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"

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"