Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was the first company that developed electronic components such as transistors based on the now commonly used semiconductor material silicon and thus laid the foundation of Silicon Valley in the U.S. state of California.
History
The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was founded by the namesake of William B. Shockley in 1956 as a department of laboratory equipment manufacturer Beckman Instruments in Mountain View. At the time, transistors were made primarily from the semiconductor material germanium, which is opposite to silicon which is technically inferior properties. Shockley was not the first with the idea of a silicon-based semiconductor technology: Already in 1954, the semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments silicon transistors announced. Shockley wanted to improve the then insufficient production of silicon ingots. The reason of that technical difficulties lay in the high melting point of silicon. Shockley won for this purpose some specialists.
In addition to the development of bipolar transistors, consisting in the construction of three differently doped semiconductor layers, he worked on then novel semiconductor devices having four layers, such as the so-called Shockley diode, which, however, by a few years later -onset development of integrated circuits have not been the expected importance obtained. Shockley had at the time afraid that his work be known early and gave results even to the closest associates secret. By and by Shockley's idiosyncratic management style, it came as a team to repeated stresses that the 1957 dismissal of eight key employees, including the later Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce resulted. Shockley referred to them as the Traitorous Eight (German: traitorous eight ). A few months after the departure from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, they founded the semiconductor manufacturer Fairchild Semiconductor.
The department was bought in 1960 by the defense companies Clevite, and a short time after the takeover by the ITT Corporation in 1968 closed.