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

In Makers of the Microchip, Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock have written a history of the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation and its work in the field of semiconductors, focusing on 1957 (when the company was founded) to 1961. Fairchild was formed by a group, most of whom had recently left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, the pioneering firm founded by William Shockley (coinventor of the transistor). Fairchild was one of the earliest Silicon Valley, California, electronics firms, and it helped establish the region as a competitor to the electronic systems and components manufacturing centers around Chicago; the greater New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania area; and Los Angeles (for the motion picture industry). The company developed transistor design techniques and added many innovations in production technology to establish itself as a leader in the field of "planar" silicon transistors and integrated circuits. However, after a few years, many of its key personnel left to pursue other goals. During those early years, the company became a leader in supplying components for military electronics systems and made inroads into nonmilitary components such as those used in consumer electronics.

The authors have taken a "documentary" history approach, meaning they tell their story in part by presenting documents that are reproduced alongside the book's text for the reader to examine. Most of the documents come from a single source: the laboratory notebook of one of Fairchild's founders, Jay Last (who also adds an informative preface to the book). The authors devote a considerable portion of the introduction to justifying this methodology, and while they acknowledge its critics, they draw support from comparable efforts such as the multivolume The Papers of Thomas A. Edison. ¹

Compared to the Edison Papers books, these facsimiles are not as visually engaging, nor do they add as much to the story through their reproduction here, but as sources for the Fairchild story, they are essential reading. Lécuyer and Brock carefully justify the narrow scope of their study, which covers just a few aspects of the company's operations that span just a few years, plus their decision not to "translate" the technical details of the story into more accessible language. These latter factors are likely to narrow the book's appeal, particularly given the authors' high expectations about the reader's technical knowledge of decades-old semiconductors devices and their applications (although they do provide a helpful glossary).

Nonetheless, they do an admirable job of telling a technically involved story, and the evidence they present supports the arguments they make about how the firm and its products developed. These arguments center on the idea that the decisions and actions undertaken by the firm's employees reflected three main factors: their perceptions of what the silicon transistor and the planar process were capable of doing technically, what their customers probably wanted, and what their competition was doing. They call these three factors silicon, user, and competition "logics"—a nice play on the fact that most of Fairchild's products became part of computer circuits.

After demonstrating how these three logics played out, the authors revisit them in the concluding chapter, but much of the conclusion is a look forward, outlining the later careers of the departed Fairchild founders, the technology of silicon semiconductor devices, and the subsequent history of the Fairchild company itself.

In many ways, this book exemplifies a first-generation type of work in the history of technology, of the kind that prevailed in the history of computing for many years, and in the Annals. The best of these works benefitted from the relative abundance of the kind of primary source data that tends to disappear or get lost after just a few decades. The trade-off in writing such a work is the lack of perspective on past events that the passage of time will provide.

This is not a criticism, however. Lécuyer and Brock are realistic about what they hope to accomplish, and they do...