It was really the place that got the engineer entrepreneur really moving.” 3 Most of the companies around here even today can trace their lineage back to Fairchild. In a 2016 interview at the Computer History Museum, Moore recalled, “It seemed like every time we had a new product idea we had several spin-offs. The serendipitous combination of Hoerni’s planar process, Noyce’s conception of the IC, and Moore’s Law created a hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurship. Continuing this trend, 50 years later manufacturers were routinely putting more than one billion transistors on a chip. From this data he projected an annual increase in complexity that emerged as a self-fulfilling prophecy, known as “Moore’s Law.” Engineers across the semiconductor industry accepted the challenge of squeezing ever more transistors onto their new IC designs. In 1965, another Fairchild founder, Gordon Moore, observed that continual improvements in the technology had allowed a steady increase with time in the number of components on each IC. Noyce’s integrated circuit (IC), or microchip, enabled smaller, faster, cheaper, and more reliable electronic systems. Planar made better and more reliable transistors, but most importantly it transformed the production of semiconductors from a handcrafting operation into a high-volume, electronic lithographic “printing” process that lowered costs and made them viable in new applications.Ĭo-founder Robert Noyce, realized that the technique also made it possible to interconnect multiple transistors into a complete electronic circuit on a single silicon chip. But a new manufacturing technique called the “planar process,” based on an idea described on pages 3 and 4 of his patent notebook by co-founder Jean Hoerni, sparked a revolution that changed the valley from just another emerging hub of the electronics industry, comparable to Boston or New Jersey, into a world-renowned center of innovation and entrepreneurial activity. With this strong start (think of the company as the Google of the 1960s), Fairchild would probably have remained a successful player in the emerging semiconductor business. Developed by the Museum’s Exponential Center, a mural display depicts the company as a giant high-tech tree, laden with a harvest of spin-off companies that span six generations of key Silicon Valley technology eras from semiconductors to social media.īeginning early in the last century a succession of successful ventures in radio communications (Litton), microwave devices (Varian), electronic instruments (Hewlett Packard), and magnetic recording (Ampex) laid a strong foundation of entrepreneurial enterprise and technical expertise on the southern San Francisco Peninsula.Ĭoupled with the proximity to Stanford University, these factors attracted co-inventor of the transistor William Shockley to establish his Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View in 1956 to perform research into silicon semiconductor devices.īusiness Week magazine featured Fairchild in a special report on “The next revolution in electronics.” Although the firm’s market valuation never exceeded $2.5 billion, its surviving combined progeny have been estimated to be worth over $2 trillion.įairchild’s role in stimulating the explosive entrepreneurial growth of the region since the 1960s is illustrated in a new exhibit in the atrium at the Computer History Museum. Sixty years after its founding in 1957, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation is celebrated as “The First Trillion Dollar Startup.” 1 Through an unprecedented series of technical, business, and cultural innovations, the company spawned hundreds of ventures that established Silicon Valley as a world center of entrepreneurial activity and technological leadership. Courtesy of Douglas Fairbairn Photography Exhibit display in CHM lobby, representing examples of the hundreds of Fairchildren established over six generations of technology ventures.
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