History of Semiconductor Engineering

Prologue.- Research Organization: Bell Telephone Laboratories.- Grown Junction and Diffused Transistors.- Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories.- Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation - Subsidiary of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company.- Driving the Company Out of Business.- Integrated Circuits outside Fairchild Semiconductor.- Linear Integrated Circuits: Pre-Widlar Era Prior to 1963.- Robert J. Widlar - The Genius, The Legend, The Bohemian.- National Semiconductor - A New Type of Semiconductor Company.- The MOS Transistor.- Epilogue.

Bo Lojek received his Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from Charles University in Prague. He joined the semiconductor industry in the middle of the nineteen sixties and has been working in the industry since then. Currently, he is the Principal Engineer in Atmel Corporation and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He holds over thirty patents, most of them on the nonvolatile memory cell.

From pre-publication reviews

"Your book is going to make a major contribution to semiconductor history. You and I agree that, while the world loves a hero, semiconductor progress depended on the efforts and ideas of a large number of people, and that moving forward depended on contributors going back a few decades in some cases. Also, as is the case with most inventions, a number of people with access to the same pool of common knowledge were working independently at the same time to put it all together and to make the necessary extensions to the existing technology and who realized that the time was right for society to accept the new concepts. Your diligent research points all this out." Dr. Jay Last, former Shockley Laboratories employee, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, co-founder of Amelco Semiconductor, and manager of the Fairchild's group which design and produced the world first planar integrated circuit

"Bo Lojek presents a remarkable document of the most important and significant technical development of our times. He describes in astounding detail the engineering efforts of modern microelectronics. He concentrates on the history of silicon semiconductor devices. California's "Silicon Valley" is the center of attention, together with its ancestry of transistor invention at Bell Laboratories. He has collected a wealth of illustrative documentation, gives incisive insight into the lives of the main actors and shows the often tragic fates of the engineers and businessmen. He does not hide his firm believe in the individual engineer and warns of the retarding influence of present-day political correctness." Dr. Hans J. Queisser, former Shockley Semiconductor scientist and retired director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Solids, Stuttgart



"The technical history of the semiconductor industry rivals the 1849 California Gold Rush as a period filled with excitement and opportunity. Although I cannotfirst hand validate