Encyclopedia
Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available
integrated circuit , and would go on to become one of the major players in the evolution of
Silicon Valley in the
1960s. The company currently employs roughly ten thousand people worldwide, with locations in
San Jose, California,
Salt Lake City, Utah,
Mountaintop, Pennsylvania,
Bucheon, South Korea,
Penang, Malaysia and
Cebu, among others. In
South Portland, Maine, the corporate headquarters is located in the
Maine Mall area, about a third of a mile from the manufacturing plant.
History
In 1956
William Shockley opened
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a division of
Beckman Instruments in Mountain View; his plan was to develop a new type of "4-layer diode" that would work faster and have more uses than current transistors. At first he attempted to hire some of his former colleagues from
Bell Labs, but none were willing to move to the West Coast or work with Shockley again. Instead he founded the core of a new company in the best and brightest new graduates coming out of the engineering schools.
Only a year later the staff was already fed up with Shockley's increasingly bizarre behavior. In one famous incident Shockley's secretary accidentally cut her finger and he became convinced it was a plot against him. He then ordered everyone in the company to take a lie detector test to track down the culprit. It was later demonstrated she had cut herself on a broken thumbtack and Shockley calmed down, but the damage was already done. This had proven to be a decisive example to several key personnel of Shockley's increasing paranoia, and a group of eight engineers decided they had had enough.
The group, later known widely as the
Traitorous Eight, decided they had reason enough to resign, and all did so. The eight men were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last,
Gordon Moore,
Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's
Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts. In 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was started with plans on making
silicon transistors — at the time
germanium was still a common material for semiconductor use.
Their first transistors were soon on the market, and the first batch of 100 was sold to
IBM for $150 a piece. However, only two years later they had managed to build a circuit with four transistors on a single wafer of silicon, thereby creating the first silicon integrated circuit. . The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year.
During the
1960s, Fairchild dominated the analog integrated circuit market, introducing the first IC
operational amplifiers, or "op amps", Bob Widlar's ľA702 and ľA709. In 1968, Fairchild introduced David Fullagar's ľA741, which became the most popular IC op amp of all time.
During the
1960s many of the original founders would leave Fairchild to strike out on their own. Known as the "fairchildren", they formed many of the companies that grew to prominence in the
1970s. A Fairchild advertisement of the time showed a collage of the
logos of
Silicon Valley with the annotation "
We started it all.". Among the last of the original founders to leave were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who left in 1968 to form
Intel. At this point much of the brainpower of the company was gone.
Intel would soon introduce its microprocessor, which Fairchild only copied, poorly, after a few years as the Fairchild F8. Their original huge lead was now squandered. By the end of the 1970s they had no new products in the pipeline, and increasingly turned to niche markets with their existing product line, notably "hardened" integrated circuits for military and space applications.
For a time, the company played a leading role in the development of
integrated circuits using
bipolar technology. These circuits were used worldwide, notably in
Cray supercomputers.
Fairchild also lead the way in the development of digital imaging. In 1973 they were the first to produce a commercial
Charge-coupled device following up on the invention at
Bell Labs. In 1976 the company released the first video game system to use ROM cartridges, the
Channel F.
In the
1970s Fairchild increasingly turned to "high end" customers, and thereby lost out in the developing
microprocessor market. In 1979, Fairchild was purchased by
Schlumberger Limited, an
oil field services company. By the late
1980s the company was in a relatively-weak competitive position; Schlumberger sold Fairchild to
National Semiconductor in 1987.
In 1997 Fairchild Semiconductor was reborn as an independent company, based in
South Portland, Maine. In 1999 Fairchild Semiconductor again became a publicly traded company on the
New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol FCS. Fairchild's South Portland, Maine location is the longest continuously operating semiconductor manufacturing facility in the world.
More recently, Fairchild has expanded its semiconductor manufacturing to include a foundry service for advanced
MEMS devices and products.
Fairchild's current product line is aimed at the power and discrete component market, claiming the ability to supply every single semiconductor component required for a typical
switched-mode power supply from controller chip to switching
MOSFET to rectifier
diodes to
optocouplers.
In 2004, Fairchild management began outsourcing its corporate infrastructure jobs to Singapore and Malaysia in a desperate attempt to shore up a falling bottom line while continuing to bolster Executive Officer salaries and perks. Fairchild currently trades below its initial offering of $18.75 per share.
Fairchild Waste Tank Failure
In 1981 it was discovered that an underground organic solvent tank had leaked at the
San Jose, California plant. This leak corrupted not only the water on site but over 18,000 customers of the Great Oaks Water Company. The addition of dichloroethylene and trichloroethane to the water supply led to numerous birth defects and five times as many miscarriages in the Los Paseos neighborhood.
The resulting clean up lasted over 15 years while the manufacturing plant sat abandoned and decrepit, attracting everyone from the
homeless who used it as a place to sleep, to
graffiti artists to the just plain curious. The many nooks and empty stairways provided a veritable urban playground for many
paintball players.
In the early
nineties a push was made by local residents to have the building demolished. In 1996 the abandoned Fairchild Semiconductor plant was finally razed and was made into a shopping center. Nothing remains of the plant and there is nothing to mark its previous location.
Alumni
...
- Wilfred Corrigan
- Jean Hoerni
- James M. Early
- Lester Hogan
- Eugene Kleiner
- Jerry Sanders
- Frank Wanlass
- Bob Widlar
External links
- of Fairchild Semiconductor International
Sources
