Fairchild Semiconductor

Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc.
legal form
founding	October 1, 1957, founded in 1997
Seat	San Jose , United States
management	Mark S. Thompson ( CEO , 2014)
Number of employees	8,272 (December 28, 2014)
sales	1,433,000,000 US dollars (2014)
Branch	Semiconductor industry
Website	www.fairchildsemi.com

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The Fairchild Semiconductor , based in San Jose , California , USA , is an American semiconductor manufacturer , which since September 2016 ON Semiconductor belongs.

history

In 1957, eight engineers from William B. Shockley's Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory , a division of Beckman Instruments in Mountain View , California, decided to leave the facility and start their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The group later became known as the Traitorous Eight (German "Die Verräterischen Acht"). The eight men were Julius Blank , Victor Grinich , Jean Hoerni , Eugene Kleiner , Jay Last , Gordon Moore , Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts . They turned to Sherman Mills Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instruments to fund their project . He funded the project with $ 1.5 million and Fairchild Semiconductor became a subsidiary of Fairchild Camera. Fairchild Semiconductor was founded on October 1, 1957.

In 1958 Robert Noyce succeeded in producing the first monolithic integrated circuit ; this development was patented in 1961. The invention was based mainly on the planar technology developed by Fairchild , with which for the first time several transistors, diodes and resistors could be placed on a silicon substrate ("chip").

Another milestone followed in 1965. The first operational amplifier manufactured entirely in a housing was produced.

In the years that followed, Fairchild dominated the market with diode-transistor logic , operational amplifiers, and custom mainframe circuits. The competition grew stronger, especially Texas Instruments . The transistor-transistor logic was developed by several companies in the same period. In 1968 Moore and Noyce left Fairchild, founded Intel and developed MOS-FET technologies there .

In 1975 the 8-bit microprocessor F8 appeared , which was also used in the world's first game console with ROM chips Channel F from 1976 . 26 games were developed for this purpose.

In 1979 Fairchild was bought by Schlumberger , who sold the company on to National Semiconductor in 1987 , which Fairchild spun off as an independent company in 1997.

In the early 1980s, Fairchild developed its own microprocessor architecture, the Clipper processor , which was sold to Intergraph in 1987 after it was taken over by National Semiconductor .

After Fairchild was introduced as an independent company in 1997, it went public again in 1999 under the symbol FCS . Also in 1997, Fairchild announced the takeover of the semiconductor division of the US defense company Raytheon .

In 2005, Mark S. Thompson joined the company's board of directors and has been CEO since then .

In October 2015, Fairchild Semiconductor put itself up for sale. On November 18, 2015, it was announced that ON Semiconductor intended to acquire Fairchild Semiconductor for $ 2.4 billion . In December 2015, however, Fairchild received another offer from a group of Chinese investors.

On September 19, 2016, ON Semiconductor's acquisition of Fairchild, previously announced for $ 2.4 billion in cash, was completed.