Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was the company William Shockley founded in 1956 in Mountain View, California, with financial backing from Arnold Beckman's Beckman Instruments, to manufacture advanced silicon semiconductor devices. It operated as a division of Beckman and is widely treated as the place where the semiconductor industry in the region later called Silicon Valley began. It never became a commercial success on its own, but its staff did: within two years a group of its young scientists had left to found Fairchild Semiconductor, and the companies that descended from that exodus shaped the electronics industry.
Shockley's reasons for returning to California were partly personal and partly entrepreneurial. He had co-invented the transistor theory at Bell Labs and wrote the first account of the junction transistor, and he believed that transistors made from silicon, rather than germanium, would be the future. He accepted backing from Arnold Beckman, whose company made scientific instruments, and set up a laboratory in the Mountain View area near Stanford, where he had family ties and where electronics firms such as Hewlett-Packard were already established. The laboratory was announced in 1956, and in the same year Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, which gave the new venture great prestige and made it easier to attract top talent.
Shockley recruited a remarkable group of young PhDs and engineers, and then pointed them at a difficult product. Among those who joined were Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Sheldon Roberts and Julius Blank, many drawn by his reputation. Rather than starting with a straightforward silicon transistor, Shockley chose to develop the four-layer diode, a pnpn switching device in which a small signal could trigger a latched conduction state and which he believed could replace relays and complex circuitry. It was a clever concept but hard to make reliably with the diffusion and contact techniques then available, and the effort to get a working product absorbed time while competitors such as Texas Instruments were shipping silicon transistors.
A dispute over management and direction ended the original team within about a year. Several of the senior researchers believed the company should concentrate on silicon transistors, which could be made and sold, rather than on the four-layer diode, and they were frustrated by Shockley's controlling management style. They appealed to Arnold Beckman, who did not remove Shockley, and in September 1957 eight of them left together. The departing group, later called the Traitorous Eight, founded Fairchild Semiconductor with outside financing. Shockley's own label for them is the origin of the name. The loss was a blow from which the laboratory never recovered, as Beckman struggled to maintain it; in 1960 Beckman sold it to Clevite, and it later passed to ITT, and Shockley himself left to teach at Stanford in the early 1960s.
A common misconception is that Shockley Semiconductor itself created the chips and products that made Silicon Valley rich; it did not. Its commercial output was small, and its main legacy was human: it assembled, trained and then, unintentionally, released a generation of engineers who started their own firms. This is why historians describe it as the seed rather than the tree. The area's later features, a culture of job mobility, venture capital and spin-off companies, drew on that precedent, where talented employees left an unsatisfactory employer and founded a better one with investor support.
Today the site is remembered as the birthplace of the region's semiconductor industry, even though the original laboratory building no longer stands in the same form. The case is also used as a management lesson: technical brilliance does not by itself make a good company, and a founder's choices about product focus and staff relations can decide whether a team stays or leaves.
Read Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a failed company that succeeded as a launch pad: its products went nowhere, but the people it gathered and then lost carried silicon transistor manufacturing into an industry of their own.