Shockley

"Noyce had a PhD in physics and a deep theoretical foundation, but he was outgoing, had leadership charisma, and had business vision—an entrepreneur as well as a scholar. Before joining “Fairchild,” he had served as R&D director under Shockley, the inventor of the transistor and a Nobel Prize winner. Because he disagreed with Shockley, he led eight key R&D executives to defect to Fairchild. Shockley’s company thus collapsed, and Shockley and Noyce became enemies who never spoke to each other. Noyce was quite successful at “Fairchild,” but working under others, he still felt his ambitions were unfulfilled."

"My time at Sylvania can be said to have been the beginning of my fervent learning of semiconductor technology. After spending the first few months focusing on Shockley’s Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, most of what I learned came from academic papers published at the time or from my daily R&D work. Fortunately, my new boss held a Harvard PhD and was quite proficient in transistor theory, which benefited me greatly. Starting in 1956, I began attending semiconductor academic conferences at least two or three times a year. In December 1956, I published my first semiconductor paper, and in 1957 I published two more papers. In hindsight, these papers were insignificant, but they helped quite a bit in raising my standing inside and outside the company."

"Self-studying semiconductors, gradually standing out At the same time, I began to teach myself semiconductors. My textbook was Shockley’s (one of the inventors of the transistor and a Nobel Prize winner) classic work, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. For a beginner, this is quite a difficult textbook. The feeling of first reading Homer’s epic poems when I had just arrived in the United States six years earlier appeared once again."