Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory Last worked at the
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of
Beckman Instruments from April 1956 to September 1957. Last recalled in the book
Oral History of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, “Shockley did not encourage us to interact with each other. It had to come from Shockley on down.” Shockley utilized such tactics as publicly-staged firings of underperforming employees and lie detector tests in order to keep his workers under control. And Thus, in January 1957, a group of seven employees, including Last, appealed to Arnold Beckman to ask that he intervene in the company's operations. Beckman initially seemed sympathetic, but ended up supporting Shockley. They were eventually joined by
C. Sheldon Roberts, and termed the "
Traitorous Eight".
Fairchild Semiconductor On September 18, 1957, Last and the others formally resigned from Shockley Semiconductor to form
Fairchild Semiconductor, as a division of
Sherman Fairchild's
Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. Once it became available, the mesa transistor was desired for a wide variety of military applications. The speed with which it had been developed gave Fairchild a virtual monopoly on the fast-growing market for the next year. The most significant contract came from Autonetics, which was developing the navigation and control computer for the Minuteman ICBM. For example, Fairchild utilized “laboratory techniques such as diffusion and photolithography developed at the Bell Telephone Laboratories” and successfully converted them into “reproducible manufacturing processes” rather than re-inventing processes themselves. During this period, Last helped develop various transistor fabrication techniques in photo-lithography, photomasking, photoresists, and mesa etching. He helped to design a step-and-repeat camera to make photomasks and a method for aligning the masks. Many of the techniques developed at Fairchild became foundational to the creation of both transistors and integrated circuits by the semi-conductor industry. He presented a novel adaptation of silicon manufacturing processes that had originated at Bell Labs. The planar process created a flat surface structure protected with an insulating silicon dioxide layer. Robert Noyce showed how Hoerni’s planar process could be exploited to electrically interconnect the components of an integrated circuit. They described hybrid silicon integrated circuits that they had developed, including a
flip-flop, a gate, an
adder, and a
shift register. They also discussed the feasibility of creating miniaturized, integrated logic circuits. However, they still faced many challenges in improving and commercially producing them. By the summer of 1960, Last's Fairchild Semiconductor team succeeded in building and demonstrating the first working planar
integrated circuits. The working group included Last, Bob Norman, Isy Haas, Lionel Kattner, James Nall, James Wilkerson, Gary Tripp, Robert Marlin, Chester Gunter, Jerry Lessard, and Melvin Hoar. Last and Hoerni had technical expertise essential to such an undertaking. By targeting specialty military applications as their primary market, Teledyne avoided putting itself in direct competition with Fairchild, and stayed on generally good terms with the larger company.
Recognition In May 2011, the
traitorous eight (Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and C. Sheldon Roberts) received the “Legends of California Award” from the
California Historical Society. Prior to the award ceremony, Last said he was not scared about his risky departure from Shockley, explaining, "When you are in your late 20s you don't know enough to be scared, we just did it. We just knew what we had to do and we did it." Last appeared on the
PBS documentary series
American Experience in the episode titled
"Silicon Valley", which debuted on February 6, 2013. The show focused on the eight pioneering innovators, including Last, who defected from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to start Fairchild Semiconductor, and turned
Santa Clara County, California, into the center of technological ingenuity. Last also talked about the day that
William Shockley showed up in Last's laboratory at MIT and offered him a job at his company. ==Art and philanthropy==