It’s hardly surprising that semiconductor companies were reluctant to invest much energy into MOSFET development in the early 1960s. Early MOSFETs were 100 times slower than bipolar transistors, and they were considered unstable, for good reason: their electrical characteristics drifted badly and unpredictably with time and temperature. A lot of research and development work would be needed to transform MOSFETs into reliable electronic components. However, when Fairchild Semiconductor hired Frank Wanlass, the MOSFET found its champion. Wanlass was committed to the MOSFET, not to any company. He went anywhere and did anything he could to promote the … Read More → "A Brief History of the MOS transistor, Part 3: Frank Wanlass – MOS Evangelist, Inventor of CMOS"

No company was better equipped and better positioned to capitalize on the development of the first MOSFET than Fairchild Semiconductor. Founded in 1957 to work on silicon transistors, Jean Hoerni developed the planar process and Robert Noyce developed the ideas for the first practical integrated circuit (IC) based on Hoerni’s planar process just months before Atalla and Kahng got the first MOSFET to work at Bell Labs. Like the two keys needed to open a safety deposit box in a bank vault, the planar semiconductor process technology and the planar IC were the two keys needed to … Read More → "A Brief History of the MOS transistor, Part 2: Fairchild – The Big Engine that Couldn’t"

The first wave of semiconductor companies started in April 1952 when Bell Labs held its second transistor symposium for its transistor patent licensees, which was attended by representatives from some 40 companies. After the symposium, most of those companies started manufacturing bipolar point-contact transistors within mere months or a couple of years, and many became successful commercial semiconductor vendors. A few of those vendors – including Infineon (formerly Siemens), NXP (formerly Philips), and Texas Instruments – continue to make semiconductors today. (I discussed this history in a 7-part series about the early transistor makers in EEJournal. See the reference section of … Read More → "A Brief History of the MOS transistor, Part 1: Early Visionaries"

When I wrote the initial six parts of this series on early transistor makers, I worked from a list of initial companies that made transistors using the early Bell Labs transistor patents. That list of attendees to the April, 1952 Transistor Symposium at Bell Labs came from Bo Lojek’s book, History of Semiconductor Engineering, which is an encyclopedic history of semiconductors. Another book, A History of Engineering and … Read More → "The Transistor at 75: The First Makers, Part 7"