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
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Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
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The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
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All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg · 5 Apr 2011 · 329pp · 106,831 words
This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg · 12 Sep 2012 · 461pp · 125,845 words
Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank
by John Tamny · 30 Apr 2016 · 268pp · 74,724 words
Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
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Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
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Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM
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Chokepoint Capitalism
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Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
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Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
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The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
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System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
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The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
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Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
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Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
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Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
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What Technology Wants
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Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
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The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It
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Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
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Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
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Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
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How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
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Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
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The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
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The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
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Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing)
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Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
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eBoys
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The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
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Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
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Toast
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Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
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Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
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Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
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The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
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The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
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Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
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Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
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Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
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Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
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Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America
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Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
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The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
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The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
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Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
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Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics
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Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
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An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
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How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
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