Traitorous eight

The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. William Shockley had in 1956 recruited a group of young PhD graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular. This was accentuated by the fact that Shockley’s research focus wasn’t proving fruitful. After the demand for Shockley to be replaced was rebuffed, the eight left to form their own company.

Shockley described their leaving as a "betrayal". The eight who left Shockley Semiconductor were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts. In August 1957 they reached an agreement with Sherman Fairchild and on September 18, 1957 they formed Fairchild Semiconductor. The newly founded Fairchild Semiconductor soon grew into a leader of the semiconductor industry. In 1960 it became an incubator of Silicon Valley, and was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of dozens of corporations such as AMD and Intel. These many spin-off companies came to be known as "Fairchildren".

In the winter of 1954–1955, William Shockley, an inventor of the transistor and a visiting professor at Stanford University, decided to establish his own mass production of advanced transistors and Shockley diodes. He found a sponsor in Raytheon, but Raytheon discontinued the project after a month. In August 1955 Shockley turned for advice to the financier Arnold Beckman, the owner of Beckman Instruments. Shockley needed one million dollars. Beckman knew that Shockley had no chance in the business, but believed that Shockley's new inventions would be beneficial for his own company and did not want to give them to his competitors. Accordingly, Beckman agreed to create and fund a laboratory under the condition that its discoveries should be brought to mass production within two years.

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