The Recruit Who Did What He Wanted

That company was the most innovative semiconductor company in the industry's history, Fairchild Semiconductor.

And so it was, in 1962, that a young PhD from Utah, came to Fairchild and asked if he could work on thin film devices.

He was Frank Wanlass, and he was hired by Gordon Moore, then heading  the Fairchild lab.

Wanlass saw his work as a route to enabling the fabrication of  hundreds of transistors on a single substrate.

Wanlass could make transistors all right, but they were unstable. Eventually he figured out that the process of evaporating the aluminum used to make the gates produced sodium which contaminated the circuit.

Moore judged Wanlass to be right and assigned Andy Grove, among others, to help Wanlass find the way through to making integrated circuits based on MOS field effect transistors.

WEEKEND THOUGHT:  Poll 2 Monday: Who Was The Greatest-Ever Semi  CEO?