The launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, was a red flag to the US government. It signaled the USSR’s development of ICBMs that could deliver nuclear weapons across oceans. In response, the US government ramped up its own ICBM program with the completion of the Atlas and development of the…
It’s hardly surprising that semiconductor companies were reluctant to invest much energy into MOSFET development in the early 1960s. Early MOSFETs were 100 times slower than bipolar transistors, and they were considered unstable, for good reason: their electrical characteristics drifted badly and unpredictably with time and temperature. A lot of research and development work would…
No company was better equipped and better positioned to capitalize on the development of the first MOSFET than Fairchild Semiconductor. Founded in 1957 to work on silicon transistors, Jean Hoerni developed the planar process and Robert Noyce developed the ideas for the first practical integrated circuit (IC) based on Hoerni’s planar process just months before…