Page 35 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

The Evolution of the Microprocessor 11

being given sufficient authority at Bell Labs. More than once he had
watched other men promoted over him. Also, Shockley personally would
not receive any money from the transistor patents he had helped AT&T
secure. He decided to leave and found his own company to make semi-
conductor products.
In the fall of 1955, Shockley secured financially backing from
California businessman Arnold Beckman and chose Palo Alto, California,
as the location for his new company. At the time Palo Alto was notable
only as the home of Stanford University. Shockley had received strong
encouragement from Frederick Terman, the Stanford Dean of
Engineering, to locate nearby. The university’s engineering school would
be an ideal place to recruit new employees, but perhaps Shockley was
ultimately persuaded by more personal reasons. He had grown up in
Palo Alto, and his mother still lived there. Over the next 20 years,
Shockley’s decision would cause this sleepy valley of orchards to be
transformed into the famous “Silicon Valley.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Shockley had little luck hiring any of his
former colleagues from Bell Labs, and so he turned to a younger gen-
eration. He recruited some of the brightest engineers, physicists, and
chemists from around the country, and in February 1956, Shockley
Semiconductor was founded. That same year, Shockley, Bardeen, and
Brattain were together awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their
invention of the transistor. Shockley’s brilliance as a scientist had
received the highest recognition, and yet it was his management style
that would doom his company.
Feeling that his subordinates at Bell Labs had tried to steal the credit
for his ideas, Shockley was determined that it would not happen at his
own company. All ideas and all development direction were to come
from him. The talented men he hired grew restless under his heavy-
handed management. In 1957, eight of Shockley’s recruits, led by Robert
Noyce and Gordon Moore, approached Beckman to ask that Shockley be
removed from management and allowed to act only as a technical con-
sultant. Beckman considered this seriously for a month before deciding
to leave Shockley in charge. On September 18, 1957, the group that
would become known in Silicon Valley as the “traitorous eight” resigned.
Shockley Semiconductor continued operating another 11 years but never
turned a profit. Bill Shockley never again had a significant influence on
the semiconductor industry he had helped to start.
The day after the “eight” resigned they founded a new company,
Fairchild Semiconductor, in which Fairchild Camera and Instruments
provided the financial backing. The company was becoming involved in
components for missiles and satellites, and it was clear that transistors
would play an important part. Fairchild Semiconductor made rapid
progress and by 1959 was profitably selling silicon junction transistors.