The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was a pioneering semiconductor developer founded by William Shockley, and funded by Beckman Instruments, Inc., in 1955. It was the first high technology company in what came to be known as Silicon Valley to wo ...
in 1957 to found
Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of int ...
.
William Shockley
William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly ...
had in 1956 recruited a group of young Ph.D. graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...
in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular.
[ This was accentuated by Shockley's research focus not proving fruitful.][ After the demand for Shockley to be replaced was rebuffed, the eight left to form their own company.
Shockley described their leaving as a "betrayal". The eight who left Shockley Semiconductor were ]Julius Blank
Julius Blank (June 2, 1925 – September 17, 2011) was a semiconductor pioneer. A member of the so-called traitorous eight, he left Nobel-winning physicist William Shockley's company to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
Early life and education ...
, Victor Grinich
Victor Henry Grinich (November 26, 1924 – November 5, 2000) was a pioneer in the semiconductor industry and a member of the "traitorous eight" that founded Silicon Valley.
Early life and education
Born to Croatian immigrant parents, his ori ...
, Jean Hoerni
Jean Amédée Hoerni (September 26, 1924 – January 12, 1997) was a Swiss-American engineer. He was a silicon transistor pioneer, and a member of the " traitorous eight". He developed the planar process, an important technology for reliably fa ...
, Eugene Kleiner
Eugene Kleiner (12 May 1923 – 20 November 2003) was an Austrian-American engineer and venture capitalist. He is considered a pioneer of Silicon Valley. He was one of the original founders of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital fi ...
, Jay Last
Jay Taylor Last (October 18, 1929 – November 11, 2021) was an American physicist, silicon pioneer, and member of the so-called " traitorous eight" that founded Silicon Valley.
Early life and education
Last was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, on ...
, Gordon Moore
Gordon Earle Moore (born January 3, 1929) is an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corporation. He is also the original proponent of Moore's law.
As of March 2021, Moore's net worth is rep ...
, Robert Noyce
Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited wit ...
, and Sheldon Roberts
C. Sheldon Roberts (October 27, 1926 – June 6, 2014) was an American semiconductor pioneer, and member of the " traitorous eight" who founded Silicon Valley.
Biography
Roberts earned a Bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering from Ren ...
. In August 1957, they reached an agreement with Sherman Fairchild, and on September 18, 1957, they formed Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of int ...
. The newly founded Fairchild Semiconductor soon grew into a leader in the semiconductor industry. In 1960, it became an incubator of Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
and was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of dozens of corporations, including Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
and AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...
.[ These many spin-off companies came to be known as "Fairchildren".
]
Initiation
In the winter of 1954–1955, William Shockley, an inventor of the transistor and a visiting professor at Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
, decided to establish his own mass production of advanced transistors and Shockley diode
The Shockley diode (named after physicist William Shockley) is a four-layer semiconductor diode, which were one of the first semiconductor devices invented. It is a PNPN diode, with alternating layers of P-type and N-type material. It is equ ...
s. He found a sponsor in Raytheon
Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitaliza ...
, but Raytheon discontinued the project after a month. In August 1955, Shockley turned for advice to the financier Arnold Beckman
Arnold Orville Beckman (April 10, 1900 – May 18, 2004) was an American chemist, inventor, investor, and philanthropist. While a professor at California Institute of Technology, he founded Beckman Instruments based on his 1934 invention of th ...
, the owner of Beckman Instruments
Beckman Coulter Inc. is a Danaher Corporation company that develops, manufactures, and markets products that simplify, automate and innovate complex biomedical testing. It operates in two industries: Diagnostics and Life Sciences. For more than ...
. Shockley needed one million dollars. Beckman knew that Shockley had no chance in the business, but believed that Shockley's new inventions would be beneficial for his own company and did not want to give them to his competitors. Accordingly, Beckman agreed to create and fund a laboratory under the condition that its discoveries should be brought to mass production within two years.
The new department of Beckman Instruments took the name Shockley Semi-Conductor Laboratories (the hyphen was conventional in those years). During 1955, Beckman and Shockley signed the deal, bought licenses on all necessary patents for $25,000, and selected the location in Mountain View, near Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...
. Though Shockley did recruit four PhD physicists, William W. Happ (from Raytheon Corporation
The Raytheon Company was a major U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation with manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics. It was previously involved in corporate and special-mission aircraft unti ...
) George Smoot Horsley
George Smoot Horsley (1916 – 1992) was a physicist and pioneer in printed circuitry and semiconductors. He was one of the first four recruits by William Shockley to help develop technologies at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.
Early life
H ...
and Leopoldo B. Valdes
Leopoldo Benjamin Valdes was a pioneer in semiconductors. He was one of the first four recruits by William Shockley to help develop technologies at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.
Career
During the winter of 1954–1955, William Shockley deci ...
(both from Bell Labs), and Richard Victor Jones
Richard Victor Jones (1929 – November 11, 2019) was a Professor of Applied Physics at Harvard University and a pioneer in semiconductors. He was one of the first four recruits by William Shockley to help develop technologies at Shockley Semicon ...
(a fresh Berkeley
Berkeley most often refers to:
*Berkeley, California, a city in the United States
**University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California
* George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher
Berkeley may also refer ...
graduate), the location provided limited enticement for new employees. The vast majority of semiconductor-related companies and professionals were based on the East Coast, so Shockley posted ads in ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' and the ''New York Herald Tribune
The ''New York Herald Tribune'' was a newspaper published between 1924 and 1966. It was created in 1924 when Ogden Mills Reid of the ''New-York Tribune'' acquired the ''New York Herald''. It was regarded as a "writer's newspaper" and competed ...
''. Early respondents included Sheldon Roberts of Dow Chemical, Robert Noyce of Philco
Philco (an acronym for Philadelphia Battery Company) is an American electronics industry, electronics manufacturer headquartered in Philadelphia. Philco was a pioneer in battery, radio, and television production. In 1961, the company was purchased ...
, and Jay Last
Jay Taylor Last (October 18, 1929 – November 11, 2021) was an American physicist, silicon pioneer, and member of the so-called " traitorous eight" that founded Silicon Valley.
Early life and education
Last was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, on ...
, a former intern of Beckman Instruments. The newspaper campaign brought some three hundred responses, and fifteen people, including Gordon Moore and David Allison, Shockley himself recruited at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
Selection continued throughout 1956. Shockley was a proponent of social technologies
Social technology is a way of using human, intellectual and digital resources in order to influence social processes. For example, one might use social technology to ease social procedures via social software and social hardware, which might incl ...
(which later led him to eugenics
Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or ...
) and asked each candidate to pass a psychological test, followed by an interview.
Blank, Last, Moore, Noyce, and Roberts started working in April–May, and Kleiner, Grinich, and Hoerni came during the summer. By September 1956, the lab had 32 employees, including Shockley. Each successful candidate had to negotiate his salary with Shockley. Kleiner, Noyce, and Roberts settled for $1,000 per month; the less-experienced Last got $675. Hoerni did not bother about his payment. Shockley set his own salary at $2,500 and made all salaries accessible to all employees.
The members of the future traitorous eight were aged between 26 (Last) and 33 (Kleiner), and six of them held PhDs. Hoerni was an experienced scientist and gifted manager, and, according to Bo Lojek, matched Shockley in intellect. Only Noyce was involved in semiconductor research, and only Grinich had experience in electronics.
Research strategy
Throughout 1956, most members of the lab were assembling and tuning the equipment, and "pure scientists" Hoerni and Noyce carried out individual applied research. Shockley refused to hire technical staff, believing that his scientists should be able to handle all technological processes. After resettlement, he focused on fine-tuning Shockley diodes for mass production, and five employees, led by Noyce, continued the work on a field effect transistor for Beckman Instruments. Shockley refused to work on bipolar transistors, which later was proven a strategic mistake. Because the work on Shockley diodes took so much effort the produced devices were commercial failures.
According to Noyce and Moore, as well as David Brock and Joel Shurkin Joel or Yoel is a name meaning "Yahweh Is God" and may refer to:
* Joel (given name), origin of the name including a list of people with the first name.
* Joel (surname), a surname
* Joel (footballer, born 1904), Joel de Oliveira Monteiro, Brazili ...
, the shift from bipolar transistors to Shockley diodes was unexpected. Shockley initially planned to work on the mass production of diffusion bipolar transistors, but then set up a "secret project" on Shockley diodes, and in 1957 stopped all works on bipolar transistors. The reasons for this turn are unknown. According to Beckman's biographer, Shockley regarded his diode as an interesting scientific problem, and chose it, neglecting Beckman's commercial interests.
Bo Lojek, based on the archives of Shockley, believes that Shockley Labs never worked on bipolar transistors; that Shockley diodes were Shockley and Beckman's original target, for which Beckman Instruments received military R&D contracts; and that Shockley diodes could have found widespread use in telephony if Shockley had improved their reliability.
Frictions
Historians and colleagues generally agree that Shockley was a poor manager and businessman.[ From early childhood he was prone to outbursts of unprovoked aggression, which were suppressed only due to the internal discipline of his past working environment. He also tended to see rivals, even in his own subordinates.
On November 1, 1956, it was announced that the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics would be awarded to Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. The related public events of November–December overtired Shockley and took him away from the lab at a time when it had several management problems. Despite the festivities, the atmosphere in the lab was unhealthy.
Although Shockley was never diagnosed by psychiatrists, historians characterized Shockley's state of mind in 1956–1957 as paranoia][ or ]autism
The autism spectrum, often referred to as just autism or in the context of a professional diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or autism spectrum condition (ASC), is a neurodevelopmental condition (or conditions) characterized by difficulti ...
. All phone calls were recorded, and the staff was not allowed to share their results with each other, which was not feasible since they all worked in a small building. Shockley, not trusting his employees, was sending their reports to Bell Labs for double-checking. At some point, he sent the entire lab for a lie detector test, though everyone refused.[
The team started losing its members, starting with Jones, a technologist, who left in January 1957 due to a conflict with Grinich and Hoerni. Noyce and Moore then stood on different sides: Moore led the dissidents, whereas Noyce stood behind Shockley and tried to resolve conflicts. Shockley appreciated that and considered Noyce as his sole support in the group.
]
Resignation
In March 1957, Kleiner, who was beyond Shockley's suspicions, asked permission ostensibly to visit an exhibition in Los Angeles. Instead, he flew to New York to seek investors for a new company, and his parents, New York residents, assisted him. Kleiner was supported by Blank, Grinich, Last, Roberts, Hoerni and Moore. Arthur Rock
Arthur Rock (born August 19, 1926) is an American businessman and investor. Based in Silicon Valley, California, he was an early investor in major firms including Intel, Apple, Scientific Data Systems and Teledyne.
Early life
Rock was born and ...
and Alfred Coyle from Hayden, Stone & Co. became interested in the offer, believing that trainees of a Nobel laureate were destined to succeed.
As a last resort, on May 29, 1957, a group led by Moore presented Arnold Beckman with an ultimatum: solve the "Shockley problem" or they would leave. Moore suggested finding a professor position for Shockley and replacing him in the lab with a professional manager. Beckman refused, believing that Shockley could still improve the situation, later regretting this decision.
In June 1957, Beckman finally put a manager between Shockley and the team, but by then seven key employees had already made their decision. At the last minute they were joined by Noyce. Roberts persuaded him to attend the meeting of the "California group", as they called themselves in the agreement with Fairchild. The meeting was held at the Clift Hotel
The Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel is a historic hotel located two blocks from Union Square at the intersection of Geary Street and Taylor Street, San Francisco, California.
History
In 1913, Frederick C. Clift, an attorney from a large family in the S ...
in California and was attended by Rock and Coyle. These ten people became the core of a new company.
Finding investors proved to be difficult. The US electronics industry was concentrated in the east, and the California group preferred to stay near Palo Alto. In August 1957, Rock and Coyle met with the inventor and businessman Sherman Fairchild, founder of Fairchild Aircraft and Fairchild Camera.[ Fairchild sent Rock to his deputy, Richard Hodgson. Hodgson, risking his reputation, accepted the offer and within a few weeks completed all paperwork. The capital of the new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, was divided into 1,325 shares. Each member of the traitorous eight received 100 shares, 225 shares went to Hayden, Stone & Co and 300 shares remained in reserve. Fairchild provided a loan of $1.38 million. To secure the loan, the traitorous eight gave Fairchild the voting rights on their shares, with the right to buy their shares at a fixed total price of $3 million.
On September 18, 1957, Blank, Grinich, Kleiner, Last, Moore, Noyce, Roberts, and Hoerni resigned from Shockley Labs. They became known as the "traitorous eight", though it is not known who coined the term.][ Shockley could never understand the reasons for this defection. After that time, he never talked to Noyce again, but continued to follow the work of "The Eight". He also combed through all records left by The Eight, basing patents, held as Shockley Labs' intellectual property, on any important ideas. (Technically, in accordance with U.S. law, those patents were issued to the respective inventing employees.)
In 1960, with the help of a new team, Shockley brought his own diode to serial production, but time had been lost, and competitors had already come close to the development of integrated circuits. Beckman sold the unprofitable Shockley Labs to investors from Cleveland. On July 23, 1961, Shockley was seriously injured in a car crash, and after recovery left the company and returned to teaching at Stanford. In 1969, ]IT&T
ITT Inc., formerly ITT Corporation, is an American worldwide manufacturing company based in Stamford, Connecticut. The company produces specialty components for the aerospace, transportation, energy and industrial markets. ITT's three businesses ...
, the new owners of Shockley Labs moved the company to Florida. When the staff refused to move, the lab ceased to exist.
Split
In November 1957, The Eight moved out of Grinich's garage into a new, empty building on the border of Palo Alto and Mountain View. Their starting salaries ranged from $13,800 to $15,600 per year. Hodgson, who headed the board of directors, suggested Noyce as the operational manager of the company, but Noyce refused. Fairchild, knowing Noyce's personality, also opposed his leadership. Regardless of the will of Fairchild, Noyce, and Moore, who were responsible for the research and production, respectively, became the "leaders among equals".
The group immediately set a clear goal to produce an array of silicon diffusion mesa transistors for digital devices, utilizing the research results of Bell Labs and Shockley Labs. Moore, Hoerni and Last led three teams working on three alternative technologies. The technology of Moore resulted in a higher yield of operational n-p-n transistors, and in July–September 1958, they went into mass production. The release of p-n-p transistors of Hoerni was delayed until early 1959. This created the Moore-Hoerni conflict at Fairchild: Moore ignored the contribution of Hoerni, and Hoerni believed that his work was unfairly treated. However, the Moore transistors formed the prestige of Fairchild Semiconductor – for several years, they beat all the competitors.
In 1958, Fairchild mesa transistors were considered for the D-17B
The D-17B (D17B) computer was used in the Minuteman I NS-1OQ missile guidance system. The complete guidance system contained a D-17B computer, the associated stable platform, and power supplies.
The D-17B weighed approximately , contained 1,521 ...
Minuteman I
The LGM-30 Minuteman is an American land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in service with the Air Force Global Strike Command. , the LGM-30G Minuteman III version is the only land-based ICBM in service in the United States and re ...
guidance computer, but they did not meet military standards of reliability. Fairchild already had a solution in the planar technology of Hoerni proposed on December 1, 1957. In the spring of 1958, Hoerni and Last were spending nights on experiments with the first planar transistors. The planar technology later became the second most important event in the history of microelectronics, after the invention of the transistor, but in 1959 it went unnoticed. Fairchild announced the transition from mesa to planar technology in October 1960. However, Moore refused to credit this achievement to Hoerni, and in 1996 even attributing it to unnamed Fairchild engineers.
In 1959, Sherman Fairchild exercised his right to purchase shares of the members of the traitorous eight. Jay Last recalled (in 2007) that this event happened too early and turned former partners into ordinary employees, destroying the team spirit.[ In November 1960, Tom Bay, the Vice President of Marketing at Fairchild, accused Last of squandering money and demanded termination of Last's project of developing integrated circuits. Moore refused to help Last, and Noyce declined to discuss the matter. This conflict was the last straw: on January 31, 1961, Last and Hoerni left Fairchild and to head Amelco, the microelectronics branch of ]Teledyne
Teledyne Technologies Incorporated is an American industrial conglomerate. It was founded in 1960, as Teledyne, Inc., by Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky.
From August 1996 to November 1999, Teledyne existed as part of the conglomerate All ...
. Kleiner and Roberts joined them after a few weeks. Blank, Grinich, Moore, and Noyce stayed with Fairchild. The traitorous eight split into two groups of four.
Heritage
From 1960–1965, Fairchild was the undisputed leader of the semiconductor market, both technologically and in terms of sales. Early 1965 brought the first signs of management problems. In November 1965, the creators of integrated operational amplifiers Bob Widlar
Robert John Widlar (pronounced ''wide-lar''; November 30, 1937 – February 27, 1991) was an American electronics engineer and a designer of linear integrated circuits (ICs).
Early years
Widlar was born November 30, 1937 in Cleveland to pare ...
and David Talbert left for National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drive ...
. In February 1967, they were followed by five top managers who disagreed with Noyce. Noyce started litigation with shareholders and effectively removed himself from the operational management. In July 1967, the company became unprofitable and lost their leading position in the market to Texas Instruments.
In March 1968, Moore and Noyce decided to leave Fairchild and again, as nine years prior, turned to Arthur Rock. In the summer of 1968, they founded NM Electronics. Blank, Grinich, Kleiner, Last, Hoerni, and Roberts set aside the past disagreements and financially supported the company of Moore and Noyce. A year later, NM Electronics bought the trade name rights from the hotel chain Intelco and took the name of Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
. Moore held senior positions at Intel until 1997 when he was named Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation. Noyce left Intel in 1987 to lead the non-profit consortium Sematech
SEMATECH (from Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology) is a not-for-profit consortium that performs research and development to advance chip manufacturing. SEMATECH has broad engagement with various sectors of the R&D community, including chipma ...
. He died suddenly in 1990, the first of The Eight.
Grinich left Fairchild in 1968 for a short sabbatical and then taught at UC Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...
and Stanford
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...
, where he published the first comprehensive textbook on integrated circuits. He later co-founded and ran several companies developing industrial radio-frequency identification
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. An RFID system consists of a tiny radio transponder, a radio receiver and transmitter. When triggered by an electromag ...
(RFID) tags.[
Blank was the last of The Eight to leave Fairchild in 1969. He founded the financial firm Xicor specializing in innovative start-ups, and in 2004 sold it for $529 million.][
Hoerni headed Amelco until the summer of 1963 and, after the conflict with the Teledyne owners, for three years headed Union Carbide Electronics. In July 1967, supported by the watch company ]Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère
Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère (SSIH) is a former group of Swiss watchmakers comprising the brands Omega, Tissot and Lemania.
History
SSIH was created on February 24, 1930 in Geneva by Tissot and Omega, to be joined in 1932 by Lema ...
(the predecessor of Swatch Group
The Swatch Group Ltd is a Swiss manufacturer of watches and jewellery. The company was founded in 1983 by the merger of ASUAG and SSIH to move to manufacturing quartz-crystal watches to resolve the quartz crisis threatening the traditional Sw ...
) founded Intersil
Intersil is an American semiconductor company headquartered in Milpitas, California. As of February 24, 2017, Intersil is a subsidiary of Renesas. The previous Intersil was formed in August 1999 through the acquisition of the semiconductor busin ...
, the company that created the market for custom CMOS circuits.[ The circuits developed by Intersil for ]Seiko
, commonly known as Seiko ( , ), is a Japanese maker of watches, clocks, electronic devices, semiconductors, jewelry, and optical products. Founded in 1881 by Kintarō Hattori in Tokyo, Seiko introduced one of the first quartz watches and the ...
in 1969–1970 contributed to the rise of Japanese electronic watches.[ Intersil and Intel weren't competitors as Intel released a limited set of templated circuits for computers and sold them initially only in the U.S. market, whereas Intersil focused on custom CMOS circuits with low power consumption and sold them worldwide.
Last remained with Amelco and for twelve years served as Vice President of Technology at Teledyne. In 1982, he founded Hillcrest Press specializing in art books.][ After leaving Amelco, Roberts led his own business, and in 1973–1987 served as a trustee of the ]Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van ...
.[ Amelco, after numerous mergers, acquisitions, and renaming, became a subsidiary of ]Microchip Technology
Microchip Technology Inc. is a publicly-listed American corporation that manufactures microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP integrated circuits. Its products include microcontrollers ( PIC, dsPIC, AVR and SAM), Serial EEPROM ...
.
In 1972, Kleiner and Tom Perkins from Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
founded the venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs ...
, which has been involved in the creation and/or funding of Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
, Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
, Genentech
Genentech, Inc., is an American biotechnology corporation headquartered in South San Francisco, California. It became an independent subsidiary of Roche in 2009. Genentech Research and Early Development operates as an independent center within R ...
, Intuit
Intuit Inc. is an American business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application Tu ...
, Lotus, Macromedia, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and dozens of other companies. Kleiner later wrote that his goal was to geographically spread the venture financing.
Honors
In May 2011, the California Historical Society
The California Historical Society (CHS) is the official historical society of California. It was founded in 1871, by a group of prominent Californian intellectuals at Santa Clara University. It was officially designated as the Californian state hi ...
gave the "Legends of California Award" to The Eight. Blank, Last, Moore, and Roberts' son Dave attended the event in San Francisco.[
]
Fairchildren
In research, reporting, and popular lore related to Silicon Valley, the term "Fairchildren" has been used to refer to:
*The corporate spin-off
A corporate spin-off, also known as a spin-out, or starburst or hive-off, is a type of corporate action where a company "splits off" a section as a separate business or creates a second incarnation, even if the first is still active.
Characte ...
s created by former employees of Fairchild Semiconductor. This usage was propagated by historian Leslie Berlin through her 2001 review article,[ PhD thesis,][ and biography of ]Robert Noyce
Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 – June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited wit ...
.
* The founders of such firms. This is the earliest usage, e.g., in the 1978 BBC ''Horizon'' documentary " Now the Chips are Down", Tom Wolfe's 1983 profile of Noyce[ or a 5,000-word profile of Silicon Valley in 1999.][
* Former Fairchild Semiconductor employees, as in a 1988 ''New York Times'' article.][
* The original founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, more commonly known as the traitorous eight. This has been used by th]
PBS website
and a book by Blasi ''et al''.[
One of the first articles to identify Fairchild as the parent of so many spin-offs appeared in ''Innovation Magazine'' in 1969.][Nilo Lindgren, "The Splintering of the Solid-State Electronics Industry," reprinted in ''Dealing with Technological Change: Selected Essays from Innovation'', New York: Auerbach Publishers, 1971] The spin-off companies, such as AMD, Intel, Intersil and restructured National Semiconductor, were different from those of the east coast and California's electronic companies established in the 1940s and 1950s. "Old Californians" like Beckman and Varian Associates
Varian Associates was one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1948 by Russell H. and Sigurd F. Varian, William Webster Hansen, and Edward Ginzton to sell the klystron, the first vacuum tube which could amplif ...
did not trust Wall Street
Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs between Broadway in the west to South Street and the East River in the east. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for t ...
and kept control of their companies for decades, whereas the new companies of the 1960s were created for a quick (within 3–5 years) public sale of shares. Their founders built a business strategy based on the expectations of the investment banks. Another characteristic of Silicon Valley was the mobility of managers and professionals among companies. Partly because of Noyce, Silicon Valley developed a culture of openly denying the hierarchical culture of traditional corporations. People remained faithful to each other, but not to the employer or the industry. Fairchild "alumni" can be found not only in electronics-related but also financial and public relations companies.
See also
*PayPal Mafia
The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, an ...
, former PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
employees who founded a number of technology companies
* Mohamed Atalla, inventor of the MOSFET
The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, MOS-FET, or MOS FET) is a type of field-effect transistor (FET), most commonly fabricated by the controlled oxidation of silicon. It has an insulated gate, the voltage of which d ...
(MOS transistor), former Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
employee who later joined Fairchild Semiconductor
* Chih-Tang Sah, another former employee under William Shockley who later joined Fairchild Semiconductor, where he developed CMOS
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS, pronounced "sea-moss", ) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFE ...
Notes
References
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External links
1999 Computerworld interview with Eugene Kleiner, Julius Blank and Jay Last
History of computing hardware
Octets
Scientists at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
History of Silicon Valley