23 Facts About Fairchild Semiconductor

Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California.

Schlumberger bought the firm in 1979 and sold it to National Semiconductor in 1987; Fairchild was spun off as an independent company again in 1997.

In 1955, William Shockley founded Shockley Fairchild Semiconductor Laboratory, funded by Beckman Instruments in Mountain View, California; his plan was to develop a new type of "4-layer diode" that would work faster and have more uses than then-current transistors.

In 1957 the Fairchild Semiconductor division was started with plans to make silicon transistors at a time when germanium was still the most common material for semiconductor use.

Fairchild Semiconductor's first marketed transistor was the 1958 2N697, a mesa transistor developed by Moore, and it was a success.

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In 1960, Fairchild built a circuit with four transistors on a single wafer of silicon, thereby creating the first silicon integrated circuit .

Fairchild Semiconductor grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was making $130 million a year.

In 1963, Fairchild Semiconductor hired Robert Widlar to design analog operational amplifiers using Fairchild Semiconductor's process.

Since Fairchild Semiconductor's processes were optimized for digital circuits, Widlar collaborated with process engineer Dave Talbert.

In 1968, Fairchild Semiconductor introduced David Fullagar's µA741, which became the most popular IC op amp of all time.

Fairchild Semiconductor dominated the market in DTL, op-amps and mainframe computer custom circuits.

In 1965, Fairchild opened a semiconductor assembly plant on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico.

Fairchild Semiconductor had not done well in the digital integrated circuit market.

In 1966, Fairchild Semiconductor's sales were second to those of Texas Instruments, followed in third place by Motorola.

Widlar and Talbert had earlier left Fairchild to join Molectro, which was later acquired by National Semiconductor.

Federico Faggin, frustrated, left Fairchild Semiconductor to join Intel in 1970 and design the first microprocessors using SGT.

In 1973, Fairchild Semiconductor became the first company to produce a commercial charge-coupled device following its invention at Bell Labs.

Fairchild Semiconductor was being operated at a loss, and the bottomline subsisted mostly from licensing of its patents.

Fairchild Semiconductor research developed the Clipper architecture, a 32-bit RISC-like computer architecture, in the 1980s, resulting in the shipping of the C100 chip in 1986.

In 1997, the reconstituted Fairchild Semiconductor was reborn as an independent company, based in South Portland, Maine with Kirk Pond as CEO.

Fairchild Semiconductor carried with it what was mostly the Standard Products group previously segregated by Gil Amelio.

In December 1998, Fairchild Semiconductor announced the acquisition of Samsung's power division, which made power MOSFETs, IGBTs, etc.

Fairchild Semiconductor originally joined Fairchild as Executive Vice President, Manufacturing and Technology Group.