Les Hogan, who led the mass exodus from Motorola Semiconductor to Fairchild Semiconductor after Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove left Fairchild to start Intel, has died at the age of 88.

C. Lester Hogan was a brilliant scientist doing pioneering work at Bell Labs and Harvard University on devices amplifying microwaves, and in ferrites the original basis for computer memories.

In 1968, after the resignations of Noyce, Moore and Grove, Sherman Fairchild offered Hogan a stupendous package to move over with the top management team of Motorola’s semiconductor division to run Fairchild.

Among that team, dubbed ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ after the TV series, were Wilf Corrigan,  later president of Fairchild and founder of LSI Logic,

Hogan received a $120,000 salary and a $5.4m interest-free loan to buy shares on which the paper profit, before the year was out, was $2.5m. It was an unheard of package for the 1960s.

Subsequent industry remuneration packages were measured in relation to it. ‘Half a Hogan’, ‘A Quarter-Hogan’ etc.
Motorola’s shares dropped ten per cent on the news of Hogan’s transfer, and Fairchild’s rose 19 per cent.

Hogan had taken Motorola Semiconductors from a $5m a year operation to $230m but, at Fairchild, he was soon to make a mistake – sidelining his head of marketing, the formidable Jerry Sanders III, who left to found Advanced Micro Devices.

Hogan also made a big bet on CCDs which didn’t work out, and struggled to get MOS into production. 

Hogan was a very impressive figure with strongly-held opinions and that capacity for strong, decisive leadership which characterised the pioneering CEOs of the semiconductor industry.