Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore are inextricably linked to the three most important commercial semiconductor companies in the history of semiconductors. First William Shockley brought Noyce and Moore together at his Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto, California to develop silicon transistors. Although the company failed to develop commercially successful products, the team that William…
When Bell Labs announced the creation of the first working MOSFET by Atallah and Kahng in 1960, RCA Labs was immediately interested. Like IBM Research, RCA Labs was not closely coupled to RCA’s product development and manufacturing operations. RCA’s bountiful corporate revenues in the early 1950s accustomed RCA Labs to having had plenty of budget,…
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…