The highly competent team assembled by Shockley later left to form spin-offs such as Fairchild and ultimately others like Intel and AMD.Īnother instance of historical conjecture is that of personal computers. In addition, he may have inadvertently spawned the rest of the semiconductor industry. One of Shockley’s main contributions was his vision of using silicon rather than germanium to make BJTs. I couldn’t confirm that Shockley Semiconductor was the first semiconductor company, but my guess is that it holds such a distinction, although you don’t hear much about it. There many stories about who did what and when. The start of Silicon Valley is an example. And, maybe more importantly, he unknowingly revealed one major truth: how history gets distorted over time. I want to thank Dick for this clarification. His specialties include nonlinear waves, undersea acoustics, and other esoteric subjects. He’s retired emeritus from the Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) in San Diego. Dick is a physicist and received his first degree at Stanford and later a PhD at USC. The note I received that pointed out this discrepancy was from Shockley’s son Dick Shockley. More details can be found in Shockley’s definitive biography Broken Genius by Joel Shurkin. In 1956, Shockley moved to California and established Shockley Semiconductor, one of the first, if not the first, semiconductor company in what we now know as Silicon Valley. Later, in 1948, Shockley developed the first bipolar transistor. However, Shockley was not included in that patent. What I should have said was that Bardeen and Brattain did indeed invent the first transistor, a point contact type. On that day, they demonstrated transistor amplification with a point contact transistor.” 23, 1947 at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories by scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain. “The various historical records say that the transistor was invented Dec. I got it mostly right, but recently I received a note that has me initiating this clarification. Who was the real inventor of the transistor? In January of last year, Electronic Design published my article on the anniversary of the invention of the transistor. Okay, let’s clear this up once and for all.
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