This merger is particularly significant, not for the technology which ON Semi will acquire – which is, no doubt, complementary to its portfolio – but rather because of the Fairchild name.
If you were to construct a family tree of the semiconductor industry, it’s pretty much certain that every modern company could trace its heritage back to Fairchild. Fairchild, meanwhile, had no problems tracing its lineage – it only had to go back one step to Shockley Semiconductor.
William Shockley, a legend of the semiconductor industry, was manager of the group at Bell Labs that created the transistor. But he was a difficult person to work for and decided to strike out on his own, moving to the West Coast, where he set up Shockley Semiconductor.
Unfortunately for Shockley, after a few years, eight of his top technical people found the Bell Labs staff were right and they decided to go their own way. In his journal, Shockley simply wrote ‘Wed 18 Sep – Group resigned’. The so called ‘traitorous eight’ ended up forming Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 as a subsidiary of Fairchild Camera and Instrument.
Amongst the eight were people like Bob Noyce and Gordon Bell, who went on to found Intel. But there were others who started legendary careers at Fairchild, including Federico Faggin, designer of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor, Wilf Corrigan, founder of LSI Logic, and Jerry Sanders, who cofounded AMD.
We have to assume the Fairchild name will disappear; perhaps not immediately. But it’s not the first time. The company was sold to oil and gas giant Schlumberger in the late 1970s, then acquired by National Semiconductor, which absorbed it, then span it out again as Fairchild in 1997.
Whether the name survives or not, its legacy certainly will. It can be argued that Fairchild spawned Silicon Valley – at least its semiconductor element. Those companies which can trace their lineage back to the early 1960s – and the people who worked for them – became known as Fairchildren.
