Jean Hoerni

Jean Amédée Hoerni (September 26, 1924 – January 12, 1997) was a silicon transistor pioneer and a member of the 'traitorous eight'. He developed the ground breaking planar process for reliably manufacturing semiconductor devices such as transistors.

Hoerni was born on September 26, 1924 in Geneva, Switzerland. He received a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from the University of Cambridge and another Ph.D. from the University of Geneva.

In 1952, he moved to the United States to work at the California Institute of Technology, where he became acquainted with William Shockley, the "father of the transistor."

A few years later, Shockley recruited Hoerni to work with him at the newly founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments in Mountain View, California. But Shockley's strange behavior compelled the so-called 'traitorous eight': Hoerni, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts, to leave his laboratory and create the Fairchild Semiconductor corporation. At Fairchild Hoerni would go on to invent the planar process, which was critical in the invention of Silicon Integrated circuit by Robert Noyce.Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments is usually credited, with Noyce, with the invention of the integrated circuit, but Kilby's IC was based on Germanium, and as it turns out, Silicon ICs have numerous advantages over germanium. The name "Silicon Valley" refers to this silicon.

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