This process led to more reliable transistors, higher yields and lower costs. For more than a year, according to the PBS documentary, Hoerni had “been working on a radically new transistor design: a thin, protective layer of silicon oxide mounted on top of the transistor,” which became known as the planar process. Fairchild needed to fix its product, and fast. However, Fairchild’s transistors were fragile and frequently failed in laboratory tests. Certainly, the military market was very important for us.” How does the small company compete against the giant TI or Motorola? It has to have something unique. “The military was willing to pay high prices for performance. “The Minuteman program was a godsend for us,” Charlie Sporck of Fairchild says in the documentary. The reliability of Fairchild’s product was put to the test in 1958, the documentary notes, when it beat out Texas Instruments to supply transistors for the guidance system on the Air Force’s Minuteman nuclear ballistic missile. However, Fairchild struggled to reliably produce semiconductors. In July 1958, Fairchild fulfilled its first order: One hundred silicon transistors at $150 each, or 30 times the going rate for transistors made of germanium. Fairchild won the contract largely on the strength of Noyce’s personality, according to the PBS documentary. The Air Force needed transistors that were not only capable of withstanding high temperatures, but also fast-switching. They founded what would become Fairchild Semiconductor, and, despite the significant challenges of starting a new company, were able to win a contract to supply IBM with silicon transistors for the Air Force’s new supersonic B-70 bomber. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last - left Shockley in 1957, disenchanted with Shockley’s authoritarian management style that developed after he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. In 1955, Shockley formed Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in California’s Santa Clara Valley, and recruited a group of young scientists dedicated to the development of the semiconductor industry.Īs recounted in the “Silicon Valley” episode of PBS’ American Experience series, eight of the scientists - Gordon Moore, C. By 1954, Texas Instruments became the first producer of a silicon transistor, Slomovic notes. In 1947, a Bell Labs team led by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. “It has made investments in microelectronics research and development, supported the industry in its infancy as a first and major customer, and created a demand environment in which companies had incentives to advance the state of the art.”ĭiscover how the GRiD Compass, one of NASA's first notebook computers, was used on the Space Shuttle. “The federal government's role has been important and wide-ranging,” Anna Slomovic, then a fellow at the RAND Graduate School, wrote in a 1988 paper. The Air Force and NASA were among the first customers of the new integrated circuits, using them in missile technologies and space-guidance systems, respectively. government played a significant role in supporting the fledgling microchip industry. The first integrated circuits were created by firms in the private sector, chief among them Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor, but the U.S. Though it seems impossible to imagine life - much less federal IT - without the microchip, it was not always inevitable that it would become such an integral element of daily activity. To download datasheet, Please click Here.It sits at the heart of virtually every piece of modern IT and communications technology, including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets: the humble microchip. Product Manuals / Spec Sheets / Downloads:
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