Fairchild Semiconductor: The Traitorous Eight, Planar Chips and Shiprock

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In 1955 physicist William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, to build a hard-to-manufacture four-layer diode. His erratic management drove eight researchers, including Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni, to leave. Noyce pitched Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument on silicon over germanium, and in 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was born in an early form of venture capital. Its first product, the 2N697 mesa transistor, sold to IBM at $150 each for the B-70 bomber program, and Autonetics used it in Minuteman missile guidance. Hoerni's planar process then sealed flat junctions under silicon dioxide, and in 1960 Noyce built the first commercially practical integrated circuit.

Fairchild grew from 12 employees to 12,000 and $130 million in sales. In 1965 it opened an assembly plant on the Navajo Nation at Shiprock, New Mexico, employing over a thousand Navajos, mostly women, and marketing the work as akin to rug weaving; it closed in 1975. The parent company in Syosset, New York, visited once a year, spent semiconductor profits elsewhere and withheld stock options. Charles Sporck left for National Semiconductor in 1967, the year of a $7.6 million loss, and Noyce and Moore founded Intel in 1968. Federico Faggin took silicon gate technology to Intel in 1970, and Motorola's suit over Lester Hogan's hires failed for lack of provable damages.

• Jack Kilby's earlier chip at Texas Instruments used hand-soldered gold wires, while Noyce's used deposited metal films.
• Fairchild made the first commercial CCD image sensor in 1973.
• Its 1976 Channel F was the first home console with interchangeable ROM cartridges, soon overtaken by the Atari 2600.
• It passed to Schlumberger in 1979, National Semiconductor in 1987, independence in 1997 and ON Semiconductor for $2.4 billion in 2016.
• Its alumni founded or led Intel, AMD, National Semiconductor and LSI Logic, and Silicon Valley entered print in 1971.