The Fairchild Patent Notebooks: A dinner presentation with Computer History Museum's David Laws

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Last night was the annual IEEE-CNSV (Consultants Network of Silicon Valley) Dinner and the guest speaker was David Laws, who currently serves as the Semiconductor Curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Laws spoke about an incredible artifact collection—perhaps the semiconductor industry’s single most important collection by far: The Fairchild Patent Notebooks. Among the many innovations documented in these 1334 hand-written notebooks are Jean Hoerni’s invention of the planar process and Robert Noyce’s extension of that process to connect multiple components on one silicon die to create the modern monolithic integrated circuit. These notebooks speak for the people who launched Silicon Valley, in their own words.
Laws is a semiconductor industry veteran having worked for Fairchild, Litronix, AMD, and others so he has a deep-set feel and an apparent fondness for the subject. The Fairchild patent notebooks made their way to the museum in a most circuitous way. They came from Texas Instruments, which purchased National Semiconductor in 2011. National took possession of the notebooks when it acquired Fairchild in 1987.
Of the many notebook pages Laws projected during his dinner speech, I particularly noted three for this blog:
December 1, 1957: Jean Hoerni documents his ideas for silicon wafer oxide insulation and masking—the fundamental semiconductor planar process. He got the idea in the shower one morning. But Hoerni didn’t use silicon-dioxide insulation to create ICs at first—that would take another three years to realize. He did it to save Fairchild from oblivion.
By 1959, Fairchild had $8 million in contracts for high-reliability, double-diffused mesa transistors, many of which were destined to go into Minuteman missile guidance computers. There was a problem however. One in 10,000 transistors would short out if tapped lightly. Tapping dislodged a sliver of metal inside of the transistor can and the metal would unfortunately short a junction in the unpassivated transistor—bye, bye transistor. Hoerni’s oxide insulation made the mesa transistor impervious to such faults.
Page from Jean Hoerni’s Patent Notebook documenting the planar process. December 1, 1957.
Witnessed by Robert Noyce
January 23, 1959: Robert Noyce invents the metal interconnect layer needed to connect multiple devices on the same silicon die. This is the breakthrough needed to make monolithic integrated circuits.
Page from Robert Noyce’s Patent Notebook extending Hoerni’s planar process to an IC—a simple full-adder logic circuit built from a diode matrix. January 23, 1959.
October 8, 1962: PhD physicist Frank Wanlass documents the basic CMOS structure that now dominates the semiconductor industry. He stumbles onto an unusual behavior of the device but does not pursue it. It later turns out to be oxide tunneling and charge storage, the basic phenomena underlying EPROM storage.
The ideas and innovations in these notebooks, in conjunction with the patents developed from this work, constitute the archaeological history of the semiconductor industry. Patents have become extremely important in the semiconductor industry. Last year, when Xilinx celebrated its 30th anniversary, the press release mentioned the company’s 3500+ patents and 60 industry firsts in addition to celebrating the company’s three decades in business.
The Computer History Museum has an active campaign to raise the funds needed to restore and conserve these 1334 Fairchild patent notebooks. Here’s a video about that campaign:
 

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