Fairchild's First Order

Tom Bay, who pretty well wrote the text-book for semiconductor marketing as the head of sales and marketing at Fairchild, was Fairchild employee No.9, the first employee taken on after the ‘treacherous eight’.

A week after joining Fairchild, in December 1957, he went with Bob Noyce to see IBM.

At that time Fairchild had no products at all. They hadn't developed a product. They hadn't defined a product, and they had no idea what the specifications of any product they might develop could conceivably be.

The only concept Fairchild had for the products it hoped to produce, was the general theme of: 'silicon transistors'.

IBM told them they needed a core driver which would withstand an 85 degree Celsius operating temperature and could drive at 150mA with 60V capability.

“Noyce said that we could do it”, recounted Bay, “ Noyce had never made such a device. It was all theoretical.”

IBM gave Fairchild an order for the device in the last week in December, and Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni set about trying to produce it.

Moore worked on NPN, and Hoerni on PNP. Moore’s NPN device achieved the best yield, and was chosen as the one to go to manufacture..

To manufacture the device, the Fairchild team had to build furnaces, a crystal-growing machine and much of the production equipment from scratch.

In March 1958, Fairchild delivered 100 of the devices, made on half inch diameter wafers, at a price of $150 each.

Later Fairchild moved the devices into volume production.

Bay found IBM a rich seam to mine with many more groups inside IBM subsequently coming to him with specifications for silicon transistors they wanted Fairchild to make..