Fairchild Semiconductor

key Semi Conductor birthplace

Only a year later, the staff of eight engineers decided to leave Shockley Semiconductor and form their own company. The group later became known widely as the Traitorous Eight. The eight men were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and SheldonRoberts. Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts (Government Contract). In 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was started with plans on making silicon transistors - at the time germanium was still a common material for semiconductor use.

During the 1960s many of the original founders would leave Fairchild to strike out on their own. Known as the "fairchildren", they formed many of the companies that grew to prominence in the 1970s. A Fairchild advertisement of the time showed a collage of the logos of Silicon Valley with the annotation "We started it all.". Among the last of the original founders to leave were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who left in 1968 to form Intel. At this point much of the brainpower of the company was gone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor