Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor was the company founded in 1957 by the Traitorous Eight, with financing and later ownership from Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, and based first in Palo Alto and then Mountain View, California. In a few years it became the leading silicon transistor and integrated circuit firm of its day, and it is the single most important root of the modern semiconductor industry. Its engineers developed the planar process and the first practical monolithic integrated circuits, and its former employees founded or led many of the companies that followed, which is why the term Fairchildren is used for its offspring.
Fairchild started with an advantage: it was devoted to silicon at a time when much of the industry still sold germanium. Its first products, shipped in 1958, were diffused-base silicon mesa transistors, the 2N696 and 2N697 family, which could switch fast and tolerate heat, and were bought for computers and military electronics. Early military and computer orders gave it revenue, and in 1959 Fairchild Camera and Instrument exercised its option to take full ownership, a step that provided capital but also tied the company to a parent firm in New York. The tension between a fast-moving Californian engineering team and an East Coast corporate owner recurs throughout its history.
The company's decisive technical achievement was the planar process, and the integrated circuit that grew from it. In 1959 Jean Hoerni developed a way to make transistors in which the junctions were formed by diffusion through windows in a silicon dioxide layer that stayed on the surface as protection. That oxide layer reduced leakage and improved reliability, and it provided a flat, uniform surface onto which metal connections could be laid. Robert Noyce then saw that this flat surface allowed several devices and their wiring to be formed on one piece of silicon, and he filed for a patent on a monolithic integrated circuit in 1959, less than a year after Jack Kilby's demonstration at Texas Instruments. Fairchild introduced its Micrologic integrated circuit family in the early 1960s, and the Apollo guidance computer later used NOR-gate integrated circuits of this kind.
The company also produced an engineering culture that spread far beyond its walls. Many of its employees left to join or found other firms: Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel in 1968, Jerry Sanders and colleagues founded Advanced Micro Devices in 1969, and National Semiconductor, though earlier, was rebuilt under executives who came from Fairchild. The phrase Fairchildren became shorthand for the dozens of companies that followed, and the spreading of talent was helped by the freedom with which people moved between firms in the region. Its own fortunes, however, declined: parent-company management, competition and the departure of key engineers weakened it during the 1960s and 1970s.
Later ownership changes are often summarized loosely, so a careful account is useful. Schlumberger acquired the company in 1979; National Semiconductor bought it in 1987; it was spun off again as an independent public company in the late 1990s; and ON Semiconductor completed an acquisition of it in 2016. Over this period its identity shifted toward power and analog semiconductors rather than leading-edge logic. A common misconception is that Fairchild invented the integrated circuit alone. Kilby at Texas Instruments built the first working IC, a hybrid of germanium parts joined by wires, while Fairchild's contribution was the monolithic, planar, manufacturable form.
The name Fairchild lives on chiefly as a lineage rather than a brand. The planar process remains the basis of chip fabrication, and the practices it normalized, such as selling a process, hiring from rivals and starting new companies, are part of how Silicon Valley still works.
Read Fairchild Semiconductor as the company that turned the transistor into the integrated circuit and then, by losing its people to new ventures, became the parent of an industry.