A few years later, Shockley recurited Hoerni to work with him at the newly founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments in Mountain View, California. But Shockley's strange behavior would compel the Traitorous Eight to abandon him and create the Fairchild Semiconductor corporation, where Hoerni would invent the planar process, which allowed integrated circuits to be created out of silicon rather than germanium. The "silicon" in the name "Silicon Valley" refers to silicon.
An avid mountain climber, Hoerni often visited the Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan and was moved by the poverty of the Balti mountain people who lived there. He and Greg Mortenson contributed $12,000 for the building of the first school in the area, and later founded the Central Asia Institute with an endowment of $1 million to continue providing services for them after his death.
Bibliography
Red Herring magazine, February 1997, in an article by Deborah Claymon
JeanHoerni (1924- January 12, 1997) was a silicon transistor pioneer and a member of the Traitorous Eight.
But Shockley's strange behavior would compel the Traitorous Eight to abandon him and create the Fairchild Semiconductor corporation, where Hoerni would invent the planar process, which allowed integrated circuits to be created out of silicon rather than germanium.
An avid mountain climber, Hoerni often visited the Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan and was moved by the poverty of the Balti mountain people who lived there.
Hoerni's inspiration came to him during his shower one morning in 1958, at a time when he and the seven other Fairchild founders were completely stalled in their research.
Hoerni'splanar process, a means of fusing an insulating layer of silicon dioxide onto the chip before the application of the conducting metal circuitry, turned out to be the breakthrough.
Hoerni was as stimulated by a Sherpa as by a Nobel scientist, and if his name is not often recognized in the rolling hills of the San Francisco Bay Area, it is sung with high praise in remote Pakistan.
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