Fairchild Semiconductor
My first job as a graduate Electrical Engineer was with Honeywell in Minneapolis. Not exactly Silicon Valley. I took the Honeywell job after a good on-campus interview as I was about to graduate with a BSEE
from the University of New Mexico, and Honeywell flew me up to Minneapolis in April for an onsite interview and tour. Being from New Mexico I was stunned with how green everything was, and they even had lakes with water in them. One of my goals
was to be at least a two day’s drive from the family home so I would not have to be there for all of the family functions, and Minnesota met that requirement. So when I was offered a job in semiconductor evaluation working on the Apollo program,
I took it.
Several important things happened while I was in Minneapolis: I learned what cold weather is really like, I ended up working two jobs, semiconductor evaluation and vibration analysis –made enough money to buy a Corvette, and had
contact with engineers from Fairchild Semiconductor. The Fairchild Engineers were impressed with my ability to turn knobs on a curve tracer, and they offered me a job in Palo Alto. The job offer came after they flew me out to the Bay Area
for a job interview. That was pretty interesting because when I knew I was coming out for the interview I contacted a UNM classmate who worked in Mountain View. He was happy to see me and took me to North Beach in San Francisco the evening
before I had the interview. He introduced me to the Condor Club and Carol Doda. This is 1965 when the topless bathing suit and silicone enhancement was big time. After that evening, I would have paid to move here. Somehow despite a
massive hangover I passed the job interview, got the job and here I am.
I went to work as a semiconductor reliability and test engineer at Fairchild R&D in 1965. It turned out that this was a very good time to get into the very new semiconductor
industry. Fairchild was only a few years old, having been formed by the “Traitorous Eight” out of Shockley Semiconductor. Bob Noyce (co-invented the integrated circuit) was the President, and Gordon Moore (of Moore’s Law fame)
was the Director of Fairchild R&D. I fairly quickly got out of the discreet transistor reliability and test work and moved into the very new field of MOS IC design and development. In those days the design engineer did everything: the
actual circuit design, the layout of the circuit, the device fabrication, the device testing… The first device I designed was a 1024 bit Read Only Memory, fabricated in P-Channel metal gate MOS. I think the wafer size was 2” diameter.
The smallest geometry was probably about 10 microns. Note that now the smallest geometry on commercially available integrated circuits is 0.014 microns, or .00000055”, and the wafer size is 12” diameter. The number of transistors on
an individual integrated circuit has increased from approximately 1000 in 1967-1968 to perhaps 10 Billion now.
Immediately after starting at Fairchild R&D I was thrust into a device physics class that was taught by Andy Grove.
Andy taught it out of a loose leaf notebook called the “Fairchild Basic Data Handbook”. Every page was stamped with a “Fairchild Semiconductor Company Private” stamp. This was by far the hardest course I ever took.
Andy was a tough teacher, and the other engineers in the class had been at Fairchild for a year or so and had already learned much of the material through their daily work. I was drinking from a fire hose. Note that in 1967 Andy published the course
material including most of the “Basic Data Handbook” as Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices; John Wiley and Sons.
Working at R&D was pretty cool. There wasn’t
a lot of pressure to really accomplish much. I wrote several papers that were published in technical journals, and every February they sent us to the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in Philadelphia. There we interacted with
engineers from other companies, most of which were on the East Coast, notably Bell Labs. There weren’t any other West Coast semiconductor companies yet, and Silicon Valley had to wait until 1971 to be named by Don Hoefler in his newsletter “Microelectronics
News”. I really think the reason that we were sent to the ISSCC was to be reminded that the weather on the East Coast was horrible. Philadelphia in February is unbearable for California kids. No one ever moved east.
The problem
for me with R&D is we didn’t ever really make anything that was sold. Research and technical papers were all that came out of the place. The real Fairchild was in Mountain View. I applied and was accepted to be the first Supervising
Engineer in the newly formed MOS Integrated Circuit group in the headquarters facility. It turned out that I was the youngest Supervising Engineer in the company. My secretary called me “The Kid”. I was 25.
The job
in Mountain View was very challenging. We developed a variety of digital logic circuits, all on P-Channel MOS. However, Fairchild itself was not doing great, especially after Noyce, Moore, Grove and several others left to form Intel. I think
I could have gone with them, but I doubted that they would be successful as they were too R&D and not enough real world engineers. I certainly got that wrong. I was at Fairchild when the top management from Motorola was hired to fix the company.
They were known as Hogan’s Heroes after a TV show of that name and because the leader was Lester Hogan. Lester was very impressive in that once you were introduced to him he knew your name. I ended up working for Jack Gates, a big ex-football
player with a larger than life personality. I quit after a total of five years at Fairchild after receiving an offer to go to a startup company. One other note, while at Fairchild I got married, we had two sons, bought our first house and I received
my Masters in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University. It was a very busy five years.