William Shockley

William Bradford Shockley (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) American physicist, eugenicist and co-inventor of the transistor with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. His attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 60s led directly to the creation of Silicon Valley. In his later life, Shockley was a "superb" professor at Stanford.http://www.pbs.org/transistor/album1/shockley/shockley3.html

Shockley Semiconductor

Eventually he was given a chance to run his own company as a division of his Caltech friend's successful electronics firm. In 1955, he joined Beckman Instruments, where he was appointed as the Director of Beckman's newly founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division in Mountain View, California. With his prestige and Beckman's capital, Shockley attempted to lure some of his former colleges from Bell Labs to his new lab, but none of them would come to join him. Instead he started scouring universities for the brightest graduates to build a company from scratch, one that would be run "his way".

Related Topics:
1955 - Beckman Instruments - Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory - Mountain View, California

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"His way" could generally be summed up as "domineering and increasingly paranoid". In one famous incident he claimed that a secretary's cut thumb was an attempt to poison him, and he demanded lie detector tests to find the culprit. It was later demonstrated the cut was due to a broken thumbtack on the office door, and from that point the research staff was increasingly hostile. Meanwhile his demands to create a new and technically difficult device, now known as the Shockley diode, meant that the project was moving very slowly.

Related Topics:
Lie detector - Shockley diode

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In late 1957 eight of his researchers, whom he later named "the Traitorous Eight", resigned and started Fairchild Semiconductor after being given seed capital from Fairchild to form a semiconductor division. This moment can be pointed to as the birth of silicon valley. Among the "Traitorous Eight" were Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, who themselves would leave Fairchild to create Intel. Other offspring companies of Fairchild Semiconductor include National Semiconductor and Advanced Micro Devices.

Related Topics:
1957 - Traitorous Eight - Fairchild Semiconductor - Seed capital - Fairchild - Robert Noyce - Gordon E. Moore - Intel - National Semiconductor - Advanced Micro Devices

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Shockley Semiconductor did not, however, make Shockley a fortune or even turn a profit. While still trying to get his three-state device to work, Fairchild and Texas Instruments both introduced the first integrated circuits, making Shockley's work essentially superfluous.

Related Topics:
Texas Instruments - Integrated circuit

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A group of about 30 colleagues have met on and off at Stanford since 1956 to reminisce about their time with Shockley and his central role in sparking the information technology revolution, its organizer saying "Shockley is the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley." http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/02/shockley1023.html

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