The Planar Legacy
In the autumn of 1957, eight scientists committed an act of rebellion that would reshape the world. They left their employer to pursue a vision of what semiconductor technology could become — and in doing so, they planted the seeds of Silicon Valley.
The Traitorous Eight
William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and Nobel laureate, had assembled the finest team of semiconductor scientists in the world at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. But his abrasive management style drove them away. In September 1957, eight of his best engineers — whom Shockley bitterly dubbed the "traitorous eight" — left to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
What Shockley saw as betrayal, history would remember as the founding moment of Silicon Valley.
Julius Blank
Mechanical Engineer
Designed manufacturing equipment and processes
Victor Grinich
Electrical Engineer
Developed quality control and testing methods
Jean Hoerni
Physicist
Invented the revolutionary planar process (1959)
Eugene Kleiner
Engineer
Later co-founded Kleiner Perkins venture capital
Jay Last
Physicist
Led the first integrated circuit production
Gordon Moore
Chemist
Formulated Moore's Law; co-founded Intel
Robert Noyce
Physicist
Co-invented the integrated circuit; co-founded Intel
Sheldon Roberts
Metallurgist
Expertise in crystal growth and materials
Jean Hoerni's Planar Process
The early transistors were unreliable. Their exposed junctions degraded rapidly when exposed to air and moisture. Jean Hoerni's solution was elegantly simple: grow a layer of silicon dioxide — glass — over the entire surface of the silicon wafer.
This protective "planar" layer, flat and uniform, shielded the delicate transistor junctions from contamination. More importantly, it enabled a new way of manufacturing: instead of building transistors one by one, you could now process thousands simultaneously on a single wafer.
The planar process didn't just solve the reliability problem — it made mass production of semiconductors possible for the first time. It was the foundation upon which Robert Noyce would build the integrated circuit.
The planar process: a protective oxide layer enables reliable, mass-produced transistors
1967 Fairchild Briefing Film
Robert Noyce's Integrated Circuit
Building on Hoerni's planar process, Robert Noyce realized that instead of making individual transistors and wiring them together, you could build the entire circuit — transistors, resistors, capacitors, and the connections between them — on a single piece of silicon.
The planar oxide layer wasn't just protection anymore; it became the insulator that allowed metal interconnects to cross over transistors without short-circuiting. The monolithic integrated circuit was born.
In 1967, Fairchild produced a seminal educational film explaining this technology — a film now preserved by the Computer History Museum as a testament to the revolution these engineers created.
The "Fairchildren"
Fairchild became a university for semiconductor entrepreneurs. Over the following decades, alumni would leave to found or lead many of the most important technology companies in history.
Intel
Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce (1968)
The world's largest semiconductor company
AMD
Jerry Sanders and others (1969)
Major CPU and GPU manufacturer
National Semiconductor
Fairchild alumni (1967)
Leading analog chip maker
Kleiner Perkins
Eugene Kleiner (1972)
Legendary Silicon Valley VC firm
Signetics
Fairchild spinoff (1961)
Pioneer in IC manufacturing
Intersil
Jean Hoerni (1967)
Power management semiconductors
The influence extends far beyond these names. Over 400 companies can trace their lineage back to Fairchild — a family tree that defines Silicon Valley itself.