Fairchild Semiconductor

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set up shop and the first commercially practical integrated circuit was invented

Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (released shortly before the one from Texas Instruments), and would go on to become one of the major players in the evolution of Silicon Valley in the 1960s. The company currently employs approximately nine thousand people worldwide, with locations in San Jose, California, Salt Lake City, Utah, Mountaintop, Pennsylvania, Bucheon, South Korea, Penang, Malaysia, Suzhou, China, and Cebu City among others. In South Portland, Maine, the corporate headquarters is located about a third of a mile from the manufacturing plant.

Fairchild History

1956 In 1956 William Shockley opened Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a division of 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 current transistors. 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. Instead he founded the core of the new company with what he considered the best and brightest graduates coming out of American engineering schools.

Only a year later, the staff of eight engineers decided to leave Shockley and form their own company. The group later became known widely as the Traitorous Eight. The eight men were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts. In 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was started with plans on making silicon transistors — at the time germanium was still a common material for semiconductor use.

Their first transistors were of the mesa transistor variety, innovative for their time, but with several drawbacks. A while later Fairchild pioneered the planar transistor process, which was a huge improvement—transistors could be made easier, cheaper, and with much higher performance. Fairchild's planar process made most other transistor designs obsolete. One casualty of this was Philco's transistor division, which had just built a $40 million dollar plant to make their now totally obsolete germanium post alloy diffused transistor process transistors. Within a few years every other transistor company copied or licensed the Fairchild planar process.

Their first marketed planar transistor was the 2N697 (initially a mesa transistor TRANSISTOR MUSEUM™ Historic Transistor Photo Gallery FAIRCHILD 2N697), and was a huge success. The first batch of 100 was sold to IBM for $150 a piece. Only two years later they had managed to build 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. patent). The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year.

1960s During the 1960s, Fairchild dominated the analog integrated circuit market, introducing the first IC Operational Amplifier, or "op amps", Bob Widlar's µA702 (in 1964) and µA709. In 1968, Fairchild introduced David Fullagar's µA741, which became the most popular IC op amp of all time.

Fairchild did not do so well at first in the digital integrated circuit market. Their first line of ICs was the "micrologic" RTL line (used in the Apollo Guidance Computer). resistor-transistor logic stood for "Resistor-Transistor-Logic". It had the advantage of being extremely simple—each inverter consisted of just one transistor and two resistors. But the logic family had many drawbacks that made it marginal for commercial purposes, and not well suited for military ones. The logic could only tolerate about 100 millivolts of noise—far too low for comfort. They waited a long time before going to more robust designs, such as diode-transistor logic (diode-transistor-logic) which had much better noise margins.

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 prominence in the 1970s. A Fairchild advertisement of the time showed a collage of the logos of Silicon Valley with the annotation "We started it all.". Among 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.

After Intel introduced the 8008 8-bit microprocessor, Fairchild developed the Fairchild F8 8-bit microprocessor, which had an unusual architecture and was not a great market success. By the end of the 1970s they had few new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for military and space applications.

For a time, the company played a leading role in the development of integrated circuits using Bipolar junction transistor. These circuits were used worldwide, notably in Cray supercomputers.

1970s Fairchild also led the way in the development of digital imaging. In 1973 they were the first to produce a commercial Charge-coupled device following up on the invention at Bell Labs. Digital image sensors are still produced today at their descendant, Fairchild Imaging. In 1976 the company released the first video game system to use ROM cartridges, the Channel F.

In 1979, Fairchild was purchased by Schlumberger Limited, an oil field services company. Schlumberger sold Fairchild to National Semiconductor in 1987.

1997 In 1997 Fairchild Semiconductor was reborn as an independent company, based in South Portland, Maine. In 1999 Fairchild Semiconductor again became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol FCS. Fairchild's South Portland, Maine location is the longest continuously operating semiconductor manufacturing facility in the world.

Fairchild Semiconductor is now a global supplier of high performance products that optimize system power. Fairchild has developed a range of products to address power efficiency needs for market segments including consumer, ultra-portable, communications, computing, industrial and automotive.

2005 In 2005, Mark Thompson was named CEO of the corporation. Thompson is President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors of Fairchild Semiconductor International. He originally joined Fairchild as Executive Vice President, Manufacturing and Technology Group.

Prior to joining Fairchild, Mr. Thompson served as CEO of Big Bear Networks. He also serves on the board of directors of American Science and Engineering, Inc. in Massachusetts.

2007 Fairchild Semiconductor celebrates a 50 year milestone since it was first established in 1957.

Alumni

Robert Noyce
Gordon Moore
Wilfred Corrigan
Jean Hoerni
James M. Early
Lester Hogan
Eugene Kleiner
Jerry Sanders (businessman)
Edwin Turney
Frank Wanlass
Bob Widlar

References

External links

Official homepage of Fairchild Semiconductor International
Fairchild Imaging
IT Corporate Histories Collection link to Fairchild Semiconductor history content on the Computer History Museum site.

{{Finance links| name = Fairchild Semiconductor International| symbol = FCS| sec_cik = 1036960| hoovers = 53008-->

Fairchild Semiconductor
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