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"

In 1952, the same year that IBM introduced its first electronic computer, the tube-based Model 701, the company became an original licensee for the Bell Labs transistor patents, and Thomas Watson Jr. became IBM’s president. Prior to 1952, IBM specialized in punched-card machines: card readers, card punches, card tabulators, card calculators, and of course, the punched cards themselves. Before the IBM 701, the company essentially made electromechanical equipment. Starting with the IBM 701, the company entered the electronics era. Just five years later, in 1957, Thomas Watson Jr. became CEO and caused the following product-development policy proclamation to be made: “It shall … Read More → "A Brief History of the MOS transistor, Part 4: IBM Research, Persistence, and the Technology No One Wanted"

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"