William Shockley Shockley Semiconductor What did Shockley's semiconductor do? The company, a division of Beckman Instruments, Inc., was the first establishment working on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as Silicon Valley.
What year was the semiconductor made?
What year was Shockley's semiconductor made?
In 1956 Shockley moved from New Jersey to Mountain View, California to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to live closer to his ailing mother in Palo Alto, California. The company, a division of Beckman Instruments, Inc., was the first establishment working on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as Silicon Valley. "His way" could generally be summed up as domineering and increasingly paranoid. In one well-known incident, he claimed that a secretary's cut thumb was the result of a malicious act and he demanded lie detector tests to find the culprit, when in reality, the secretary had simply grabbed at a door handle that happened to have an exposed tack on it for the purpose of hanging paper notes on. After he received the Nobel Prize in 1956 his demeanor changed, as evidenced in his increasingly autocratic, erratic and hard-to-please management style. In late 1957, eight of Shockley's researchers, who would come to be known as the "traitorous eight", resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors. They went on to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a loss from which Shockley Semiconductor never recovered. Over the course of the next 20 years, more than 65 new enterprises would end up having employee connections back to Fairchild. A group of about thirty colleagues who had met on and off since 1956 met again at Stanford in 2002 to reminisce about their time with Shockley and his central role in sparking the information technology revolution. The group's organizer said, "Shockley is the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley." CANNOTANSWER
1956
William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. He was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect". 

Partly as a result of Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s, California's "Silicon Valley" became a hotbed of electronics innovation. In his later life, while a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, Shockley became a proponent of eugenics. A 2019 study in the journal Intelligence found him to be the second-most controversial (behind Arthur Jensen) intelligence researcher among 55 persons covered.

Early life and education
Shockley was  born to American parents in London on February 13, 1910, and was raised in his family's hometown of Palo Alto, California from the age of three. His father, William Hillman Shockley, was a mining engineer who speculated in mines for a living and spoke eight languages. His mother, May (née Bradford), grew up in the American West, graduated from Stanford University and became the first female U.S. Deputy mining surveyor. Shockley was homeschooled up to the age of eight, due to his parents' dislike of public schools as well as Shockley's habit of violent tantrums. He spent two years at Palo Alto Military Academy, then briefly enrolled in the Los Angeles Coaching School to study physics and later graduated from Hollywood High School in 1927.

Shockley earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in 1932 and a PhD from MIT in 1936. The title of his doctoral thesis was Electronic Bands in Sodium Chloride, a topic suggested by his thesis advisor, John C. Slater. After receiving his doctorate, Shockley joined a research group headed by Clinton Davisson at Bell Labs in New Jersey. The next few years were productive for Shockley. He published a number of fundamental papers on solid state physics in Physical Review. In 1938, he received his first patent, "Electron Discharge Device", on electron multipliers.

Career
Shockley was one of the first recruits to Bell Labs by Mervin Kelly, who became director of research at the company in 1936 and focused on hiring solid-state physicists. Executives at Bell Labs had theorized that semiconductors may offer solid-state alternatives to the vacuum tubes used throughout Bell's nationwide telephone system. Shockley conceived a number of designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials, and with Walter Brattain unsuccessfully attempted to create a prototype in 1939. 

When World War II broke out, Shockley's prior research was interrupted and he became involved in radar research in Manhattan (New York City). In May 1942, he took leave from Bell Labs to become a research director at Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group. This involved devising methods for countering the tactics of submarines with improved convoying techniques, optimizing depth charge patterns, and so on. This project required frequent trips to the Pentagon and Washington, where Shockley met many high-ranking officers and government officials. 

In 1944, he organized a training program for B-29 bomber pilots to use new radar bomb sights. In late 1944 he took a three-month tour to bases around the world to assess the results. For this project, Secretary of War Robert Patterson awarded Shockley the Medal for Merit on October 17, 1946.

In July 1945, the War Department asked Shockley to prepare a report on the question of probable casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Shockley concluded:

This report influenced the decision of the United States to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which precipitated the unconditional surrender of Japan.

Shockley was the first physicist to propose a log-normal distribution to model the creation process for scientific research papers.

Development of the transistor
Shortly after the war ended in 1945, Bell Labs formed a solid-state physics group, led by Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan, which included John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore, and several technicians. Their assignment was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Its first attempts were based on Shockley's ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments failed every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these surface states and they met almost daily to discuss the work. The rapport of the group was excellent, and ideas were freely exchanged.

By the winter of 1946 they had enough results that Bardeen submitted a paper on the surface states to Physical Review. Brattain started experiments to study the surface states through observations made while shining a bright light on the semiconductor's surface. This led to several more papers (one of them co-authored with Shockley), which estimated the density of the surface states to be more than enough to account for their failed experiments. The pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes. Moore built a circuit that allowed them to vary the frequency of the input signal easily. Finally they began to get some evidence of power amplification when Pearson, acting on a suggestion by Shockley, put a voltage on a droplet of glycol borate placed across a P–n junction.

Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and devices based on it patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925. Although the patent appeared "breakable" (it could not work) the patent attorneys based one of its four patent applications only on the Bardeen-Brattain point contact design. Three others (submitted first) covered the electrolyte-based transistors with Bardeen, Gibney and Brattain as the inventors. 

Shockley's name was not on any of these patent applications. This angered Shockley, who thought his name should also be on the patents because the work was based on his field effect idea. He even made efforts to have the patent written only in his name, and told Bardeen and Brattain of his intentions.

Shockley, angered by not being included on the patent applications, secretly continued his own work to build a different sort of transistor based on junctions instead of point contacts; he expected this kind of design would be more likely to be commercially viable. The point contact transistor, he believed, would prove to be fragile and difficult to manufacture. Shockley was also dissatisfied with certain parts of the explanation for how the point contact transistor worked and conceived of the possibility of minority carrier injection. 

On February 13, 1948 another team member, John N. Shive, built a point contact transistor with bronze contacts on the front and back of thin wedge of germanium, proving that holes could diffuse through bulk germanium and not just along the surface as previously thought. Shive's invention sparked Shockley's invention of the junction transistor. A few months later he invented an entirely new, considerably more robust, type of transistor with a layer or 'sandwich' structure. This structure went on to be used for the vast majority of all transistors into the 1960s, and evolved into the bipolar junction transistor. Shockley later admitted that the workings of the team were "mixture of cooperation and competition". He also admitted that he kept some of his own work secret until his "hand was forced" by Shive's 1948 advance. Shockley worked out a rather complete description of what he called the "sandwich" transistor, and a first proof of principle was obtained on April 7, 1949.

Meanwhile, Shockley worked on his magnum opus, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors which was published as a 558-page treatise in 1950. The tome included Shockley's critical ideas of drift and diffusion and the differential equations that govern the flow of electrons in solid state crystals. Shockley's diode equation is also described. This seminal work became the reference text for other scientists working to develop and improve new variants of the transistor and other devices based on semiconductors.

This resulted in his invention of the bipolar "junction transistor", which was announced at a press conference on July 4, 1951.

In 1951, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He was forty-one years old; this was rather young for such an election. Two years later, he was chosen as the recipient of the prestigious Comstock Prize for Physics by the NAS, and was the recipient of many other awards and honors.

The ensuing publicity generated by the "invention of the transistor" often thrust Shockley to the fore, much to the chagrin of Bardeen and Brattain. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Though Shockley would correct the record where reporters gave him sole credit for the invention, he eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.

Shockley Semiconductor

In 1956 Shockley moved from New Jersey to Mountain View, California to start Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to live closer to his ailing and elderly mother in Palo Alto, California. The company, a division of Beckman Instruments, Inc., was the first establishment working on silicon semiconductor devices in what came to be known as Silicon Valley.

After he received the Nobel Prize in 1956 his demeanor changed, as evidenced in his increasingly autocratic, erratic and hard-to-please management style. Shockley became increasingly domineering and paranoid. In one well-known incident, he demanded lie detector tests to find the "culprit" after a company secretary suffered a minor cut. In late 1957, eight of Shockley's researchers, who would come to be known as the "traitorous eight", resigned after Shockley decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors. They went on to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a loss from which Shockley Semiconductor never recovered and which led to its purchase by another company three years later. Over the course of the next 20 years, more than 65 new enterprises would end up having employee connections back to Fairchild.

A group of about thirty colleagues who had met on and off since 1956 met again at Stanford in 2002 to reminisce about their time with Shockley and his central role in sparking the information technology revolution. The group's organizer said, "Shockley is the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley."

Views on race and eugenics

After Shockley left his role as director of Shockley Semiconductor, he joined Stanford University, where in 1963 he was appointed the Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, in which position he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1975. In this position, Shockley became interested in questions of race, human intelligence, and eugenics. He thought this work was important to the genetic future of the human species and he came to describe it as the most important work of his career; however, expressing these views led to the damaging of his reputation. Shockley argued that a higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. He also claimed that blacks were genetically inferior to whites on an intellectual level. For example, in a debate with psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing M.D. and on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.:

My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment.

Shockley's writings and lectures on this topic were partly based on the writings of psychologist Cyril Burt and were funded by the Pioneer Fund. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization. Anthropologist Roger Pearson defended Shockley in a self-published book co-authored with Shockley. University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee professor Edgar G. Epps argued that "William Shockley's position lends itself to racist interpretations".

In 1981, Shockley filed a libel suit in Atlanta against the Atlanta Constitution after a science writer, Roger Witherspoon, compared Shockley's advocacy of a voluntary sterilization program to Nazi human experimentation. The suit took three years to go to trial. Shockley won the suit but received only one dollar in damages and no punitive damages. Shockley's biographer Joel Shurkin, a science writer on the staff of Stanford University during those years, sums this up as saying that the statement was defamatory, but Shockley's reputation was not worth much by the time the trial reached a verdict. Shockley taped his telephone conversations with reporters, and then sent the transcript to them by registered mail. At one point he toyed with the idea of making them take a simple quiz on his work before discussing the subject with them. His habit of saving all his papers (including laundry lists) provides abundant documentation for researchers on his life.

Shockley was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 1982 United States Senate election in California. He ran on a single-issue platform of highlighting the "dysgenic threat" of some racial groups, including African-Americans, to American society. He came in eighth place in the primary, receiving 8,308 votes and 0.37% of the vote.

Personal life
At age 23 and while still a student, Shockley married Jean Bailey in August 1933. The couple had two sons and a daughter. Although one of his sons earned a PhD at Stanford University and his daughter graduated from Radcliffe College, Shockley believed his children "represent a very significant regression ... my first wife – their mother – had not as high an academic-achievement standing as I had."

Shockley became an accomplished rock climber, going often to the Shawangunks in the Hudson River Valley. He pioneered a route across an overhang, known as "Shockley's Ceiling", which remains one of the classic climbing routes in the area. Several climbing guidebooks changed the route's name to "The Ceiling" in 2020 due to controversy associated with Shockley's eugenics research.  Shockley was popular as a speaker, lecturer, and an amateur magician. He once "magically" produced a bouquet of roses at the end of his address before the American Physical Society. He was also known in his early years for his elaborate practical jokes.

Shockley donated sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank founded by Robert Klark Graham in hopes of spreading humanity's best genes. The bank, called by the media the "Nobel Prize sperm bank", claimed to have three Nobel Prize-winning donors, though Shockley was the only one to publicly acknowledge his involvement. However, Shockley's controversial views brought the Repository for Germinal Choice a degree of notoriety and may have discouraged other Nobel Prize winners from donating sperm.

PBS claims Shockley was cruel towards his children and unhappy in his life. He reportedly tried playing Russian roulette as part of an attempted suicide.

Death
Shockley died of prostate cancer in 1989 at the age of 79. At the time of his death, he was estranged from most of his friends and family, except his second wife, the former Emmy Lanning (1913–2007). His children reportedly learned of his death by reading his obituary in the newspaper. Shockley is interred at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, California.

Honors
 National Medal of Merit, for his war work in 1946.
 Comstock Prize in Physics of the National Academy of Sciences in 1953.
 First recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Solid State Physics Prize of the American Physical Society in 1953.
 Co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956, along with  John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. In his Nobel lecture, he gave full credit to Brattain and Bardeen as the inventors of the point-contact transistor. 
 Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1963.
 Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1963.
 Honorary science doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Gustavus Adolphus Colleges in Minnesota.
 IEEE Medal of Honor from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1980.
 Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
 Listed at  on the Boston Globe's 2011 MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas in the 150-year history of MIT.

Patents
Shockley was granted over ninety US patents. Some notable ones are:
  April 4, 1950; his first granted patent involving transistors.
  September 25, 1951; His earliest applied for (June 26, 1948) patent involving transistors.
  October 13, 1953; Used in computers.
  April 2, 1957; The diffusion process for implantation of impurities.
  April 24, 1962; Improvements on process for production of basic materials.
  September 11, 1962; Exploring other semiconductors.

Bibliography

Prewar scientific articles by Shockley

Postwar articles by Shockley
 
 
 
 
 
 "On the Statistics of Individual Variations of Productivity in Research Laboratories", Shockley 1957
 Heredity:
 Shockley 1965, "Is Quality of US Population Declining." U.S. News & World Report, November 22, pp. 68–71
 Shockley 1966, "Possible Transfer of Metallurgical and Astronomical Approaches to Problem of Environment versus Ethnic Heredity" (on an early form of admixture analysis)
 Shockley 1966, "Population Control or Eugenics." In J. D. Roslansky (ed.), Genetics and the Future of Man (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts)
 Shockley 1967, "The Entrenched Dogmatism of Inverted Liberals", manuscript by Shockley from which major portions were read in lectures
 Shockley 1968, "Proposed Research to Reduce Racial Aspects of the Environment-Heredity Uncertainty", proposal read by Shockley before the National Academy of Science on April 24, 1968
 Shockley 1968, "Ten Point Position Statement on Human Quality Problems", revised by Shockley from a talk which he presented on "Human Quality Problems and Research Taboos" 
 Shockley 1969, "An Analysis Leading to a Recommendation Concerning Inquiry into Eugenic Legislation", press release by Shockley, Stanford University, April 28, 1969
 Shockley 1970, "A 'Try Simplest Cases' Approach to the Heredity-Poverty-Crime Problem." In V. L. Allen (ed.), Psychological Factors in Poverty (Chicago: Markham)
 Shockley 1979, "Proposed NAS Resolution, drafted October 17, 1970", proposed by Shockley before the National Academy of Sciences
 Shockley 1970, "New Methodology to Reduce the Environment-Heredity Uncertainty About Dysgenics"
 Shockley 1971, "Hardy-Weinberg Law Generalized to Estimate Hybrid Variance for Negro Populations and Reduce Racial Aspects of the Environment-Heredity Uncertainty"
 Shockley 1971, "Dysgenics – A Social Problem Evaded by the Illusion of Infinite Plasticity of Human Intelligence?", manuscript planned for reading at the American Psychological Association Symposium entitled: "Social Problems: Illusion, Delusion or Reality."
 "Models, Mathematics, and the Moral Obligation to Diagnose the Origin of Negro IQ Deficits", W. Shockley, (1971)  
 "Negro IQ Deficit: Failure of a 'Malicious Coincidence' Model Warrants New Research Proposals", Shockley 1971 
 "Dysgenics, Geneticity, Raceology: A Challenge to the Intellectual Responsibility of Educators", Shockley 1972a 
 "A Debate Challenge: Geneticity Is 80% for White Identical Twins' I.Q.'s", Shockley 1972b
 Shockley 1972, "Proposed Resolution Regarding the 80% Geneticity Estimate for Caucasian IQ", advance press release concerning a paper presented by Shockley
 Shockley 1973, "Deviations from Hardy-Weinberg Frequencies Caused by Assortative Mating in Hybrid Populations"
 Shockley 1974, "Eugenic, or Anti-Dysgenic, Thinking Exercises", press release by Shockley dated 1974 May 3
 Shockley 1974, "Society Has a Moral Obligation to Diagnose Tragic Racial IQ Deficits", prepared statement by Shockley to be read during his debate against Roy Innis
 Shockley 1978, "Has Intellectual Humanitarianism Gone Berserk?", introductory statement read by Shockley prior to a lecture given by him at UT Dallas
 Shockley 1979, "Anthropological Taboos About Determinations of Racial Mixes", press release by Shockley on October 16, 1979
 Shockley 1980, "Sperm Banks and Dark-Ages Dogmatism", position paper presented by Shockley in a lecture to the Rotary Club of Chico, California, April 16, 1980
 Shockley 1981, "Intelligence in Trouble", article by Shockley published in Leaders magazine, issue dated 1981 Jun 15

Books by Shockley
 Shockley, William – Electrons and holes in semiconductors, with applications to transistor electronics, Krieger (1956) 
 Shockley, William and Gong, Walter A – Mechanics Charles E. Merrill, Inc. (1966)
 Shockley, William and Pearson, Roger – Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems, Scott-Townsend (1992)

Interviews
 Interview of William Shockley by Lillian Hoddeson on 1974 Sep. 10, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA
 Playboy 1980, William Shockley interview with Playboy

Notes

Other notes

References

External links

 National Academy of Sciences biography
  including his Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1956 Transistor Technology Evokes New Physics
 PBS biography
 Gordon Moore. Biography of William Shockley Time Magazine
 Interview with Shockley biographer Joel Shurkin
Interview of William Shockley by Lillian Hoddeson in 1974
 History of the transistor
 William Shockley (IEEE Global History Network)
 Shockley and Bardeen-Brattain patent disputes
 William Shockley vs. Francis Cress-Welsing (Tony Brown Show, 1974)

Guide to the William Shockley Papers SC0222

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National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications.

On September 23, 2011, the company formally became part of Texas Instruments as the "Silicon Valley" division.

History

Founding
National Semiconductor was founded in Danbury, Connecticut, by Dr. Bernard J. Rothlein on May 27, 1959, when he and seven colleagues, Edward N. Clarke, Joseph J. Gruber, Milton Schneider, Robert L. Hopkins, Robert L. Koch, Richard R. Rau and Arthur V. Siefert, left their employment at the semiconductor division of Sperry Rand Corporation.

The founding of the new company was followed by Sperry Rand filing a lawsuit against National Semiconductor for patent infringement. By 1965, as it was reaching the courts, the preliminaries of the lawsuit had caused the stock value of National to be depressed. The depressed stock values allowed Peter J Sprague to invest heavily in the company with Sprague's family funds. Sprague also relied on further financial backing from a pair of West Coast investment firms and a New York underwriter to take control as the chairman of National Semiconductor. At that time Sprague was 27 years old. Jeffrey S. Young characterized the era as the beginning of venture capitalism.

That same year National Semiconductor acquired Molectro. Molectro was founded in 1962 in Santa Clara, California, by J. Nall and D. Spittlehouse, who were formerly employed at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. The acquisition also brought to National Semiconductor two experts in linear semiconductor technologies, Robert Widlar and Dave Talbert, who were also formerly employed at Fairchild.  The acquisition of Molectro provided National with the technology to launch itself in the fabrication and manufacture of monolithic integrated circuits.

In 1967, Sprague hired five top executives away from Fairchild, among whom were Charles E. Sporck and Pierre Lamond. At the time of Sporck's hiring, Robert Noyce was de facto head of semiconductor operations at Fairchild and Sporck was his operations manager.

Sporck was appointed president and CEO of National. To make the deal better for Sporck's hiring and appointment at half his former salary at Fairchild, Sporck was allotted a substantial share of National's stock. In essence, Sporck took four of his personnel from Fairchild with him as well as three others from TI, Perkin-Elmer, and Hewlett-Packard to form a new eight-man team at National Semiconductor. Incidentally, Sporck had been Widlar's superior at Fairchild before Widlar left Fairchild to join Molectro after a compensation dispute with Sporck.

In 1968, National shifted its headquarters from Danbury, Connecticut, to Santa Clara, California. However, like many companies, National retained its registration as a Delaware corporation, for legal and financial expediency.

Over the years National Semiconductor acquired several companies like Fairchild Semiconductor (1987), and Cyrix (1997). However, over time National Semiconductor spun off these acquisitions. Fairchild Semiconductor became a separate company again in 1997, and the Cyrix microprocessors division was sold to VIA Technologies of Taiwan in 1999.

From 1997 to 2002, National enjoyed a large amount of publicity and awards with the development of the Cyrix Media Center, Cyrix WebPad, WebPad Metro and National Origami PDA concept devices created by National's Conceptual Products Group. Based largely on the success of the WebPad, National formed the Information Appliance Division (highly integrated processors & "internet gadgets") in 1998. The Information Appliance Division was sold to AMD in 2003.

Other businesses dealing in such products as digital wireless chipsets, image sensors, and PC I/O chipsets have also been recently closed down or sold off as National has reincarnated itself as a high-performance analog semiconductor company.

The transformation of National Semiconductor

Peter Sprague, Pierre Lamond and the affectionately called Charlie Sporck worked hand-in-hand,  with support of the board of directors to transform the company into a multinational and world-class semiconductor concern. Immediately after becoming CEO, Sporck started a historic price war among semiconductor companies, which then trimmed the number of competitors in the field. Among the casualties to exit the semiconductor business were General Electric and Westinghouse.

Cost control, overhead reduction and a focus on profits implemented by Sporck was the key element to National surviving the price war and subsequently in 1981 becoming the first semiconductor company to reach the US$1 billion annual sales mark. However, the foundation that made National successful was its expertise in analog electronics, TTL (transistor–transistor logic) and MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) integrated circuit technologies. As they had while employed in Fairchild, Sporck and Lamond directed National Semiconductor towards the growing industrial and commercial markets and began to rely less on military and aerospace contracts. Those decisions coupled with inflationary growth in use of computers provided the market for the expansion of National. Meanwhile, sources of funds associated with Sprague coupled with creative structuring of cash flow buffering due to Sporck and Lamond provided the financing required for that expansion. Lamond and Sporck had also managed to attract and extract substantial funds to finance the expansion.

Among Sporck's cost control efforts was his offshore outsourcing of labour. National Semiconductor was among the pioneers in the semiconductor industry to invest in facilities to perform final manufacturing operations of integrated circuits in developing countries, especially in Southeast Asia.

National Semiconductor's manufacturing improvements under Sporck (in collaboration with Lamond) was enabled not by emphasizing process innovation but by improving and standardizing processes already established by other companies like Fairchild and Texas Instruments, as well as by frequent raiding to hire from Fairchild's pool of talents.

Weaknesses of Sporck's leadership
National Semiconductor under Sporck was not particularly invested in marketing strategies, even though it had the vision to launch itself into new and apparent opportunities in the consumer market. Sporck had applied strategies that made National Semiconductor function as a low-cost mass manufacturer of semiconductor commodities.

A few key executives and engineers left the company in 1981. Among them was Pierre Lamond, who had been the chief IC designer (now partner at Sequoia Capital). Robert Swanson's departure in the same year to found Linear Technology was another indication of the appropriateness of organisational strategies of National Semiconductor under Sporck. "For 13 of 14 years at National, I was a gung-ho guy. Then, the company started to get big. I kept looking at all the companies whose butts we'd been kicking. And then National started organizing itself like them. It was frustrating." Swanson said in the May 13, 1991, Business Journal-San Jose.

Sporck's strategy of outsourcing sales to external sources meant National Semiconductor did not have sufficient or responsive resources to respond to requests from innovators, inventors and academic research—which would have been helpful in the technological innovation boom of the 1980s.

National Semiconductor's lack and loss of innovation meant it was producing products that were easily copied and reproducible. It may have been the cheapest manufacturer in the United States, but it was not the cheapest compared to the Asian manufacturers. This weakness in National Semiconductor was evident in its failure to compete during the globalisation of Japanese semiconductor companies in the 1980s, followed by globalisation of Taiwanese and South Korean companies.

Leadership under Gilbert F. Amelio
On May 27, 1991, Charles E. Sporck was replaced by Gil Amelio as CEO and president. Amelio was then president of Rockwell International's semiconductor division and had a Ph.D. in physics from Georgia Institute of Technology. Amelio had also been formerly employed at Fairchild.

Amelio was faced with a company plagued with over-capacity and shrinking market share. Amelio found that, just prior to his taking helm, despite having spent US$1 billion over the last five years on research and development, National Semiconductor had a disappointing record in new products. The Business section of The New York Times January 11, 1991, reflected the over-capacity generated by Sporck that had to be inherited by Amelio.

Amelio disposed of the non-core products and assets in which National Semiconductor had no market motivation or expertise and turned the company towards its core expertiseanalog semiconductors. National Semiconductor under Amelio emphasized on reduction of cost of sales, improving capacity utilization,  scrap reduction and cycle-time reduction. Redundant facilities were sold and consolidated.

With the progress of restructuring, National Semiconductor increased revenues each year. In 1994, National Semiconductor under Amelio posted record net revenues of US$2.29 billion. It was also a time when US semiconductor companies had regained market leadership. Amelio introduced benchmarking to evaluate productivity, restructured marketing strategies and reorganised management by introducing modern management practices and workplace environments.

Amelio divided products into two divisions: Standard Products Group which comprised low-margin, logic and memory chipscommodity products which were more susceptible to cyclical demands and through which National Semiconductor had matured; and Communications & Computing Group which comprised high-margin, value-added analog and mixed-signal chips. Amelio's division of products seemed to prepare National Semiconductor for the eventual disposal of low-margin commodity products, which came to fruition later with the sale of a reconstituted Fairchild.

National Semiconductor under Amelio chose to build a brand new eight-inch (200 mm)  wafer fabrication plant in South Portland, Maine. It chose to divest itself of its then somewhat new plant in Migdal HaEmek, Israel, which became Tower Semiconductor.

In 1995, Amelio was elected as the chairman of the board of directors of National Semiconductor.

In 1996, Amelio accepted an invitation from Apple Computer, a customer of National Semiconductor, to join its board of directors. Troubles at Apple later prompted the board to invite Amelio to take on the position of CEO, which he accepted in February 1996.  National Semiconductor announced the resignation of Amelio as the company's president, chairman and chief executive officer on February 2, 1996.

Leadership under Brian L. Halla
National Semiconductor announced the appointment of Brian L. Halla as its chairman, president and CEO on May 3, 1996. Halla was then the head of LSI logic products division. Prior to LSI, he had been with Intel for 14 years.

Halla reinforced Amelio's emphasis on the expertise of National Semiconductor in analog technology. He also was, on occasions, an evangelist for analog technology. However, he found that National Semiconductor under Amelio had too few product offerings. Halla embarked on a diversification into personal computer and graphics business.

He advocated PC-on-a-chip (aka system-on-a-chip) as a business direction for National Semiconductor. During his tenure at LSI, LSI had successfully applied similar concepts. However, LSI had steered clear of getting involved with PC technologies that would make it a competitor with Intel. Halla held the vision that information appliances (IAs) would succeed the personal computer as a trend. He predicted that IAs would overtake sales of PCs by the year 2000.

To achieve the goal, National Semiconductor started acquiring companies that would provide the needed technological complements. Among the acquisitions were Cirrus Logic Inc's PicoPower business, for its specialised expertise in small form factor devices; Mediamatics Inc, which makes multimedia connectivity products; Future Integrated Systems Inc, a PC graphics company; Gulbransen Inc, a digital audio technology maker; ComCore Semiconductor Inc, a maker of digital signal processing for LANs; Cyrix, the maker of Intel x86 clones.

On March 11, 1997, National Semiconductor Corporation announced the US$550 million sale of a reconstituted Fairchild to the management of Fairchild with the backing of Sterling LLC, a unit of Citicorp Venture Capital. Fairchild carried with it what was mostly the Standard Products group previously segregated by Amelio. Incidentally, the effective price of acquisition of Cyrix was also US$550 million.

On November 17, 1997, National Semiconductor and Cyrix announced the merger of the companies. Cyrix would become an autonomous wholly owned subsidiary. Halla had earlier emphasized that National was after the low-end CPU market as part of the system-on-a-chip pursuit and therefore would not place emphasis on Cyrix's current development of high-end 6x86MX design. However, Cyrix later announced that its merger with National Semiconductor would not change its development or marketing plans.

The acquisition of an independent-minded Cyrix subsequently turned National Semiconductor from a collaborator into a competitor with Intel. National lost its business with Intel. Intel reinstated the relationship after the sale of Cyrix.

The acquisition of Cyrix also carried with it a business obligation to use the IBM microelectronics division to fabricate the Cyrix chips,,  as well as technical constraint to do the same, while National Semiconductor had plans to transfer their fabrication to its South Portland fab. National incurred huge losses in its processor business and announced the sale of Cyrix to VIA in 1999.

In 1999, National Semiconductor also put out feelers for selling if not the whole, then a majority stake of, its fabrication plant in South Portland, Maine. However, that did not come to fruition.

On June 28, 2000, National Semiconductor and TSMC Taiwan signed an agreement that would allow transfer of advanced fabrication technologies from TSMC to the National Semiconductor fabrication plant in South Portland, Maine.

On March 11, 2009, National announced plans to close its assembly and test plant in Suzhou, China, and its wafer fabrication plant in Arlington, Texas.

On October 9, 2009, Brian Halla announced his retirement as National's CEO. He remains executive chairman. The company promoted Donald (Don) Macleod, who had previously served as the company's president and chief operating officer, to CEO.

Leadership under Donald Macleod
Don Macleod became National Semiconductor's chief executive officer on November 30, 2009. He was named chairman of the board on May 31, 2010.

Acquisition by Texas Instruments

On April 4, 2011, Texas Instruments announced that it had agreed to buy National Semiconductor for $6.5 billion in cash.  Texas Instruments paid $25 per share of National Semiconductor stock, an 80% premium over the April 4, 2011, closing share price of $14.07. The deal made Texas Instruments one of the world's largest makers of analog technology components. On September 19, 2011, the Chinese minister approved the merger, the last one needed. The companies formally merged on September 23, 2011.

Manufacturing locations

National Semiconductor also had operations in Migdal (tower) Ha'Emeq (valley), Israel. National Semiconductor had six inch (152 mm)  wafer fabrication operations there. In 1993, National Semiconductor divested to retain 19% ownership of the plant. The plant in Migdal Ha'Emeq, Israel is now constituted as Tower Semiconductor of Israel.

Products
analog circuits
operational amplifiers
buffers
comparators
integrated circuits
regulators
voltage references
audio circuits
microcontrollers
network products
data converters
interface circuits
display technology
temperature sensors
simple switcher

History of National Semiconductor logo and product identification
The following picture excerpts illustrate the history of identification marks of National Semiconductor.

See also

National Semiconductor microprocessors
 NS320xx
 NE2000
 Hitachi Data Systems
 Bob Pease, designer of the LM331 and LM337 among others
 Bob Widlar inventor of the Widlar current source
 List of LM-series integrated circuits
 List of semiconductor fabrication plants
 EE Power

References

 Macleod Changes Focus to Revenue Growth at National EE Times Europe: March 12, 2010

External links

 
 National Semiconductor at chipdb.org
 National Semiconductor at DataSheetCatalog.com

Defunct semiconductor companies of the United States
Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Companies based in Santa Clara, California
American companies established in 1959
Electronics companies established in 1959
Electronics companies disestablished in 2011
1959 establishments in California
2011 disestablishments in California
Defunct manufacturing companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Superfund sites in California
Texas Instruments
2011 mergers and acquisitions Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of integrated circuits. Schlumberger bought the firm in 1979 and sold it to National Semiconductor in 1987; Fairchild was spun off as an independent company again in 1997. In September 2016, Fairchild was acquired by ON Semiconductor.

The company had locations in the United States at San Jose, California; San Rafael, California; South Portland, Maine; West Jordan, Utah; and Mountaintop, Pennsylvania. Outside the U.S. it operated locations in Australia; Singapore; Bucheon, South Korea; Penang, Malaysia; Suzhou, China; and Cebu, Philippines, among others.

Company history

1950s

In 1955, William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, funded by Beckman Instruments in Mountain View, California; his plan was to develop a new type of "4-layer diode" that would work faster and have more uses than then-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 at that time. Shockley then founded the core of the new company with what he considered the best and brightest graduates coming out of American engineering schools.

While Shockley was effective as a recruiter, he was less effective as a manager.  A core group of Shockley employees,  later known as the traitorous eight, became unhappy with his management of the company. 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 the Fairchild Semiconductor division was started with plans to make silicon transistors at a time when germanium was still the most common material for semiconductor use.

According to Sherman Fairchild, Noyce's impassioned presentation of his vision was the reason Sherman Fairchild had agreed to create the semiconductor division for the traitorous eight. Noyce advocated the use of silicon as substrate – since the material costs would consist of sand and a few fine wires, the major cost would be in the manufacturing process. Noyce also expressed his belief that silicon semiconductors would herald the start of disposable appliances that, due to cheap electronic components, would not be repaired but merely discarded when worn out.

Their first transistors were of the silicon mesa variety, innovative for their time, but exhibiting relatively poor reliability.

Fairchild's first marketed transistor was the 1958 2N697, a mesa transistor developed by Moore, and it was a success. The first batch of 100 was sold to IBM for $150 apiece in order to build the computer for the B-70 bomber. More were sold to Autonetics to build the guidance system for the Minuteman ballistic missile.

At the same time Jean Hoerni developed the planar process which was a major improvement – transistors could be made more easily, at a lower cost and with greater performance and reliability.

The planar process made most other transistor processes obsolete. One such casualty was Philco's transistor division, whose newly built $40 million plant to make their germanium PADT process transistors became nonviable. Within a few years every other transistor company paralleled or licensed the Fairchild planar process. Hoerni's 2N1613 was a major success, with Fairchild licensing the design across the industry.

In 1960, Fairchild built a circuit with four transistors on a single wafer of silicon, thereby creating the first silicon integrated circuit (Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had developed an integrated circuit made of germanium on September 12, 1958, and was awarded a U.S. patent, however Kilby's method was not scalable and the semiconductor industry adopted Fairchild's process to manufacture integrated circuits). The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year.

1960s

Fairchild's Noyce and Texas Instrument's Kilby had independently invented the integrated circuit (IC) based on bipolar technology. In 1960, Noyce invented the planar integrated circuit. The industry preferred Fairchild's invention over Texas Instruments' because the transistors in planar ICs were interconnected by a thin film deposit, whereas Texas Instruments' invention required fine wires to connect the individual circuits. Noyce's invention was enabled by the planar process developed by Jean Hoerni. In turn, Hoerni's planar process was inspired by the surface passivation method developed by Mohamed Atalla at Bell Labs in 1957.

In the early 1960s, Fairchild R&D began experimenting with the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor. The first MOSFET was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959, and demonstrated in early 1960, but was initially overlooked and ignored by Bell Labs. However, the MOSFET generated significant interest at Fairchild. Inspired by the first MOSFET, Chih-Tang Sah built an MOS-controlled tetrode at Fairchild later that year. MOS devices were later commercialized by Fairchild in 1964, with p-channel devices for logic and switching applications. The experiments led to Fairchild's development of MOS integrated circuits.

In 1963, Fairchild hired Robert Widlar to design analog operational amplifiers using Fairchild's process. Since Fairchild's processes were optimized for digital circuits, Widlar collaborated with process engineer Dave Talbert. The collaboration resulted in two revolutionary products – µA702 and µA709.

Hence, Fairchild dominated the analog integrated circuit market, having introduced the first IC operational amplifiers, or "op-amps", Bob Widlar's µA702 (in 1964) and µA709.  In 1968, Fairchild introduced David Fullagar's µA741, which became the most popular IC op amp of all time.

By 1965, Fairchild's process improvements had brought low-cost manufacturing to the semiconductor industry – making Fairchild nearly the only profitable semiconductor manufacturer in the United States. Fairchild dominated the market in DTL, op-amps and mainframe computer custom circuits.

In 1965, Fairchild opened a semiconductor assembly plant on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico. At its peak, the plant employed over a thousand Navajos, the majority of whom were women. In The Shiprock Dedication Commemorative Brochure released by the Fairchild company, the Diné (Navajo) women circuit makers were celebrated as "culture workers who produced circuits as part of the 'reproductive' labor of expressing Navajo culture, rather than merely for wages." This claim was based on the opinion that circuits of the electronic chips had a mere resemblance with the complex geometric patterns on the Navajo rugs. Paul Driscoll, the Shiprock plant manager, spoke of the "untapped wealth of natural characteristics of the Navajo...the inherent flexibility and dexterity of the Indians." Although highly successful during its operation, the plant was closed in 1975. While the Fairchild corporation claims the Diné women were chosen to work in the Shiprock plant due to their "'nimble fingers'" as previously noted, the women of the Shiprock reservation were actually chosen as the workforce due to a lack of labor rights asserted by the women in addition to "cheap, plentiful workers and tax benefits".

Fairchild had not done well in the digital integrated circuit market.  Their first line of ICs was the "micrologic" resistor–transistor logic (RTL) line which was used in the Apollo Guidance Computer.  It had the advantage of being extremely simple – each inverter consisted of just one transistor and two resistors. The logic family had many drawbacks that had made it marginal for commercial purposes, and not well suited for military applications: the logic could only tolerate about 100 millivolts of noise – far too low for comfort. It was awhile before Fairchild relied on more robust designs, such as diode–transistor logic (DTL) which had much better noise margins.

Sales due to Fairchild semiconductor division had doubled each year and by the mid-1960s comprised two-thirds of total sales of the parent company. In 1966, Fairchild's sales were second to those of Texas Instruments, followed in third place by Motorola. Noyce was rewarded with the position of corporate vice-president and hence became the de facto head of the semiconductor division.

However, internal trouble at Fairchild began to surface with a drop in earnings in 1967. There was increasing competition from newer start-ups. The semiconductor division, situated in Mountain View and Palo Alto, California, was actually managed by executives from Syosset, New York, who visited the California sites once a year, even though the semiconductor division earned most of the profits of the company. Fairchild's president at that time, John Carter, had used all the profits to fund acquisitions of unprofitable ventures.

Noyce's position on Fairchild's executive staff was consistently compromised by Sherman Fairchild's faction. Charles E. Sporck was Noyce's operations manager. Sporck was reputed to run the tightest operation in the world. Sporck, Pierre Lamond and most managers had grown upset and disillusioned with corporate focus on unprofitable ventures at the expense of the semiconductor division. Executives at the semiconductor division were allotted substantially fewer stock options compared to other divisions. In March 1967, Sporck was hired away by Peter J. Sprague to National Semiconductor. Sporck brought with him four other Fairchild personnel. Actually, Lamond had previously assembled a team of Fairchild managers in preparation to defect to Plessey, a British company. Lamond had recruited Sporck to be his own boss. When negotiations with Plessey broke down over stock options, Lamond and Sporck succumbed to Widlar's and Talbert's (who were already employed at National Semiconductor) suggestion that they look to National Semiconductor. Widlar and Talbert had earlier left Fairchild to join Molectro, which was later acquired by National Semiconductor.

In the fall of 1967, Fairchild suffered a loss for the first time since 1958 and announced write-offs of $4 million due to excess capacity, which contributed to a total loss of $7.6 million. Profits had sunk to $0.50 a share, compared to $3 a share the previous year, while the value of the stock dropped in half. In October 1967, the board ordered Carter to sell off all of Fairchild's unprofitable ventures. Carter responded to the order by resigning abruptly.

Furthermore, Fairchild's DTL technology was being overtaken by Texas Instruments's faster TTL (transistor–transistor logic).

While Noyce was considered the natural successor to Carter, the board decided not to promote him. Sherman Fairchild led the board to choose Richard Hodgson. Within a few months Hodgson was replaced by a management committee led by Noyce, while Sherman Fairchild looked for a new CEO other than Noyce. In response, Noyce discreetly planned a new company with Gordon Moore, the head of R&D. They left Fairchild to found Intel in 1968 and were soon joined by Andrew Grove and Leslie L. Vadász, who took with them the revolutionary MOS Silicon Gate Technology (SGT), recently created in the Fairchild R&D Laboratory by Federico Faggin who also designed the Fairchild 3708, the world’s first commercial MOS integrated circuit using SGT. Fairchild MOS Division was slow in understanding the potential of the SGT which promised not only faster, more reliable, and denser circuits, but also new device types that could enlarge the field of solid state electronics – for example, CCDs for image sensors, dynamic RAMs, and non-volatile memory devices such as EPROM and flash memories. Intel took advantage of the SGT for its memory development. Federico Faggin, frustrated, left Fairchild to join Intel in 1970 and design the first microprocessors using SGT. Among the investors of Intel were Hodgson and five of the founding members of Fairchild.

Sherman Fairchild hired Lester Hogan, who was the head of Motorola semiconductor division. Hogan proceeded to hire another hundred managers from Motorola to entirely displace the management of Fairchild.

The loss of these iconic executives, coupled with Hogan's displacement of Fairchild managers demoralized Fairchild and prompted the entire exodus of employees to found new companies.

Many of the original founders, otherwise known as the "fairchildren", had left Fairchild in the 1960s to form companies that grew to prominence in the 1970s. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were among the last of the original founders to leave, at which point the brain-drain of talents that had fueled the growth of the company was complete.

A Fairchild advertisement of the time showed a collage of the logos of Silicon Valley with the annotation "We started it all".
It was later, in 1971, Don Hoefler popularizated the name "Silicon Valley USA" in Electronic News. He notes he didn't invent the name. See also Gregory Gromov  and TechCrunch 2014 update  of Hoefler's article.

1970s
Hogan's action to hire from Motorola had Motorola file a lawsuit against Fairchild, which the court then decided in Fairchild's favor in 1973. Judge William Copple ruled that Fairchild's results were so unimpressive that it was impossible to assess damages "under any theory." Hogan was dismissed as president the next year, but remained as vice chairman.

In 1973, Fairchild became the first company to produce a commercial charge-coupled device (CCD) following its invention at Bell Labs. Digital image sensors are still produced today at their descendant company, Fairchild Imaging.  The CCD had a difficult birth, with the devastating effects on Fairchild of the 1973–75 recession that followed on the 1973 oil crisis.

After Intel introduced the 8008 8-bit microprocessor, Fairchild developed the Fairchild F8 8-bit microprocessor, which was according to the CPU Museum "in 1977 the F8 was the world's leading microprocessor in terms of CPU sales."

In 1976, the company released the first video game system to use ROM cartridges, the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (or VES) later renamed Channel F, using the F8 microprocessor. The system was successful initially, but quickly lost popularity when the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (or VCS) was released.

By the end of the 1970s they had few 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 and isoplanar ECL products used in exotic applications like Cray Computers.  Fairchild was being operated at a loss, and the bottomline subsisted mostly from licensing of its patents.

In 1979, Fairchild Camera and Instrument was purchased by Schlumberger Limited, an oil field services company, for $425 million.  At this time, Fairchild's intellectual properties, on which Fairchild had been subsisting, were expiring.

1980s
In 1980, under Schlumberger management, the Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research (FLAIR) was started within Fairchild Research.
In 1985 the lab was separated to form Schlumberger Palo Alto Research (SPAR).

Fairchild research developed the Clipper architecture, a 32-bit RISC-like computer architecture, in the 1980s, resulting in the shipping of the C100 chip in 1986.  The technology was later sold to Intergraph, its main customer.

Schlumberger sold Fairchild to National Semiconductor in 1987 for $200 million. The sale did not include Fairchild's Test Division, which designed and produced automated test equipment (ATE) for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, nor did it include Schlumberger Palo Alto Research.

1990s
In 1997, the reconstituted Fairchild Semiconductor was reborn as an independent company, based in South Portland, Maine with Kirk Pond as CEO.

On March 11, 1997, National Semiconductor Corporation announced the US$550 million sale of a reconstituted Fairchild to the management of Fairchild with the backing of Sterling LLC, a unit of Citicorp Venture Capital. Fairchild carried with it what was mostly the Standard Products group previously segregated by Gil Amelio.

The Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation announced November 27, 1997 that it would acquire the semiconductor division of the Raytheon Corporation for about $120 million in cash. The acquisition was completed on December 31, 1997.

In December 1998, Fairchild announced the acquisition of Samsung's power division, which made power MOSFETs, IGBTs, etc. The deal was finalized in April 1999 for $450 million. To this day, Fairchild remains an important supplier for Samsung.

In August 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 and Mountaintop, Pennsylvania locations are the longest continuously operating semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world, both operating since 1960.

2000s
On March 19, 2001, Fairchild Semiconductor announced that it had completed the acquisition of Intersil Corporation's discrete power business for approximately $338 million in cash. The acquisition moved Fairchild into position as the second-largest power MOSFET supplier in the world, representing a 20 percent share of this $3 billion market that grew 40 percent last year.

On September 6, 2001, Fairchild Semiconductor announced the acquisition of Impala Linear Corporation, based in San Jose, California, for approximately $6 million in stock and cash. Impala brought with it expertise in designing analog power management semiconductors for hand-held devices like laptops, MP3 players, cell phones, portable test equipment and PDAs.

On January 9, 2004, Fairchild Semiconductor CEO Kirk Pond was appointed as a Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, elected by member banks to serve a three-year term.

On April 13, 2005, Fairchild announced appointment of Mark Thompson as CEO of the corporation. Thompson would also be President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors of Fairchild Semiconductor International. He originally joined Fairchild as Executive Vice President, Manufacturing and Technology Group.

On March 15, 2006, Fairchild Semiconductor announced that Kirk P. Pond would retire as Chairman at the company's annual stockholders' meeting on May 3, 2006. Pond would continue as a member of the company’s board of directors. Mark Thompson (then CEO) became Chairman.

On September 1, 2007, New Jersey-based RF semiconductor supplier Anadigics acquired Fairchild Semiconductor's RF design team, located in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, for $2.4 million.

2010s
In April 2011, Fairchild Semiconductor acquired TranSiC, a silicon carbide power transistor company originally based in Sweden.

On November 18, 2015, ON Semiconductor made an offer to acquire Fairchild Semiconductor for $2.4 billion (or $20 per share) after a few months of speculation that Fairchild was seeking a potential buyer.

On April 10, 2016, Fairchild Semiconductor moved its headquarters from San Jose (3030 Orchard Pkwy.) to Sunnyvale (1272 Borregas Ave.)

On September 19, 2016, ON Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor jointly announced that ON Semiconductor had completed its announced $2.4 billion cash acquisition of Fairchild.

In the fall of 2016, the Fairchild 'ON' Semiconductor International closed the West Jordan, Utah, manufacturing plant.

Alumni

 Gil Amelio
 Julius Blank
 Lee Boysel
 Ron Brachman
 Wilfred Corrigan
 Alan L. Davis
 Richard O. Duda
 James M. Early
 Federico Faggin
 Jack Gifford
 Victor Grinich
 Andrew Grove
 Peter E. Hart
 Jean Hoerni
 Lester Hogan
 Eugene Kleiner
 Pierre Lamond
 Hector Levesque
 Richard F. Lyon
 Gordon Moore
 Robert Noyce
 Stav Prodromou
 Chih-Tang Sah
 Jerry Sanders
 Ed Turney
 Leslie L. Vadász
 Frank Wanlass
 Bob Widlar
 Andrew Witkin
 Don Valentine

See also
 Fairchild Aircraft

References

External links

 
 Fairchild Imaging
 IT Corporate Histories Collection link to Fairchild Semiconductor history content on the Computer History Museum site.
 Buying Tomatoes at the Birthplace of Silicon Valley: What happened to the original Fairchild site and to Shockley Lab.
 The Silicon Gate Technology, developed at Fairchild in 1968 by F. Faggin et al., was presented at the IDEM in Washington DC, in Oct. 1968.

Semiconductor companies of the United States
Manufacturing companies based in San Jose, California
Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Computer companies established in 1957
Electronics companies established in 1957
1957 establishments in California
Economy of Cumberland County, Maine
South Portland, Maine
Superfund sites in California
Companies formerly listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq
American companies established in 1957
1999 initial public offerings
2016 mergers and acquisitions