[HN Gopher] Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
Author : BirAdam
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-12-24 20:29 UTC (1 days 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.
| llama-mini wrote:
| No, the man's personality is the engine of his achievement.
|
| It's just that ordinary human do not really rewards genius.
|
| For the man being different, he probably can be Gorden Moore,
| who just noticed a pattern, and then become monumental
| figure.
|
| Populous rewards popularity, not genius. And being ignored by
| them is not a failure, it's a necessity of greatness.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Wild that people think only very specific human beings
| could have done this, there were multiple people working on
| the same problems, one of them was going to invent the
| thing, he wasn't the only genius around.
|
| So much so there were plenty of others coming on his wake,
| creating and contributing even more to the field.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "Greatness" and "repels people so hard that nobody wants to
| work with him" are _not_ the same thing. Greatness does not
| require being that abhorrent to others.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| In case people are not aware, Beckman had invented the pH meter a
| few years before Hewlett & Packard came up with their audio test
| equipment.
|
| https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1503
|
| Just like the one jn my collection :)
| llama-mini wrote:
| https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
|
| Look at the picture, you can notice who's shockley by just
| observing their facial expression. The cold-and-smart-than-you
| shockley in the middle. Shockley's personality becomes his mortal
| enemy, but that personality is also ncessary for his achievement.
|
| If strength cannot become your weakness, than it's just
| mediocrity.
| huijzer wrote:
| I think it's a balance. You do need to be an asshole sometimes
| to get things done. But you don't need to be an asshole all the
| time. It's an easy excuse to say you need to be a prick because
| otherwise you cannot do your great achievements. It's a false
| dichotomy. Even Einstein had friends.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Prime example of how one can make (dubious) conclusions from a
| still frame.
|
| It's why I don't do video calls with my coworkers.
| immibis wrote:
| Hopefully by now everyone knows the "crazy feminist lady"
| picture, which was a still frame from a pretty normal
| conversation where she wasn't even really supporting the
| feminist side that much, but got spread around the Internet
| by anti-feminists for years.
| adonovan wrote:
| It's true, it's so easy to tell yourself a story about how
| good/bad a person is based on how a photo supports your
| existing beliefs.
| amyfp214 wrote:
| The picture is great. The senior manager on the right has a bit
| of a grimace in realizing yet again he'll need to smooth over
| Shockley's antagonism. The guy on the left has more of a smile
| and nod, and everything will be okay, type attitude.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Shockley recruited/managed both. Bardeen (on the left) went
| on to win a second Nobel for explaining superconductivity.
| huijzer wrote:
| I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and
| ruthlessness go hand in hand. "Hard times create strong men and
| strong men create good times" is a famous quote. For example, it
| applies to Arnold Schwarzenegger since his father apparently
| mentally and physically abused Arnold[1], as well as for Elon
| Musk's father for whom it is well documented he is a piece of
| work. If you read a lot about founders then this is a recurring
| theme. Why else would you work like a maniac your whole life? You
| don't need a successful company to have a happy life.
|
| There have also been studies that people tend to leash out to
| people below them if they feel that someone above them leashes
| out on them. This "displacement behavior" is a form of stress
| relieve. Monkeys do it too, and also there it is a form of stress
| relieve. It sort of makes sense right? You feel shit so then the
| easy solution is just to tell someone else that he/she is shit.
| You feel a bit better about yourself and all is good. Apart from
| the poor person (or monkey) who receives the abuse.
|
| So on the one hand, we want great men who produce good times, who
| solve difficult problems (Elon) or who inspire people (Arnold).
| But on the other hand I wish no child to have a tough childhood
| like that. That's life I guess.
|
| One thing about Shockley. The blog mentions Shockley's funeral.
| What the blog doesn't mention is why there was no funeral. His
| wife thought nobody would come anyway so decided to not hold the
| ceremony. A sad ending. I wonder how his parents were and what
| would have become of him if things would have been a bit
| different. Maybe he would have been smart and emphatic?
|
| [1]: Although many people don't know this, Arnold can be very
| ruthless. Read about his early years and his relationships for
| more info.
| julianeon wrote:
| In Shockley's case we have the benefit of seeing his whole
| life, from end to end. If for example a person loses a job,
| that could be a fluke; that could be due to anything. I would
| draw next to no conclusions from a person losing a job one
| time. But if we can see their whole career at a glance, and
| notice that person was fired 15 times in 40 years, that's a
| pattern. We can say that's out of the ordinary, that doesn't
| happen to the average working person. The record speaks for
| itself: this person must have had some quality that made his
| employers want to fire him.
|
| Shockley was like this. Repeatedly in his life we see this
| pattern of people scrambling to get away from working with, or
| under, him. It's unusual for people to dislike someone that
| much: that's not common. If it was one anonymous guy over his
| whole career lodging a complaint, we might ignore it. But so
| many people voted to not be around Shockley, with their feet
| and with their employment. That's not common for a scientist,
| Democrat, Republican, entrepreneur, or anyone really: there
| must have been some unpleasant quality about Shockley that made
| people not want to be around him, as this pattern repeated over
| his whole life shows.
| mlinhares wrote:
| He wasn't good at the abusive boss dynamic I think, there's
| plenty of terrible bosses and terrible tech companies out
| there that continue to chew up workers and some even come
| back, because the abusive dynamics are very well done. All he
| needed was getting better at it.
| immibis wrote:
| I don't see why Elon should be in the category of strong men
| created by hard times who produce good times. It seems like all
| he did was fail upwards until he was rich enough to provide
| funding to, yes, some good projects. But nothing he's actually
| had a direct hand has really been successful.
|
| If anything, now that he's (seemingly) an incompetent president
| of the US, he's likely to create bad times.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| This may be the most delusional comment in the history of HN.
| baq wrote:
| You can say many things about Elon and I'd probably agree
| with lots of them, especially regarding the near past, but he
| did build at least two organizations which have changed or
| are actively and visibly changing the world for the better.
| Funding came because of his resilience and perseverance, not
| in spite of his other traits.
|
| Or, to quote a classic, he was smart and got shit done, for
| about two decades.
| immibis wrote:
| Which ones are those? PayPal (he didn't run it)? Tesla (it
| turned to shit when he ran it)? SpaceX (he didn't run it)?
| Twitter (it turned to shit when he ran it)?
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| SpaceX is know to have a department only dedicated to
| handling the dumb ideas from Elon.
|
| Anyone with a bed of esmeralds could be a genius. It's
| only a question of luck.
| wat10000 wrote:
| What period in Tesla's history are you identifying as
| "turned to shit"? Seems like they've been on a continuous
| upward trajectory and he's been at the helm nearly the
| whole time. When he took over, they had no products, no
| sales, no manufacturing. He's been in charge since then,
| during which they built several factories, launched
| several models, and sold several million cars.
|
| He's obviously not running the place day to day all the
| time, but I don't see a period of decline where you could
| point and say "that's when Elon came in and screwed it
| up."
| lutusp wrote:
| > I find it a sad thing that often great achievements and
| ruthlessness go hand in hand.
|
| That may be true (plenty of examples), but it may also be an
| outlier. It might be more common for talented individuals to
| work cooperatively, in a way that leads to breakthroughs, but
| without anyone trying to steal all the credit. I emphasize this
| is just a theory, in a field that cannot be reduced to science.
|
| I've met many talented people over decades, in effective teams,
| but worked with only one classic martinet -- Steve Jobs. To
| hear Steve tell it, he was the reason for Apple's success. But
| he didn't design anything -- he was a salesman, not an
| engineer. In fairness, his incompetent replacements were in
| every way worse.
|
| This thread is perfectly timed. We're about to see another
| martinet try to steal credit for the accomplishments of others,
| while denying responsibility for errors along the way.
| kragen wrote:
| Your perspective is irreplaceable on this matter. Thank you
| for sharing it; I had feared you had given up on HN.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'm very much unconvinced by the "hard times strong men good
| times weak men hard times" cycle. It seems like something
| people come up with to justify their bad behavior, or the bad
| behavior of people they admire. Do "great men" actually come
| from difficult backgrounds at above the background rate? Or do
| we just tend to notice the ones who do?
| amelius wrote:
| I still think that the junction transistor was an evolutionary
| step from the junction diode. Once you have a working diode,
| adding a third terminal to control the depletion zone seems like
| such a natural thing to do.
| joshu wrote:
| i am waiting for pizza maybe 300 feet from the original site of
| shockley semiconductors as i type this.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Who is the current occupant of the site? A quick search says
| Yahoo! and Coinbase. And maybe previously WeWork, temporarily
| leasing from Meta?
| dsand wrote:
| The historical former building stood unchanged until 5-10
| years ago. There was a historical plaque on that building. It
| has been demolished and replaced by a nameless large 5-story
| office building.
| dsand wrote:
| The new building has an elaborate plaque facing the
| sidewalk. It includes a railroad diagram of the many
| corporate spinoffs from Shockley Semi.
| elromulous wrote:
| Fun fact, these two very similarly named diodes are completely
| different
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_diode
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schottky_diode
| dcreater wrote:
| I mistook Shockley diode for a Schottky diode until I looked it
| up
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Schottky diodes are still useful today. Shockley diodes are
| not.
| kqr wrote:
| > The point contact transistor effect was then demonstrated to
| management at Bell Labs by Brattain and Bardeen on Christmas Eve
| in 1947. Shockley wasn't pleased that to have learned of the
| discovery over the phone, and he was even less pleased that he
| was left off the patent application. Nevertheless, he continued
| his own work which resulted in his invention of the junction
| transistor. The patent was filed on the 26th of June in 1948, and
| the first proof of principle was obtained on the 7th of April in
| 1949. This time around, Shockley immediately published his
| findings in the Bell Labs Technical Journal.
|
| In _The Idea Factory_ this chain of events is described a little
| differently. Maybe the author wants to cast Shockley in a bad
| light, but this is the timeline it lays out:
|
| 1. Bardeen and Brattain invent the point contact transistor.
|
| 2. Shockley spends a night in a hotel room inventing the much
| better junction transistor as an evolution on the point contact
| transistor, out of spite of being excluded.
|
| 3. Shockley keeps this invention secret, in contrast to typical
| Bell Labs protocol.
|
| 4. At a meeting, a group at Bell Labs is close to stumbling onto
| the invention of the junction transistor as part of solving
| issues with the point contact transistor.
|
| 5. Shockley was in that meeting and whips out his schematics for
| the junction transistor to retain credit for its invention.
|
| Implied is that anyone at Bell Labs could have invented it, given
| some time. Only Shockley could have done it during a hotel room
| night, some time before people even realised it was needed.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While the point-contact transistor has been patented by Bardeen
| and Brattain, "invent" is not the most appropriate word because
| they have discovered experimentally by sheer luck the
| transistor effect between two point contacts, without having
| any prior idea that their experiments will result in such an
| effect.
|
| The Bell Labs team was indeed searching how to make a
| semiconductor triode (the word transistor has been coined after
| the discovery of the point-contact transistor).
|
| However they had expected that they would find a method to make
| a device similar to the metal-semiconductor or metal-insulator-
| semiconductor field-effect transistors that had been invented
| by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925 and 1928 (Lilienfeld had
| never succeeded to make them reproducibly, because by his time
| the role of impurities in semiconductors was not understood, so
| he was not aware about the extreme requirements for fabricating
| reproducible semiconductor devices).
|
| Moreover, Shockley cannot have kept "secret" the bipolar
| junction transistor invented by him, except perhaps for at most
| a few weeks, if he had felt any reason to verify his
| computations before making them public, to be certain that his
| new theory is correct.
|
| Less than half of year after the discovery of the transistor
| effect by Bardeen and Brattain, both Bardeen with Brattain and
| Shockley have filed almost simultaneously 2 patents, for their
| transistors. As normal, the patents have been assigned to the
| Bell Labs and the filings must have been prepared some time
| before that, together with the legal department of the company.
|
| In the real timeline there is no time left for "secrecy".
| Shockley certainly has not kept any useful information for
| himself, because the theory published by him almost immediately
| is what has taught the first few generations of engineers
| specializing in semiconductor devices, leading to an explosive
| growth of the industry.
|
| The BJT invented by Shockley has been the basis of the
| semiconductor industry, while the point-contact transistor has
| remained a historical curiosity. Point-contact transistors have
| been used for a few years only because the first junction
| transistors were too big, so they could not be used at radio
| frequencies. However the size problem has been solved quickly,
| so the use of point-contact transistors has been abandoned.
|
| The only reason why the discovery of the transistor effect in
| point-contact transistors is important is because this has made
| Shockley think about which is the cause of the transistor
| effect, making him develop his theory that he has published
| very soon, first in abbreviated form in 1949 in the "Bell
| System Technical Journal", then in 1950 in his book "Electrons
| and Holes in Semiconductors".
|
| Now when Shockley is mentioned everybody first comments that
| even if he has been a genius physicist in other aspects he was
| a stupid human being. Both aspects are of course true and it is
| not at all unusual for humans to do both very good things and
| very bad things. However his stupidity did not really have any
| harmful effects, besides many people feeling insulted by him,
| while his theoretical work, which has taught so many engineers
| how to do their jobs, remains a really important heritage,
| which has greatly contributed to human progress.
| ac29 wrote:
| Since I cant comment on the article directly, some corrections:
|
| 391 South San Antonio Road should be 391 San Antonio Road. The
| former is in a different city. You can see some diode sculptures
| outside the correct address (now a much larger building).
|
| Similarly, "844 South Charleston Road" doesn't even exist - I
| suspect the author meant 844 East Charleston Road, which is near
| the Shockley Lab building.
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