Jean Hoerni (1924- January 12, 1997) was a silicon transistor pioneer and a member of the Traitorous Eight.

He was born in 1924 in Switzerland. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and another Ph.D. from the University of Geneva.

In 1952, he moved to the United States to work at the California Institute of Technology, where he became acquainted with William Shockley, the founder of Silicon Valley.

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.

Along with Traitorous Eight alumni Jay Last and Sheldon Roberts, he founded Amelco (known now as Teledyne) in 1962.

In 1964, he founded Union Carbide Electronics.

In 1967, he founded Intersil.

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