Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory

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The original Shockley Lab building and plaque at 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View. In 2009 there was a supermarket in the building

The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was the first company to develop electronic components such as transistors on the basis of the semiconductor material silicon , which is commonly used today , and thus laid the foundation for Silicon Valley in the US state of California .

history

The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was founded by the namesake William B. Shockley in 1956 as a department of the laboratory equipment manufacturer Beckman Instruments in Mountain View . At the time, transistors were primarily made from the semiconductor material germanium , which has poor technical properties compared to silicon. Shockley was not the first to come up with the idea of ​​a silicon-based semiconductor technology: As early as 1954, the semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments announced silicon transistors. Shockley wanted to improve the then inadequate production processes for silicon ingots . The reason for the technical difficulties at the time was the high melting point of silicon. Shockley was able to win some specialists for this purpose.

In addition to the development of bipolar transistors , which consist of three differently doped semiconductor layers, he worked on then novel semiconductor components with four layers, such as the so-called Shockley diode , which, however, did not have the expected significance due to the development of integrated circuits a few years later obtained. Shockley at the time was afraid that his work would be known too early and kept results a secret from even his closest collaborators. This, and Shockley's idiosyncratic management style, caused repeated tensions in the team, which in 1957 resulted in the dismissal of eight key employees, including the later Intel co- founder Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce . Shockley referred to it as the Traitorous Eight (Eng .: treacherous eight). A few months after leaving the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, they founded the semiconductor manufacturer Fairchild Semiconductor .

The division was bought by the defense company Clevite in 1960 , and closed shortly after it was taken over by ITT Corporation in 1968.

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