IEEE Spectrum December, 2007 - 4

SPECTRAL LINES
Happy Birthday, Fairchild
solid-state device called a mesa transistor. Encountering trouble
with its performance, they experimented with novel ways of
enhancing its reliability. Jean Hoerni [see Michael Riordan's
account of Hoerni's contribution to the semiconductor industry, "The Silicon Dioxide Solution," in this issue] came up with
an ingenious alternative. Here's an excerpt from one of Gordon
Moore's accounts of the invention of the planar transistor:

Noyce quickly saw the potential of the new manufacturing
method. He realized that by using the planar process a designer
could re-create the components found on a typical circuit board
of the time and etch them onto the silicon wafer itself. The
aluminum layer used to make contact with the base and the
emitter of the transistor could also be used to interconnect
different electrical components such as resistors and capacitors. It was the second breathtaking advance at Fairchild in a
year. Noyce had conceived an integrated circuit that could be
commercially developed-thus laying the foundation of modern computing.
The Fairchild Eight went on to pioneer other improvements to
microchip technology. Eventually, most of the principals moved
on to create other companies. They blazed an entrepreneurial
trail through the world of electronics that few have matched [for
a look at Fairchild's corporate genealogy, see "Fairchild Turns 50,"
IEEE Spectrum, October].
So when we get giddy about the pace of technological breakthroughs today, we should take a moment to remember that a
small band of workers rolled up their sleeves 50 years ago and
set our digital world in motion. Thanks, Fairchild!

-Kieron Murphy

The editorial content of IEEE Spectrum magazine does not reflect official positions of the IEEE or its organizational units. Please address comments to Forum at n.hantman@ieee.org.

IEEE Spectrum | December 2007 | NA

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FAIrchIlD SEmIcoNDucTor

The folks at Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. are tooting their
horns in celebration of their recent 50th anniversary. It's a big
deal for them, but why should we care? Because the computer
and electronic devices we use depend in large part on the fundamental breakthroughs the founders of Fairchild made a half
century ago. The creation of this company is a remarkable demonstration of how progress advances, in fits and starts, when
the right set of individuals have the right conditions in which
to work their magic.
For many tech insiders, especially those interested in the
roots of modern computing, the Fairchild story is the stuff of
legend. It begins with the invention of the transistor at AT&T
Bell Telephone Laboratories.
In the years prior to World War II, AT&T's William Shockley
probed the possibility of creating a solid-state alternative to the
vacuum tube triode. After the war, he was put in charge of the
group that developed the first transistor. For their work on this
breakthrough, Shockley and his colleagues John Bardeen and
Walter Brattain would receive the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Shockley was a brilliant but difficult man, however, and in
1955 he and Bell Labs parted ways. The following year Shockley
convinced businessman Arnold Beckman to back his plans to
create an advanced solid-state circuit design that would be
as revolutionary to the transistor as the transistor was to the
vacuum tube. But when he moved to Palo Alto, Calif., to start
his company, not a single researcher in his old Bell Labs group
accepted an offer to join him. So Shockley set about hiring
some of the brightest young minds in America to form his
fledgling company.
Among the 20 prodigies he recruited, Jean Hoerni, Gordon
Moore, Robert Noyce, and a handful of others quickly realized
that Shockley was not going to be able to advance the field further. And so the dissident staffers decided to start their own
company.
In October 1957, the eight members of the newly formed
Fairchild Semiconductor Co. opened shop. A furious Shockley
labeled them the Traitorous Eight.
The Fairchild team's first effort was to commercialize a new

Jean was a theoretician, and so was not very useful at the
time we were setting up the original facility at Fairchild, building
furnaces and all that kind of stuff. He just sat in his office, scribbling things on a piece of paper, and he came up with this idea for
building a transistor with the silicon oxide layer left on top over
the junctions. Where the silicon junctions come to the surface of
the silicon is a very sensitive area, which we used to expose and
had to work awfully hard to keep clean. Hoerni said, "Why not
leave the oxide on there?" The conventional wisdom from Bell
Laboratories had been that by the time you got done, the oxide
was so dirty that you wanted to get rid of it. Nobody had ever tried
leaving the oxide on. We couldn't try it either, because it required
making four mask steps, each indexed with respect to the next with
very high precision-a technology that didn't exist.
So we couldn't even try Jean's idea until a year and a half or
so after we had gone into business. When we finally got around to
trying it, it turned out to be a great idea; it solved all the previous
surface problems.

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