With funding from Southern California industrialist Arnold Beckman, William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories established his Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, in 1955. He attracted a group of bright young engineers and scientists that he trained in the art of working with semiconductor material.
Although a brilliant physicist, Shockley’s staff quickly became disenchanted with his management style. After unsuccessfully petitioning Beckman to appoint a new manager, eight of Shockley’s most talented employees—Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts—sought alternative employment.
On September 19, 1957, eight scientists and engineers defected from their employer to sign papers establishing their own company. Assisted by Arthur Rock, the eight men raised $1.38 million from East Coast−based "Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corporation" (one of the world's leading developer of imaging equipment, including radar cameras, radio compasses and X-ray machines, since World War II). Their startup is named "Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation".
Their timing was impeccable. With the national urgency to recoup the loss of leadership to the Soviet Union, military contractors engaged in crash programs to miniaturize and improve the reliability of aerospace electronic systems. Fairchild founders identified an opportunity for a new kind of silicon transistor to serve these applications. In just five months they outfitted an R&D facility in Palo Alto, developed new processes and equipment, and introduced a line of transistors that found instant acceptance in the market.
# Silicon
In 1959 co-founder Jean Hoerni invented a transistor structure covered with an insulating layer of silicon dioxide (glass) to protect the chip, then an innovative move, as most semiconductor devices at the time used germanium. Known for their flat surface profile as “planar” devices, they were more reliable and offered superior electrical characteristics to competing products. By the end of 1961, their success vaulted Fairchild to the largest producer of high-performance silicon transistors in the United States. Hoerni’s approach also enabled the transformation of semiconductor production from a handcrafted process to a high-volume operation amenable to automation. His breakthrough idea continues as the fundamental structure employed in the manufacturing of today’s multibillion-transistor microprocessor and memory chips.
# IC
Fairchild co-founder Robert Noyce conceived the idea of using aluminum metal deposited on top of Hoerni’s layer of glass to selectively interconnect transistors, resistors, and other components formed in the underlying silicon wafer to create an integrated electronic circuit (IC). Fairchild introduced its first IC, or microchip, a digital logic function comprising just four transistors and five resistors in March 1961.
# MOS
Fairchild scientists, led by Bruce Deal, Andy Grove, and Ed Snow, pioneered reliable metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) production. Federico Faggin and Tom Klien built the first commercial silicon-gate devices. Frank Wanlass patented complementary MOS (CMOS). All three are fundamental to mainstream chip manufacturing today.
# Analog IC
Recently out of college, Robert Widlar worked with process engineer Dave Talbert to conceive the first widely-used analog IC, the Fairchild µA709 operational amplifier (op-amp) in 1965 and established a mass market for analog devices and a highly profitable business unit for Fairchild. David Fullagar’s improved version, the µA741, remains in production today as the most popular analog IC of all time.
# CCD
Kim Choong-Ki was born in Seoul in 1942. He studied at Seoul National University and then at Columbia University. Shortly after, in the summer of 1970, Fairchild Camera and Instrument hired Kim to work in its research and development laboratory in Palo Alto.
As a newcomer to Fairchild's R&D lab, Kim was put to work on one of these new kinds of chips : the charge-coupled device. Just the year before, in 1969, George E. Smith and Willard Boyle at Bell Laboratories proposed the idea of the CCD, for which they would later win a Nobel Prize. But it was Kim and his colleagues at Fairchild who realized the first CCD devices that evolved into commercial products widely used in digital photography, radiography, and astronomy. Among other inventions, Kim helped develop a CCD area image sensor that greatly improved low-light detection and the first two-phase CCD linear image sensor—which, he reported, guaranteed “the ease of use and the high quality of image reproduction.”
Kim rose quickly within Fairchild’s hierarchy. But just five years into his tenure, he returned to South Korea.
# KAIST
Then called KAIS (the “T” was added in 1981), Kim’s new employer was the first science and technology university in South Korea and remains one of the most prestigious. The South Korean government had established the institute in 1971 with financing from the United States Agency for International Development and had invited Frederick E. Terman, the legendary dean of Stanford University’s school of engineering and a “father” of Silicon Valley, to draw up the blueprint for its direction. Terman stressed that KAIS should aim to “satisfy the needs of Korean industry and Korean industrial establishments for highly trained and innovative specialists, rather than to add to the world’s store of basic knowledge.”
Kim’s laboratory at KAIS attracted scores of ambitious master’s and doctoral candidates from almost the moment he arrived in the spring of 1975. The primary reason for the lab’s popularity was obvious: South Korean students were hungry to learn about semiconductors. The government touted the importance of these devices, as did electronics companies like GoldStar and Samsung, which needed them to manufacture their radios, televisions, microwaves, and watches. But the industry had yet to mass-produce its own chips beyond basic integrated circuits such as CMOS watch chips, in large part due to a lack of semiconductor specialists.
For 20 years, until the mid-1990s, joining Kim’s lab was essentially the only way for aspiring semiconductor engineers in South Korea to get hands-on training; KAIS was the only university in the country that had able teachers and proper facilities, including clean rooms for assembling high-quality chips.
# First Period : Government
Kim’s lab at KAIST evolved in parallel with the growth of the semiconductor sector in South Korea, which can be divided into three periods. During the first period, beginning in the mid-1960s, the government led the charge by enacting laws and drawing up plans for industry development, establishing research institutes, and pressing companies and universities to pay more attention to semiconductor technology.
His first group of students worked primarily on the design and fabrication of semiconductors using PMOS, NMOS, and CMOS technologies that, while not cutting edge by global standards, were quite advanced for the South Korea of the time. Because there were few industry jobs, many alumni of Kim’s lab took positions at government research institutes, where they developed state-of-the-art experimental chips.
# Second Period : University
The second period started in 1983, when Samsung declared that it would pursue semiconductors aggressively, starting with DRAM. The move drove rival conglomerates such as Hyundai and GoldStar to do likewise. As a result, the South Korean chip industry rapidly expanded. KAIST and other universities provided the necessary manpower, and the government reduced its role. In Kim’s lab, students began to explore emerging technologies—including polysilicon thin-film transistors (for LCD panels), infrared sensors (for military use), and rapid thermal processing (which increased efficiency and reduced costs of semiconductor production)—and published their results in prestigious international journals.
KAIST graduates flocked to Samsung, GoldStar/LG, and Hyundai/Hynix. As government influence declined, some alums from the first period who had worked at government research institutes also took corporate jobs. At the same time, more and more of Kim’s former students accepted university professorships.
# Third Period : Industry
During the third period, from 2000 on, industry seized the helm of semiconductor development. Academia churned out more specialists as well as significant research, with minimal contribution from government. Alumni of Kim’s lab continued to lead semiconductor engineering, some of them rising to become high-ranking executives.
From 1975, when the nation had barely begun producing its first transistors, to 2008, when he retired from teaching, Kim trained more than 100 students, effectively creating the first two generations of South Korean semiconductor experts. Around the world, many of Kim’s protégés were lauded for their success in transforming the economy of a nation that had just started assembling radio sets in 1959 and was fabricating outdated memory chips in the early ’80s. By the beginning of the 21st century, South Korea had become a dominant power in the global semiconductor market, meeting more than 60 percent of international demand for memory chips alone.
# References
- Dong-Won Kim (August 27, 2022) "The Godfather of South Korea's Chip Industry" IEEE Spectrum
- David Laws (September 19, 2017) "Fairchild Semiconductor : The 60th Anniversary of A Silicon Valley Legend " Computer History Museum