Author | Sea Monster
Source | Brain Polar Body (ID: unity007)
In the "Bible · Old Testament", the Israeli prophet Moses, by God's order, led the enslaved Israelis to flee Egypt to the wonderful and rich promised land of Canaan. When Moses himself was about to reach Canaan, he looked at his destination from a distance and died, and finally did not enter the promised land.
This fate seems to be repeated in William Shockley, the "father of the transistor". In 1956, Shockley, who had a good reputation, left Bell Labs, where he had worked for 20 years, and returned to his birthplace in Santa Clara Valley, California, and founded the Shockley Semiconductor Experiment.
Relying on his influence in the semiconductor field, Shockley returned to the East Coast of the United States, recruiting eight young people in the electronics field for the laboratory, and prepared to make one in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, which was still full of orchards. Change the world" business. However, in less than two years, Shockley’s poor management ability and unbearable arrogance made the young geniuses who started their business together to “defect” collectively, and founded the immortal that will be called “legendary”. Tong Semiconductor.
And Shockley could only accept the failure of entrepreneurship after being furious, and eventually returned to Stanford University to teach, giving up his business dream of becoming a millionaire.
William Shockley, because of his extraordinary business vision, made Silicon Valley, and was also known as the "Silicon Valley No. 1"; and because of his poor commercial ability, he became the "Silicon Valley's No. 1 Outcast." Shockley, like a magical Moses, split the Red Sea and brought the fortune of semiconductors from the eastern United States to the west coast of California, which is still in its infancy. However, he failed to truly "step into" his promised land.
Although Shockley's semiconductor laboratory has not left any key achievements in the development of the semiconductor industry, we can still use some space to explain the cause and effect of the birth of Silicon Valley.
(William Shockley 1910-1989)
The birth of Shockley Semiconductor Lab
In the mid-1950s, due to the transistor production process and cost, the transistor industry had just emerged, and the vacuum tube was in the midst of the day.
At that time, only a few companies could manufacture and produce transistors. Bell Labs still focused on point contact and junction transistors. On this basis, RCA was improved to metal junction transistors, while RCA successfully developed silicon transistors and MOS transistors. . Western Electric and Motorola in the United States began to manufacture transistors with a diffusion process. Japan’s Sony invented the tunnel diode, and later on, General Electric in the United States became the largest manufacturer of tunnel diodes.
It is worth mentioning that Texas Instruments released the first junction silicon tube that can be mass-produced in 1954. It has the characteristics of high temperature resistance and good heat dissipation that many germanium tubes do not have. It has become the most important in the US military and aerospace fields. Silicon tube supplier. In the same year, Texas Instruments launched the first portable transistor radio Regency TR-1 on Christmas Day 1954 and sold more than 100,000 units at once. It is this radio that made many ordinary people feel the revolutionary technological charm of transistors for the first time.
From 1954 to 1956, 17 million germanium transistors and 11 million silicon transistors were sold on the American market, valued at 55 million U.S. dollars, while 1.3 billion vacuum tubes were sold during the same period, with a market share of more than 1 billion U.S. dollars. By 1957, the annual output of transistors had reached 29 million.
It was at this stage that Shockley chose to return to his hometown to start a business with the determination to end the vacuum tube era.
The reason why Shockley would return to his birthplace, California, to start his own business, apart from the consideration of accompanying his elderly mother, is more importantly that Northern California has established a new technology industry base centered on Stanford University. A good industrial foundation and Stanford talent are just the main support for Shockley's entrepreneurship.
It was under the impetus of Professor Frederick Terman, Dean of Stanford University's School of Engineering, that Stanford established the world's first high-tech industrial park built around a university, attracting many high-tech companies to land here. It was Terman's invitation and help that enabled Shockley to locate the laboratory in Santa Clara Valley. It is worth mentioning that in 1939, with the support of Terman, two of his students, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, founded Hewlett-Packard, the famous Hewlett-Packard company.
(Santa Clara Valley)
Despite his reputation, Shockley does not have great resources. At the beginning of the venture, Shockley visited Texas Instruments, Rockefeller, Raytheon and other companies, trying to raise 500,000 US dollars to establish a transistor production company, but these companies refused, on the one hand because these companies are producing transistors themselves. On the one hand, American companies at the time did not have the idea of commercial venture capital. At the time when he was unable to do anything, Professor Arnold Beckman, a friend of Shockley University, who had founded Beckman Instruments at the time, decided to lend a helping hand and contribute $300,000 to help Shockley start his own business.
When forming the team at Shockley Lab, he also failed to bring in any colleague who had worked in Bell Labs, so he recruited graduates from prestigious universities in the east in the form of open recruitment in academic journals. Because of its reputation as the inventor of the transistor, it attracted a large number of aspiring young people to sign up, and because Shockley put forward very harsh recruitment conditions, the eight people that Shockley finally selected became elites in the semiconductor field.
At the beginning of his business, Shockley seized the best opportunity in the transistor industry, with Stanford’s entrepreneurial support, “angel” investments with friends, and a team of young and talented PhDs. He almost got a good hand at the beginning of the game. He hit a pulpy himself.
All this has a lot to do with Shockley's personal characteristics and business ability.
Shockley, a research genius and a commercial abandon, Shockley
Shockley's talent in scientific research and achievements in the invention of transistors did not affect his ambition to succeed in the commercial field.
From a young age, Shockley has revealed the idea of gaining wealth through his talents and becoming a millionaire. These traits may be derived from Shockley’s challenge-loving and pushy personality traits, as well as the environment in which he grew up.
Shockley was born in an intellectual family in the United States. His father was a mining engineer, and his mother was one of the first female college students to graduate from Stanford University. The academic atmosphere of the family environment gave Shockley a strong interest in technology when he was young. interest. In his teenage years, after his father passed away in 1925, his family moved to the vicinity of Hollywood in Los Angeles, which allowed him to see the vigorous business atmosphere brought about by industrial progress at that time, and also shaped his public personality.
During his successive studies at California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shockley was also known for his "showing the limelight." This style continued to work at Bell Labs. Once on the highway in New Jersey, he was caught illegally holding a gun. The police detained him and was later released on bail because of Bell Labs.
Zhang Yang's personality did not hinder Shockley's talent in scientific research. During World War II, Shockley also conceived the world's first nuclear reactor in 1939. Because of Shockley's great contribution to the military research department, he also received a special contribution medal after the war. After the war, when he was the leader of the solid-state physics research team at Bell Labs, because Shockley could not personally participate in the invention of Brighton and Barding’s point-contact transistors, he missed the right to sign the first transistor invention patent. With the help of one person, more advanced junction transistors have been developed independently, making the mass production of transistors possible.
Of course, Shockley's scientific research talent has not weakened his public personality. In 1947, after co-developing transistors with Brighton and Barding, their cooperation did not continue. It is said that under Shockley’s constant suppression, Brighton eventually went to other research groups, while Budding left Bell Labs and went to the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois. Although in January 1956, Shockley, Barding and Brighton won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the transistor, but this honor has actually been enjoyed by Shockley alone.
Perhaps because of the internal conflicts in the laboratory, Shockley has not been promoted and reused at Bell Laboratories, perhaps because the transistor invention patent belongs to Bell Laboratories, and he personally cannot get enough rewards. Xiao is dissatisfied. Klee chose to resign and start his own business.
(Original appearance of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory)
Hearing that Shockley had the idea of starting a business, Frederick Terman specially invited him back to his hometown and founded the "Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory" at 391 San Antonio Street, five miles away from Stanford University.
(Everyone celebrated Shockley's Nobel Prize in "Dinah's Cabin")
At the end of 1956, the moment of celebration after Shockley won the Nobel Prize seemed to be the highlight of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Since then, Shockley can use the term "chicken feathers in one place" in the management of the company.
Due to Shockley’s arbitrariness in the direction of semiconductor research and his attention to "nothing big and small" in the research process, the team has been unable to achieve results in the development of diodes made of four-layer semiconductor materials that he insisted on, and the integrated circuits suggested by the team members The manufacturing idea was easily denied by him and missed the future of the entire semiconductor industry.
In terms of business management capabilities, Shockley was described as "waste." Shockley treats these young geniuses with untrustworthy "beware everywhere." It is said that once a secretary cut his finger in the laboratory, but Shockley believed that someone deliberately conspired to get all the members to undergo a polygraph test.
And these eight spirited geniuses who had come here, also because they couldn't stand Shockley's self-righteous management style, collectively resigned at the end of 1957. This made Shockley angry, calling them "Eight Rebellions." But after that, Shockley, who had learned from his pains, intensified and chose more rigorous control methods. After a series of incredible operations, a large number of employees left their jobs and invested in rival companies.
Finally, in 1960, Shockley could only accept his failure and sold the Shockley Lab to the Klevett Lab. After that, he withdrew from the team in 1963 and returned to Stanford University to teach. The Shockley Laboratory was permanently closed in 1968 after resale.
Xiao Ke used his talents to attract the first batch of talents and ignited the "Silicon Valley Fire", and because of his arrogance, he personally ruined his business dreams, but inadvertently spread these "Silicon Valley Fires". Achieved the Silicon Valley myth from now on.
The "Silicon Valley Fire" of Shockley Labs
In hindsight, the failure of Shockley Lab had many reasons. In addition to Shockley's own personal reasons and poor business management capabilities, there are also inevitable factors of that era.
Although it was still in the early days of the transistor industry and there were opportunities everywhere, this self-made entrepreneurial model has not yet prevailed. At that time, it was mainly technology companies with huge scales or other mature businesses that dominated the manufacturing of semiconductors. Only places like Bell Labs with long-term research plans and resource strength can support their huge new product research plans.
Shockley is the sole founder of this company, which makes his personal arbitrariness no one can control. From experience, most successful startups benefit from complementary advantages and candid cooperation between at least two partners. In a team without joint decision-making, professional managers and professional business consultants, it is difficult to achieve commercial success with only a group of technical talents.
Therefore, for startups like Shockley Labs, there are not many reference samples that can be imitated, and its own failure has become the best reference sample for Silicon Valley companies since then.
(Shockley Lab is now a supermarket, this is a commemorative sign)
But Shockley's failure does not obliterate his "creation" in promoting the semiconductor industry. It was his efforts that brought silicon transistors to Northern California, making this area known as the "Valley of Preserved Fruits" named "Silicon Valley". It was his failure that pushed the technical team he built to a broader territory, and made Fairchild and the hundreds of chip companies born from it.
It is precisely this "Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship" model that he pioneered, which influences the subsequent generations of entrepreneurs and has made Silicon Valley today.
With the closing of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, people will turn their attention to the legend of Silicon Valley-Fairchild Semiconductor and the genius team called "Eight Rebellion" by Shockley.
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