A Most Successful Failure: Lessons from Shockley Semiconductor

William Shockley. Courtesy of Stanford University Silicon Valley Archives.

By David C. Brock

In the annals of the history of science, technology, and business, stories of successes—of those events, individuals, and groups that came to shape history in both intended and unforeseen ways—abound. Stories of failure are less frequently told, but the past is replete with examples of “successful failures”: developments that, despite falling short of their immediate goal, had profound effects.

By most benchmarks the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was a business failure. William Shockley (1910–1989), a pioneer of solid-state physics and corecipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the transistor, established the firm in 1955 as a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments after convincing Arnold O. Beckman that a substantial technological and economic opportunity lay in silicon semiconductor electronics. The Palo Alto–based firm met the same fate as many high-technology start-ups that followed: early years of R&D struggle, limited commercial success, and gradual disappearance as a recognizable entity after a series of acquisitions. In the late 1950s the company introduced a line of four-layer silicon diodes to the market; in 1961 Beckman sold the operation to the Clevite Corporation; in 1965 Clevite sold its semiconductor operations to ITT; and by the end of the 1960s the Shockley Semiconductor facility was shuttered.

Although Shockley Semiconductor failed to capitalize on the opportunities in silicon electronics foreseen by Shockley and Beckman, its story is crucial for the development of the semiconductor industry. Shockley assembled a remarkable collection of talented individuals, many of whom subsequently became industrial and technological leaders in the region that would become known as “Silicon Valley.” In 1957 eight of Shockley’s employees left to establish Fairchild Semiconductor, a firm that became the mother organization for hundreds of semiconductor manufacturers and their suppliers. The cofounders’ time at Shockley Semiconductor served as a crash course in entrepreneurship from which their subsequent success at Fairchild was forged.

R. Victor Jones was among the first wave of Shockley’s recruits. Jones’s addition to the laboratory in 1956 was, in Shockley’s estimation, something of a coup. Jones was finishing his doctorate in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and had accepted a job offer from Bell Telephone Laboratories—the nation’s premier industrial research laboratory. Shockley eventually convinced Jones to refuse the Bell Labs position and to join the handful of Shockley Semiconductor staff occupying a rented storefront in Palo Alto. Shockley was convinced that the future of semiconductor devices lay in two key technological approaches: silicon and diffusion. Scarcely a year earlier the Bell Labs chemist Morris Tanenbaum had used these approaches to create the first diffused-base silicon transistor (see CH, Winter 2004/5, p. 24). (At the time most transistors were made of germanium.) Shockley’s vision was predicated on access to an adequate supply of single crystals of silicon with exacting degrees of chemical purity and crystalline perfection, manufactured using a process pioneered at Bell Labs and later Texas Instruments by the chemist Gordon Teal (see CH, Spring 2006, pp. 33–35).

Not long after joining Shockley Semiconductor Jones accompanied Shockley on a cross-country flight. On the long flight to the east coast Shockley and Jones discussed how the firm could grow purer, more perfect silicon crystals. As the landscape passed beneath them, Jones and Shockley sketched out an answer. In Teal’s conventional crystal-production technique, single crystals were pulled from a melt of silicon held by a graphite crucible heated by an induction coil. The combination of high heat, silicon’s reactivity, and direct contact with graphite made this technique susceptible to contamination. Jones and Shockley envisioned pulling a crystal from a pool of melted silicon atop a large block of ultrapure silicon. The underlying silicon block would rest on a graphite support, but the arrangement would prevent contaminants from the graphite from easily migrating to the surface puddle. The scheme, however, required drastic changes from the conventional approach. Jones and Shockley would need two independent heating systems: an “oven” of sorts to bring the entire silicon block to just below its melting point and an additional “surface heater” to form the puddle on the top. Resistance heating—not induction heating—would be required. They envisioned an electro-optical feedback system to control the temperature of the surface puddle of silicon. Jones and Shockley contemplated yet another leap from existing practice to prevent contamination: instead of growing their crystals in an atmosphere of inert gas, they would grow them in a vacuum.