Founding Fairchild Semiconductor

Fairchild began in business by making silicon transistors, which at the time had to be wired together by hand after they were produced. It was a cumbersome, laborious process, and it soon became clear to Fairchild’s founders that the commercial success of their venture rested on the development of a better production method. During the startup phase at Fairchild Semiconductor there had been no sense of bosses and employees. There had been only a common sense of struggle out on a frontier. Everyone had internalized the goals of the venture4. They didn't need orders from superiors. Besides, everyone had been so young! Noyce, the administrator or chief coordinator or whatever he should be called, had been just about the oldest person on the premises, and he had been barely 30. And now, in the early 1960s, thanks to his athletic build and his dark brown hair, he still looked very young.

As Fairchild expanded, Noyce didn't even bother trying to find "experienced management personnel." Out here in California, in the semiconductor industry, they didn't exist. Instead, he recruited engineers right out of colleges and graduate schools and gave them major responsibilities. There was no "staff," no "top management" other than the eight partners themselves.

Noyce held weekly meetings of people from all parts of the operation, and whatever had to be worked out was worked out right there in the room. Noyce wanted them all to keep internalizing the company's goals and to provide their own motivations, just as they had during the start-up phase. If they did that, they would have the capacity to make their own decisions.

The young engineers who came to work for Fairchild could scarcely believe how much responsibility was suddenly thrust upon them. Some 24-year-old just out of graduate school would find himself in charge of a major project with no one looking over his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he couldn't stand it, and he would go to Noyce and ask him what to do. And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100-ampere eyes, listen, and say: "Look, here are your guidelines. You've got to consider A, you've got to consider B, and you've got to consider C." Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: "But if you think I'm going to make your decision for you, you're mistaken."

IC Development

Noyce, in his capacity as director of research and development, joined Fairchild co-founder Gordon Moore in investigating methods of connecting transistors that would eliminate after-production wiring. After a time, they developed a theory that seemed plausible, based on the idea of combining transistors in a solid block of silicon. Noyce began making notes in his lab notebook, unaware that a similar theory had already been arrived at 5 the summer before in the laboratories of Texas Instruments, where a young scientist named Jack Kilby had spent months wrestling with the same problem.

Texas Instruments would publicly unveil Kilby’s discovery, now called the integrated circuit, at the Institute of Radio Engineers Show in early 1959. This accelerated the efforts at Fairchild Semiconductor, which were now focused on making the connections between the tiny transistors and components an integral part of the manufacturing process itself. Jean Hoerni, one of Fairchild’s original founders, came up with a workable method when he developed the "planar" process. This process, which uses oxidation and heat diffusion to form a smooth insulating layer on the surface of a silicon chip, allowed the embedding of insulated layers of transistors and other elements in silicon. By using the insulation afforded by the planar process, each layer could now be isolated electrically, which eliminated the need to cut apart the layers and wire them back together as had been necessary in the past.

Fairchild Semiconductor filed a patent for a semiconductor integrated circuit based on the planar process on July 30, 1959, touching off a decade-long legal battle6 between Fairchild and Texas Instruments, which previously had filed a similar patent based on Kilby’s technology. Eventually, the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals upheld Noyce’s claims on interconnection techniques but gave Kilby and Texas Instruments credit for building the first working integrated circuit.

By 1968, Fairchild Semiconductor, now one of the cornerstones of the semiconductor industry, had become a large company with many divisions. Its discoveries had made its founders wealthy men, and many of them had left the parent company to start businesses of their own. Noyce, noting the success of these young, energetic companies, longed to do it all over again. In 1968, he and Gordon Moore left Fairchild Semiconductor to form a new company that would specialize in developing integrated circuits for the computer industry.

Intel

They called their new company Integrated Electronics, which was quickly shortened to Intel. Although the profits in building silicon transistors were hard to resist, Noyce and his associates decided to take an entirely different tack, instead focusing on developing semiconductor memories that could be used to replace the magnetic core memory systems in older computers.

In short time, the small team of scientists at Intel developed a microchip that could store the ones and zeroes of computer language, introducing its first random access computer memory chip (RAM) in 1970. From there, it was only a matter of time before Intel’s researchers figured out the way to contain the entire workings of a computer on one chip, creating the first microprocessor, or microchip. Its creation set off a veritable whirlwind of 7 developmental activity as semiconductor companies including Texas Instruments, Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices and others rushed to bring their own versions to market.

As much a futurist as entrepreneur and inventor, Noyce would step aside from day-to-day management of Intel in 1978 to become chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association, an association started by a group of Silicon Valley executives to address industry-wide concerns that included the growing pressure put on U.S. semiconductor companies by overseas manufacturers, especially those in the Pacific Rim and Asia. In 1988, he became president of Sematech, a joint industry-government research consortium designed to help develop new manufacturing technologies for American chip makers. He would become an ardent lobbyist8 on behalf of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

Noyce was working to prevent the acquisition of a Silicon Valley materials supplier by a Japanese concern when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in July 1990 at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 62 years old.

Task I

Speak on Noyce’s leadership style.

Task II

Describe the role of Robert Noyce in the development of semiconductor industry.

Task III

Tell about Noyce’s role in the development of integrated circuits manufacturing techniques.

HERBERT KROEMER

“ If in discussing a semiconductor problem, you cannot draw an energy band diagram, then you don’t know what you are talking about.”

An unusual condition was imposed on Herbert Kroemer at the start of his research career 50 years ago. He was not allowed to touch anything in his workplace, the Telecommuni­cations Laboratory of the German Postal Service. The fear was that this recent graduate in theoretical physics would break something. Far from constraining him, the restriction expanded his horizons[22].

With just pencil and paper, he began sketching out theo­ries that would resonate across the entire world[23] of semicon­ductor science. And that work would culminate in a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 and IEEE Medal of Honor in 2002, the latter for "contributions to high-frequency transistors and hot-electron devices, especially heterostructure devices from heterostructure bipolar transistors to lasers, and their molecular beam epitaxy technology."

While his theories led to products that earned their man­ufacturers billions of dollars, none of the profits came to Kroe­mer. "That really doesn't bug me," he says, sitting in his small and modestly decorated office on the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, where he is now professorofelectrical and computer engineering and materials.

IEEE Fellow Kroemer never tried to develop applicationsof his work - or even predict them. He told IEEE Spectrum, “'The principal applications of any suffi­ciently new and innovative technology always have been and will continue to be applications created by that new technol­ogy. " So he doesn't begrudge others the fruits of his ideas[24].

"I've always called myself an opportunist," he says. "This is supposed to be a derogatory term, but I'm not one bit ashamed of accepting opportunities. In the scientific sense, I wasanopportunist who was looking for challenging problems."

Too Many Lists

In high school in Germany, Kroemer played around with chemistry experiments but soon turned to physics. "I liked the beautiful logic of a structure with a relatively small number of fundamental principles from which you could draw far-reaching conclusions," he says. A university chem­istry course that required memorization of lists and lists of chemical reactions destroyed any remaining inter­est in that science.

He entered the University of Jena in East Germany in 1947, then left for West Germany the next year during the Berlin airlift and was accepted at the University of Gottingen. Four years later he received his Ph.D. for a theoretical dissertation on germanium transistors that discussed electron transport in high electrical fields. It broke little new ground, and he takes no particular pride in it. He explained some experiments, he says, but the expla­nation later proved completely wrong.

Postal Service

In 1952, when Kroemer received his Ph.D., an academic career was out of the question. The lines of succession4 at existing Ger­man universities were long, and no new ones were being established. So he joined the Telecommunications Research Laboratory of the German Postal Service in Darmstadt.

The postal serviceran the telephone system and had a small semiconductor research group - some 10 scientists - in its telecommunications labora­tory. That group hired Kroemer to answer any theoretical ques­tions that arose, to give talks on any subject he thought rele­vant - and to keep his hands off the research equipment.

"I enjoyed this thoroughly," he recalls. For one, he had liked the role of teacher since high school, when his physics teacher asked him to prepare and deliver a lecture to the class. For another, being at the researchers' beck and call5 presented him with a wide variety of problems in diverse subjects.

In solving one of those problems, he went against the con­ventional wisdom of the time. Researchers were developing pn junctions of indium and germanium. They did this by deposit­ing a layer of indium on a layer of germanium, then heating the structure to form the pn junction. Kroemer was trying to understand how exactly the junction formed.

Obviously the molten indium dissolved some of the ger­manium, and the belief was that it diffused into the germanium beyond the layer in which the germanium dissolved. But Kroe­mer concluded that the process was one of recrystallization - the heated indium dissolves some of the germanium, and then upon cooling the germanium precipitates out and recrystallizes, incorporating some of the indium atoms, which replace some of the germanium atoms in the lattice.

What he didn't know was that researchers in the United States, at General Electric Co. and RCA Corp., had simulta­neously reached the same conclusion.

But what he did know was that to be at the research fore­front, he needed to leave the German Postal Service and get to the United States. He started looking for a way to get there.

Researchers from other countries occasionally visited the lab in which he worked, curious about this small semiconduc­tor research group. In 1953 one visitor was William Shockley, then at Bell Telephone Laboratories. "I spent about two hours with him," Kroemer said. "We were having a marvelous time. I told him about the work that I'd done for my Ph.D. disser­tation, and about some of my ideas of how to make transis­tors fast by putting an electric field into the base. He seemed intrigued by that."

Kroemer asked him about coming to Bell Labs, but Shockley, as an official visitor, told Kroemer that he would have to go through official channels, starting with informing Postal Ser­vice management of his intentions to apply for a job in the United States. The young researcher was so grateful for the job he had at the Postal Service that he was "terribly squeamish6 about telling my management that I wanted to leave."

Later in 1953, the Darmstadt lab had another U.S. visitor: Ed Herold from RCA. Kroemer asked him whether RCA was working on npn transistors (back then pnp transistors domi­nated). Herold was careful in his responses; but Kroemer guessed out loud what the RCA researchers were doing, what alloys they were using (lead-antimony), the percentage of the antimony, and the alloy temperatures. His guesses proved quite dose to RCA's experiments, and the impressed Herold didn't hesitate to offer him a job. (All the same, it took a year for Kroemer to obtain a visa, even with RCA's help.)

At RCA in Princeton, N.J., Kroemer did theoretical research on an impurity diffusion process for building transistors. In the diffusion process, the doping of the base region was delib­erately graded from a high value at the emitter to a lower value at the collector. Because this gradient introduced a built-in electric drift field into the base, the result was called a drift transistor. The first commercial product to come out of that research - the 2N247 - had a high-frequency performance far beyond that of other commercially available transistors of its time. Its power gain cutoff frequency7 of 132 MHz made it suit­able for use in FM radios.

While Kroemer was theorizing about how a drift field could make transistors switch faster, he had an idea about grading the basic semiconductor itself. If an alloy of two semiconduc­tors replaced the single semiconductor, it could be given a continually varying composition to change its band gap, which is a measure of the amount of energy required to move an elec­tron from a semiconductor's valence band to its conduction band. This varying band gap would be another way to intro­duce a drift field into the base, again in order to improve tran­sistor frequency performance.

He had mentioned varying a material's band gap in a paper while still in Germany, but expanded the idea and in 1957 pub­lished two papers about it, one in the RCA Review, another in the Proceedings of the IEEE.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 835