Founded in 1955, Shockley Semiconductor was the brainchild of William Shockley. When he was ready to leave Bell Labs, he decided to form a company to build ...
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The original Shockley building at 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View,
California, was a produce market in 2006 and has since been demolished.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of
Beckman Instruments, Inc., became in 1956 the first establishment, in what came to be known as
Silicon Valley, to work on silicon semiconductor devices.
In 1957, the division's eight leading scientists resigned and became the core of
a new venture of an existing technology company. The Beckman division never recovered from that loss of personnel, and was purchased by
Clevite in 1960, then sold to
ITT in 1968, and shortly after, officially closed.
Shockley's return to California
William Shockley had studied his undergraduate degree at
Caltech and moved east to complete his PhD at
MIT. He graduated in 1936 and immediately started work at
Bell Labs. Through the 1930s and '40s he worked on
electron devices, and increasingly with semiconductor materials. This led to the 1947 creation of the first
transistor, in partnership with
John Bardeen,
Walter Brattain
and others. Through the early 1950s a series of events led to Shockley
becoming increasingly upset with Bell's management, and especially what
he saw as a slighting when Bell promoted Bardeen and Brattain's names
ahead of his own on the transistor's patent. However, others that worked
with him suggested the reason for these issues was Shockley's abrasive
management style, and it was this reason that he was constantly passed
over for promotion within the company. These issues came to a head in
1953 and he took a sabbatical and returned to Caltech as a visiting
professor.
Here Shockley struck up a friendship with
Arnold Orville Beckman, who had invented the
pH meter in 1934. By this time Shockley had become convinced that the natural capabilities of
silicon meant it would eventually replace
germanium as the primary material for transistor construction.
Texas Instruments
had recently started production of silicon transistors (in 1954), and
Shockley thought he could do one better. Beckman agreed to back
Shockley's efforts in this area, under the umbrella of his company,
Beckman Instruments. However, Shockley's mother was aging and often ill, and he decided to live closer to her house in
Palo Alto.
[1][2]
The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened for business in a small commercial lot in nearby
Mountain View
in 1956. Initially he tried to hire some of his former workers from
Bell Labs, but none of them wanted to leave the east coast, then the
center of most high-tech research. Instead, he assembled a team of young
scientists and engineers and set about designing a new type of
crystal-growth system that could produce single-crystal silicon
boules, at that time a difficult prospect given silicon's high melting point.
Shockley diodes
While work on the transistors continued, Shockley hit upon the idea
of using a four-layer device (transistors are three) that would have the
novel quality of locking into the "on" or "off" state with no further
control inputs. Similar circuits required several transistors, typically
three, so for large switching networks the new diodes would greatly
reduce complexity.
[3][4] The four-layer diode is now called the
Shockley diode.
Shockley became convinced that the new device would be just as
important as the transistor, and kept the entire project secret, even
within the company. This led to increasingly paranoid behavior; in one
famed incident he was convinced that a secretary's cut finger was a plot
to injure him and ordered
lie detector
tests on everyone in the company. This was combined with Shockley's
vacillating management of the projects; sometimes he felt that getting
the basic transistors into immediate production was paramount, and would
de-emphasize the Shockley diode project in order to make the "perfect"
production system. This upset many of the employees, and mini-rebellions
became commonplace.
[5]
Traitorous eight
Eventually a group of the youngest employees went over Shockley's
head to Arnold Beckman, demanding that Shockley be replaced. Beckman
initially appeared to agree with their demands, but over time made a
series of decisions that supported Shockley. Fed up, the group broke
ranks and sought support from
Sherman Fairchild's
Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts. In 1957,
Fairchild Semiconductor was started with plans for making silicon transistors. Shockley told the young scientists --
Julius Blank,
Victor Grinich,
Jean Hoerni,
Eugene Kleiner,
Jay Last,
Gordon Moore,
Robert Noyce, and
Sheldon Roberts -- that were leaving that they were the "
traitorous eight" and they would never be successful.
[6][7]
The eight later left Fairchild and started companies of their own, among them
Intel,
Advanced Micro Devices
and others. Over a period of 20 years, 65 different companies were
started by 1st or 2nd generation teams that traced their origins in the
valley to Shockley Semiconductor.
[8]
Shockley never managed to make the four-layer diode a commercial
success, in spite of eventually working out the technical details and
entering production in the 1960s. The introduction of
integrated circuits
allowed the multiple transistors needed to produce a switch to be
placed on a single "chip", thereby nullifying the parts-count advantage
of Shockley's design. However, the company did have a number of other
successful projects, including the first strong theoretical study of
solar cells, developing the seminal
Shockley-Queisser limit that places an upper limit of 30% efficiency on basic silicon solar cells.
See also
- Thyristor – a concept first proposed by William Shockley
References
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, Inc., became in 1956 the first establishment, in what came to be known as Silicon Valley, to work on silicon semiconductor devices.The original Shockley building at 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View, California, was a produce market in 2006 and has since been demolished.
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