Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor (review)

During the past few decades, scholars have been steadily building an edifice of works on the history of the semiconductor technology—the material culture of what is widely identified as the information age. An early effort was Ernst Braun and Stuart MacDonald’s 1978 brief survey Revolution in Miniature, on the history and impact of semiconductor electronics. In 1992 Braun, Lillian Hoddeson, and others published Out of the Crystal Maze, a volume of scholarly essays about the origins of solid-state physics, the scientific roots that flowered during the second quarter of the twentieth century. More recent works have focused on specific devices or technologies—for example, Crystal Fire, a 1997 book I coauthored with Hoddeson on the transistor’s invention and development, and Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age, on the rise of metal-oxide semiconductor technology. And biographies have been written about transistor inventors John Bardeen and William Shockley, as well as microchip pioneer Robert Noyce.

Historians are now bearing down on the integrated circuit, the second major advance in semiconductor technology after the transistor. This pivotal breakthrough occurred largely at Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, but crucial contributions came from a host of other institutions, including Bell Labs, Sperry Gyroscope, and the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories. The history of the integrated circuit is correspondingly harder to write. The task is made yet more difficult because the documentary resources are uneven, scattered, and in the case of Fairchild hard to access.

Christophe Lécuyer and David Brock’s Makers of the Microchip is therefore a welcome addition to this literature, filling an important gap in our understanding. Its focus is narrow—on the development of “planar” silicon processing at Fairchild from 1957 to 1961. But deservedly so, for planar technology still forms the foundation of semiconductor manufacturing five decades later, when the number of transistors on a microchip has swollen to over a billion. More than any other factor, this steady, unrelenting growth—as characterized by Moore’s law—has converted digital computers into common portable, personal devices. Without this revolutionary material technology, computers would still exist, encompassing cubic meters of discrete transistors, but only large companies or institutions could afford to own and operate them.

Lécuyer and Brock have been working closely with Jay Last, leader of the Fairchild team that extended the planar approach pioneered by his colleague Jean Hoerni to the manufacture of silicon integrated circuits from 1959 to 1961. Luckily, Last understood the historical significance of what he and his coworkers were up to, keeping originals or copies of important documents, including lab notebook pages. Otherwise, they would likely have been lost to history. As Fairchild Semiconductor was purchased by another company, then sold and resold, few documents related to its technological origins have been preserved. The best collection rests in Stanford University’s archives, but it is piecemeal compared to what historians can access on, for example, Bell Labs. The crucial lab notebooks—of Hoerni, Last, Moore, Noyce, and others—are still closely held by National Semiconductor Corp., which is soon to be purchased by Texas Instruments.

Fittingly, Last adds a foreword to this book; it is his opus almost as much as Lécuyer and Brock’s. In their narrative summary and commentaries on his selected documents, copies of which are included, the authors provide the analysis and perspective of seasoned historians—offering further insights from their dozens of interviews with Fairchild founders and employees. These additions help to contextualize the documents for readers less familiar with the semiconductor industry and promote a better understanding of the process they used to write history. Readers get to view raw historical data and grasp how they have been infused with additional meanings.

In 1998 Last published an essay titled “Two Communications Revolutions,” comparing the impact of semiconductor technology with that due to movable type five centuries before. It is an apt parallel, made even more...