Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore are inextricably linked to the three most important commercial semiconductor companies in the history of semiconductors. First William Shockley brought Noyce and Moore together at his Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto, California to develop silicon transistors. Although the company failed to develop commercially successful products, the team that William Shockley assembled then founded Fairchild Semiconductor, perhaps the most important semiconductor company ever created because it spawned so many other semiconductor companies and was a major factor in the creation of Silicon Valley.

In September 1957, eight Shockley employees – … Read More → "A Brief History of the MOS transistor, Part 6: Intel – The Third Time’s a Charm"

When Bell Labs announced the creation of the first working MOSFET by Atallah and Kahng in 1960, RCA Labs was immediately interested. Like IBM Research, RCA Labs was not closely coupled to RCA’s product development and manufacturing operations. RCA’s bountiful corporate revenues in the early 1950s accustomed RCA Labs to having had plenty of budget, so it was able to explore promising new technologies that would not become products immediately.

However, by the end of the 1950s, successful lawsuits by RCA’s competitors ate into those licensing revenues, and RCA Labs turned … Read More → "A Brief History of the MOS transistor, Part 5: RCA – The Persistent CMOS Contrarian"