[HN Gopher] Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
        
       Author : BirAdam
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2024-12-24 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
        
       | irsagent wrote:
       | I wonder if he held the same utility function for the entirety of
       | his life, because the beginning and end of his life is quite
       | dismal. Not one bit of reflection in his life seemed to change
       | his tone.
        
       | adrian_b wrote:
       | While the article is reasonably complete, it is unbalanced,
       | because it insists much more on the unpleasant personality of
       | William Shockley than on his decisive contributions to the
       | development of the semiconductor industry.
       | 
       | The conclusion of the article is correct that besides his own
       | contributions to the theory of semiconductor devices his second
       | great, even if unintended, achievement was hiring truly the best
       | people, but then annoying them enough so that they have left and
       | founded Fairchild Semiconductor, from where some of them have
       | gone later to create many other of the most important companies
       | of Silicon Valley.
       | 
       | However Shockley has contributed with much more than the
       | invention of the bipolar junction transistor. His invention of
       | the Shockley diode was not very important, because the PNPN
       | switch had already been invented at Bell Labs 3 years earlier, in
       | 1952, by Jewell J. Ebers. The innovation of Shockley was only to
       | notice that a PNPN switch does not need control electrodes to be
       | switched on, because it can be switched on by either the output
       | voltage or by light, therefore it can be made as a diode instead
       | of a tetrode, like previously.
       | 
       | More important has been that Shockley has invented not only the
       | bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948, but also the junction
       | field-effect transistor (JFET) in 1951. For many decades these 2
       | have been the most important semiconductor devices, until the
       | technology has progressed sufficiently to allow the control of
       | the oxide-silicon interface well enough to allow the fabrication
       | of MOS transistors (which had been invented well before WWII, but
       | nobody knew how to make them).
       | 
       | Even more important is that he has published detailed theories
       | about how the BJTs and the JFETs function, which allowed anyone
       | to design such semiconductor devices.
       | 
       | These theories of the semiconductor transistors conceived by
       | Shockley have been what has really started the semiconductor
       | industry. The previous discovery of the point-contact transistor
       | by Bardeen and Brattain has been more or less accidental and they
       | did not understand how it works. Without the theory of Shockley
       | none of the quick progresses from the years following 1948 would
       | have existed.
        
         | BirAdam wrote:
         | It does note his achievements, but had the man had any charisma
         | at all, Silicon Valley might not have been. That the man was
         | repellent is pivotal to the founding of Fairchild and thus all
         | of the fairchildren.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-12-24 23:00 UTC)