It does note his achievements, but had the man had any charisma at all, Silicon Valley might not have been. That the man was repellent is pivotal to the founding of Fairchild and thus all of the fairchildren.
Re:Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
by llama-mini on Tuesday December 24, 2024 @07:21PM
(#42505959)
No, the man's personality is the engine of his achievement.
It's just that ordinary human do not really rewards genius.
For the man being different, he probably can be Gorden Moore, who just noticed a pattern, and then become monumental figure.
Populous rewards popularity, not genius. And being ignored by them is not a failure, it's a necessity of greatness.
Wild that people think only very specific human beings could have done this, there were multiple people working on the same problems, one of them was going to invent the thing, he wasn't the only genius around.
So much so there were plenty of others coming on his wake, creating and contributing even more to the field.
Re:Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday December 24, 2024 @10:07PM
(#42506565)
"Greatness" and "repels people so hard that nobody wants to work with him" are not the same thing. Greatness does not require being that abhorrent to others.
The conclusion of the article is correct that besides his own contributions to the theory of semiconductor devices his second great, even if unintended, achievement was hiring truly the best people, but then annoying them enough so that they have left and founded Fairchild Semiconductor, from where some of them have gone later to create many other of the most important companies of Silicon Valley.
However Shockley has contributed with much more than the invention of the bipolar junction transistor. His invention of the Shockley diode was not very important, because the PNPN switch had already been invented at Bell Labs 3 years earlier, in 1952, by Jewell J. Ebers. The innovation of Shockley was only to notice that a PNPN switch does not need control electrodes to be switched on, because it can be switched on by either the output voltage or by light, therefore it can be made as a diode instead of a tetrode, like previously.
More important has been that Shockley has invented not only the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948, but also the junction field-effect transistor (JFET) in 1951. For many decades these 2 have been the most important semiconductor devices, until the technology has progressed sufficiently to allow the control of the oxide-silicon interface well enough to allow the fabrication of MOS transistors (which had been invented well before WWII, but nobody knew how to make them).
Even more important is that he has published detailed theories about how the BJTs and the JFETs function, which allowed anyone to design such semiconductor devices.
These theories of the semiconductor transistors conceived by Shockley have been what has really started the semiconductor industry. The previous discovery of the point-contact transistor by Bardeen and Brattain has been more or less accidental and they did not understand how it works. Without the theory of Shockley none of the quick progresses from the years following 1948 would have existed.