Site Record
Metadata
Site# |
190 |
Site Name |
Fairchild Semiconductor |
Description |
Fairchild Semiconductor's founding was based on Robert Noyce and his seven colleagues building a better transistor. The eight scientists (Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni, and Jay Last) had all been working for Shockley Semiconductor in California and had disagreed with William Shockley over the future of transistors. Rather than go along with Schockley and his 4-layer diode, in 1957 the eight men all left the company and formed their own company to pursue the bipolar transistor. With $3,500 of their own money, the eight men also brought in Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corporatioin as a $1.5 million investor, giving Fairchild an option to buy the company within eight years. In 1958, Bob Noyce developed the monolithic integrated circuit, "a miniature electrical circuit on a fingernail-size wafer of crystalline silicon." Jean Hoerni took that idea and expanded it - putting a collector, base and emitter on one plane, creating the planar transistor. Fairchild Semiconductor had become a subsidiary of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. when it opened its location in South Portland in the early 1960s, initially involved in the manufacture, test, and assembly of transistors for use in radios, oscilloscopes, and other instrumentation. The company first opened in South Portland at 185 Ocean Street in June of 1962 (the building that had previously been home to Boland's Auto). **According to Jim Whitworth who was an engineer and one of the first employees at Fairchild Semiconductor in South Portland, the company had roughly 85 employees at that Ocean Street location - designing, engineering, and manufacturing - but quickly outgrew the site. Fairchild had contracted for the spec building at 333 Western Avenue; the building needed to be built out to meet the needs of Fairchild. Construction had progressed enough by February of 1963 that the company was able to relocate to the new building. Other highlights in the history of Fairchild Semiconductor: - 1979 - Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. is acquired by and merged into Schlumberger, Ltd. (New York) for $363 million - 1987 - Schlumberger, Ltd. sells its Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. subsidiary to National Semiconductor Corp. for $122 million - 1997 - National Semiconductor sells the majority ownership interest in Fairchild Semiconductor to an investment group (made up of Fairchild managers, including Kirk Pond, and Citicorp Venture Capital Ltd.) for $550 million - 1999 - in a public offering in August 1999, Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc., becomes a publicly-traded corporation on the New York Stock Exchange - 2016 - Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is acquired by ON Semiconductor for $2.4 billion |
