Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Shockley had a knack for spotting talent, but he was an awful manager. He thrived on controversy and created a toxic atmosphere that alienated the bright young engineers he’d assembled. So these eight engineers left Shockley Semiconductor and decided to found their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor, with seed funding from an East Coast millionaire. The eight defectors from Shockley’s lab are widely credited with founding Silicon Valley. One of the eight, Eugene Kleiner, would go on to found Kleiner Perkins, one of the world’s most powerful venture capital firms. Gordon Moore, who went on to run Fairchild’s R&D process, would later coin the concept of Moore’s Law to describe the exponential growth in computing power. Most important was Bob Noyce, the leader of the “traitorous eight,” who had a charismatic, visionary enthusiasm for microelectronics and an intuitive sense of which technical advances were needed to make transistors tiny, cheap, and reliable. Matching new inventions with commercial opportunities was exactly what a startup like Fairchild needed to succeed—and what the chip industry needed to take off.