Semiconductor History

Raytheon sold its semiconductor operations in Mountain View CA to Fairchild in 1997. Fairchild was then a re-incarnation, not the original Silicon Valley pioneer. Raytheon had originally purchased Mountain View's Rheem in 1959, two years after it had spun out from Fairchild, led by Ed Baldwin who had moved from Hughes Semiconductors to Fairchild. Raytheon was expanding its transistor manufacturing into California through the acquisition. Like many companies, Raytheon expanded into bipolar and MOS circuits. Cyrus Madavi, who led Burr-Brown through to acquisition by TI came from Raytheon. I worked for Hughes, Raytheon and Burr-Brown.

Double diffused base silicon mesa transistor 2N697, Fairchild's first product was launched commercially at the Wescon show in August 1958. Fairchild's first product was a commercial success due to its benefits over other transistors on the market. IBM were Fairchild's first customer, using the 2N697 as a ferrite core memory driver on the XB-70 avionics contract. IBM paid $150 per transistor for the first order, 30 times the industry price. The Fairchild 2N697 was silicon, hence it had high temperature benefits over germanium and had lower power dissipation than other silicon equivalents, due to Fairchild's diffusion process. Fairchild Semiconductor (in the late 50s and 60s) were one of the most innovative and influential companies in semiconductor history, developing the planar process and the first integrated circuits.

Fairchild Micrologic Devices Fairchild introduced the Micrologic standard logic family in 1961. These were the world's first ICs, based on Jean Hoerni's revolutionary planar process which laid the blueprint for all future integrated circuits. There were eventually 25 standard logic RTL ICs. Products in the family included the 900, a buffer, 901, a 3 gate counter adapter, the 902, a flip-flop, 923, a JK flip flop and the 959, a 4bit latch. Above is a  3-input NOR device from the early 60s (uL903) in a metal can, and a later packaged JK flip flop (uL923) in a lower cost epoxy topped package. During the 1960s, Fairchild became the first semiconductor company to establish a lower cost assembly facility in the Far East (Hong Kong). Decapped uL903 Micrologic Device The 3-input NOR from Fairchild became the basic building block of the Apollo guidance computer, designed by MIT and built by Raytheon. It used 5,000 3-input NOR ICs and was the first major application of ICs. ...