Word: fairchilds
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...semiconductor revolution. Grove and his team won one of the industry's most prestigious awards for the work. At home, Eva got a hint that Andy might not be your ordinary Hungarian busboy. It was the kind of scientific triumph Grove craved--proof of the American meritocracy. At Fairchild, however, none of the suits cared...
...moved out to California, where Grove entered the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. Again he was a star. When he graduated, he had the pick of American research corporations. Grove narrowed his choices: prestigious Bell Laboratories or Fairchild Semiconductor, a start-up staffed by a handful of brilliant engineers. Grove, who says he has "excellent antennae," listened to the Berkeley buzz and came back with a sense of the future: Fairchild...
...early 1960s, the computer industry was in the midst of a benign revolution--and Fairchild was a breeding ground for revolutionaries. Early computers were fast, but attempts to make them faster were running into a thermodynamic wall: every time you asked the computer to think harder, it got hotter, like a grad student sweating his orals. The heat came from vacuum tubes, which acted as giant on-off switches, holding and releasing electrical charges. (A central "computer" tallied up all the on-off signals as ones and zeroes, and translated the results into real mathematics.) But the tubes, which sucked...
...answer, of course, turned out to be what gave Silicon Valley its name. Gordon Moore (who ran Fairchild's research arm and later became Grove's mentor as CEO of Intel) believed you could store those charges with an integrated circuit made by sandwiching metal oxide and silicon into an electrical circuit called an MOS transistor. Unlike trickier semiconductors, silicon is both a wonderful conductor of electrical charges and a nearly bottomless sink for heat, meaning it doesn't melt down as you push electrons under its surface at nearly light speed. Because it is made from refined sand, silicon...
...Noyce was fed up with Fairchild. The firm was blowing up: engineers were leaving, top execs didn't understand the semi business, and science was being replaced by politics. Noyce phoned Arthur Rock, now the eminence grise of Silicon Valley investing, and told him that he and Moore wanted to start their own semiconductor company. Fairchild, he said, was finished. Rock (who holds nearly $500 million of Intel stock today) raised the money nearly instantly. Moore told Grove of the plan one day when they were at a conference in Boulder, Colo. The decision to join his bosses was made...