Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was a semiconductor company founded by eight employees of Shockley Transistor. Branded as the "traitorous eight" by William Shockley, they left as a group in 1957 to become a new division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. Two of the eight were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, co-founders of Intel a decade later. See
Shockley Transistor Corporation.
The Planar Integrated Circuit (IC)
Noyce invented the planar IC in 1959, which was a breakthrough technology. Unlike Texas Instruments' method that required wires, planar circuits were connected by thin film deposits.
Fairchild commercialized the metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistor technology in the early 1960s, which has prevailed for more than sixty years. The company was also successful in analog amplifiers.
The Next Sixty Years
Fairchild was involved in numerous tech products, including image sensors, microprocessors, hardened military chips and video games. It was acquired by Schlumberger and then National Semiconductor only to be reborn again as an independent company in the late 1990s.
In the 2000s, Fairchild acquired the discrete power business of Intersil, the analog power chip company Impala Linear Corporation and the Swedish power transistor company TranSIC. In 2016, ON Semiconductor acquired the company. See
ON Semiconductor.