The Fairchild Semiconductor Story Part 1

is this company actually important? So if you're the luddite who hasn't, first of all, how are you getting this podcast? And second well, um, okay, but yeah, we're talking about fair Child Semiconductor and you may have heard of this company. It actually, like I said, it's it's very important in the development of technology as we have have it today. I mean, it's the the work that they did laid the foundation for what makes the technology we use today possible.

One of their inventions in in what was that? Or so is the basic technology that we still use. Right, It's one allowed maturization, Right, I mean some of the earlier work had already been done before fair fair Child became a thing, but or fair child semiconductor, I should say, But let's let's start at the beginning. So first of all, I guess we should talk so what what is a semi conduct That's a good question to ask because we're

gonna be talking about them a lot. So a semiconductor is kind of I mean, if you think of the word, it kind of makes sense. A semiconductor is some sort of material that, under certain circumstances, acts as a conductor. As an it conducts electricity, does not Yeah, that's more like an insulator. It does not conduct electricity. Now, in the case of electronics, were usually talking about something that has been engineered so that certain parts of it conduct

electricity effectively, other parts insulate. Again, all out for this thing like transistors. Transistors are essentially electron gates. That's where you get that that on off switch that one zeros. Yeah, exactly exactly. This is what allows us to control the flow of electrons through a circuit so that we can

have various outcomes. So for example, with a microprocessor, where you're using something in a in a computer or a mobile handset, this is what allows that those logical functions to take place, and we use things called logic gates. Logic gates are essentially rules that say, when you get this kind of input, you will create this kind of output. So let's say, here's a really simple example showing the

one zero concept. Let's say you have two light switches, all right, and you have one light bulb, and if you flip a light switch to the up position, that's technically uh, the number one. Let's say, so, let's say you flip both lights, which is up to the number one position, and the light bulb comes on, so that would be one one one, everything is on. If you switch both lights, which is to the off position, that would be zero. The light bulb goes off. That's zero

zero zero. Now, let's say you switch the first light switch on, second light switch off, and the light bulb comes on. That's one zero one. You do first light switch down, second light switch up at zero one, and then the light bulb comes on. That's another one. So that would be an example of a gate, and you can have all different kinds of combinations with that particular gate. It could be that when both switches are down, the lights on, but in any other combination it's off. That's

all different types of logic gates. So we create these logic gates to create the different scenarios necessary to process data. And this data is just in the form of electrons. Now, what I explained to you might sound like sorcery, but no, seriously, this is the basis of electronics and computers. And uh, the fact that we're able to to miniaturize these elements to teeny teeny tiny amounts. We're talking the nano scale these days is what allows us to have the computers

and mobile devices that we use today. Otherwise we would still be depending upon massive, massive pieces of electronic equipment right right, you're you would be tethered to a room rather than a cell phone or a building. Tweet. Yeah, because we're talking back in those days. You know, we're just talking circuits, and circuits are just pathways for electricity. That's really what a basic circuit is. In the old days, you made these pathways out of physical wires and other

components that were huge, like vacuum tubes. I mean, these are big, big things. It was only after the transistor was invented that we started to see the possibility of moving away from that. And even those earliest transistors weren't integrated circuits. They were right. They were pretty bulky. They were frequently called Mesa transistors because they slightly resembled Mesa settlements in the desert because they were big and blocky and weird looking. And yeah, yeah, the very first one

is practically enormous. I mean you can see pictures of it in things like the Computer History Museum. They have a replica. Uh. But anyway, one of the three inventors, one of the three people we credit with inventing the the transistor, was William Bradford Shockley. Uh. And he and John Bardeen and Walter H. Brittaine. We're working at Bell Telephone. Yeah,

Bell Telephone Labs. So they were over at Bell Labs and they created that first semi conductor back in nineteen Now, in nineteen fifty four, Shockley left Bell Labs to found his own semiconductor factory called Shockley semi Conductors, and he hired up all these smart engineers and scientists. He was He said, these are the people that are going to really push this as an industry. I see the potential here. We need to really grab the best and brightest and and he knew a lot about that at the time.

Nineteen fifty six he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Yeah, yeah, no, he was one of the I believe he and a couple of others were credited with it. But yes, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in creating transistors. Yes, sport guy. However, in nineteen fifty six, about eight of the twelve brilliant guys that he hired said, you know, we're not really a fan of your practices

or management style, or you're kind of a jerk your face. Yeah, okay, So, in the interest of full disclosure, Shockley, if you ever look him up, held some incredibly controversial and really not nice views. I've I've heard him compared to a slightly less polite Howard Hughes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're wondering what we're talking about, look up William Bradford Shockley. It's not really germane to this discussion. So we're not going to cover right. Maybe we'll do an episode about him

some other time. But so so it was important that he are these twelve people um and and was concentrating them on trying to figure out ways of using um uh germanium and silicon, right, yes, because those were the materials that seemed to be the most promising for semiconductors. And these eight, eight of the twelve decided to leave, and of course Shockley, being the understated fellow that he is, labeled them the traitorous eight. Yes, which I love. They

broke my heart. Fredo. So ninety seven, these eight engineers, and you're gonna recognize at least one of these names, guys, I'm pretty sure I'll leave the one that you'll recognize, uh, most likely. Last there was A C. Sheldon, Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert and Noise. I'm sure some of you recognize that name. Victor H. Grinch, Julius Blank, Jean A. Hernie, and J. T. Last, the last one is Gordon E. Moore, a k A.

That guy who came up with Morris Law. Yeah, this is the guy who created Moore's Law, which was of course an observation. He had observed that there was this tendency for manufacturing companies to cram twice as many components onto a square inch silicon chip um every year or so. Now we've since reinterpreted that to mean that every two years or so, computers get twice as powerful as they used to be. Anyway, this he was one of the founding members. These guys they decided to leave, and they

decided they wanted to find found their own company. And they approached a company called fair Child Camera and Instrument Corporation, which was located located of New York, and they were looking to get into superconductors at the time, semi conductors at the time. Exact conductors are a different thing, right, right, but semiconductors. Yes. By the way, people, we're recording this in a very warm room, so there's gonna be some verbal stumbles on on the part of both of us,

and maybe even Tyler, who was sitting in for Noeld today. Hi, Tyler, Tyler, Tyler tan waving which is great for radio so um. At any rate, they went to Fairchild Camera Instrument Corporation and said, hey, guys, I hear that you are looking at getting into the semiconductor business. We are very knowledgeable about semiconductors. How about we get together and work on this.

And the fair Child said, uh, maybe, and so they kind of drew up an agreement, and in that agreement, each of the engineers put five hundred dollars of their own money toward this as a stake in the venture, and then a fair Child threw in another one and a half million, so you know, equal equal parts all around, right sure, but yeah, it started. Also the fair Child had the option to outright by the company within eight years of its starting, and so the cons of that, yeah,

you got to read the fine print, guys. Know. So in October of seven, fair Child Semiconductor becomes a real thing, and it was just the third company that existed in Silicon Valley. Um, of course, it wasn't called Silicon Valley at the time. It was called Santa Clara Valley to anyone who you know, happened to live there. Yeah, if you're wondering what the first one was, that's Hewlett Packard.

That's technically the first company in Silicon Valley. They and you know, unlike the others, uh, they didn't start fair Child didn't start in a garage. One of the few things to set it apart from every other company that ever started in Silicon Valley. They bucked the trend. Of course at that point is not a trend, I guess, unless you're the Braves, in which case, three games in a row is a winning streak, alright, So sure that was a harsh dissa. Someone who knows something about baseball.

They're they've got the highest they've got the best record of baseball right now, So I'm it's not really a diss okay. So moving on semiconductors. What happens with making one? How are they made? So this is a little different from the way they were doing it in the earliest days at fair Child, But in general, what you have to start with is pure silicon. It's very important that

it's as pure as possible. You wanted to get it as close to pure as you possibly can because, uh, you're going to be missing with this stuff in the in the future. But you know, it's are the ways in which it works exactly. So when you start with a good pier base that, yeah, that that makes it possible. Otherwise your chips are not going to work. You're you're going to end up with a huge waste of resources. So you grow these pier silkon crystals into kind of

kind of cylinders. Yeah. Yeah. The way it works is you've got this big old vat of of liquid silicon and then you dip the pure crystal in it makes the rest of the liquid crystallize around into one crystal. It's like one solid crystal, which is really fascinating process by the way. Yeah, and then you you draw it out and you've got this big old cylindrical ingot is

what they called them. And then you use a saw usually controlled these days by a robot, but it's a saw that cuts them the cylinder into wafers or waters if you prefer, you know, Monty Python approach. So it's waffer thin and you cut a series of wafers through this ingot. Each wafer is about point seven five millimeters thick and just under twelve inches in diameter, so about three millimeters and you cut once. Once you cut that, then you're ready to start the diffusion and etching process.

So let's talk about what's going well. Actually, first you have to polish it, I should say, because you wanted to bet with Yeah, you wanted to be as uniform as possible, because you're gonna be again making very tiny changes to it, particularly these days. Now again, back in the fair Child days, you're talking about elements that were on the micro scale. Now we're on the nano scale. But we'll we'll talk more about why that's important in

in the next episode. So essentially, what you're doing is you're using chemicals to give certain properties to the semiconductor and then cut away parts that you don't want. So there are two different types of semiconductor material. There's ND type and there's P type, which essentially stands for negative and positive. The negative types have extra electrons that they can give up. The positive types have holes electron holes that can accept electrons. This is what allows electricity to

flow through semiconductor material. So you're actually introducing small amounts of impurities. It's called doping, and in this case, it's not a bad thing, so you're not gonna get thrown out of the Olympics for it, and you probably won't

go into the Olympics either. But anyway, so you're doing this doping process, and it's imagine that you you add in a layer of the special stuff that that dopes your wafer, uh like ND type, we'll just say N type, and then you coate certain parts of the wafer with a chemical that's going to protect that layer. Then you use a different chemical to etch away anything that was not coded, so only the coded stuff remains whole, creating a certain pattern on the chip or the wayfer surface

rather exactly. Then you do another coading. Maybe now it's a P coding and again you code it again with don't you're like twelve, It's like Cris Palette, she's just giggling and looking at me. Yes, it's a P coding the letter P, and then you code that with an oxide. Again you use the chemicals to etch away all the non relevant parts. You do this many, many, many times in order for you to make a final uh semiconductor

chip of whatever it is that you were building. And keep in mind this could be lots of different stuff. Semi connected material is used in more than just microprocessors. It's used in a lot of other basic pieces of electronics, but we mostly think of it as microprocessors because that's

one of those things that I think everyone has some familiarity. So, uh, yeah, the process has done several times in order to get exactly what it is you want, and then once that's done, then it can go into the next level of processing, which usually involves putting in some connectors so that it can connect to whatever it is, and then you finish it off with whatever covers need to be placed on it, then it gets packaged and sent off to wherever it needs to go. So that's your basic uh step from

beginning to end. And so one thing that the fair Child folks had come up with was this idea of double diffusion. Now that is the process I was talking about of introducing those impurities, that doping process, and the way that they were doing it was cutting down on the processing time that they would need to do. Back in the early days, if you wanted to make a transistor,

you essentially had to do it piece by piece. You would get a wafer and you would make one transistor and you you know, you end up having that all cut out and and done, then you would go back to the wafer and make the next one. They found a way where they could process this and makes several transistors of an entire wafer all at once. So it really cut down on the amount of time it took to produce transistors, which in turn brought the price down.

This is what Gordon Moore was talking about when he made that observation. He said, we're making improvements in manufacturing which is making it possible for us to reduce the price of components, which is making it possible to build bigger components. So really, when he made that observation, it wasn't anything necessarily about computer power or or electronics power. It was more about about the actual right, the actual physical pieces. And yeah, it was just ultimately all comes

down to money, which is you know, cheerful. Hey, that being said, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, so we're back. Let's talk about the actual history of fair Child. So it was founded in nineteen seven. Six

months later, it was profitable. That's pretty impressive. I mean, brand new company, unproven other than the fact that they knew they had some of the smartest guys in the industry still and also, I mean they made their first sales to IBM um for an order of a hundred transistors priced at a hundred and fifty bucks a pop, right, and that was approximately five million dollars. It was it was It was a lot. It was a bunch. Was

it was bunch. It was a bunch of dollars hundred fifty bucks for a hundred transistor, well a hundred fifty dollars per transistor for a hundred transistors, all to IBM that's a good first client to have. Yeah, sure, not too bad. Um My, my favorite part about this story is that when they had to ship them, um, j Last just ran out to a local supermarket and picked up a used Brillow carton. Brillow being that brand of scrubby sponges, right all right, you know there's sponges that

have some steel wool and soap in them. Yeah. Yeah, And and he just picked up a used carton and they were just like, oh, this is good for transistors and pop Yeah, keeping in mind that, you know, these days, we have very specific packaging for all this kind of cages built in and like plastic that you will never ever open without the use of some sort of chainsaw. Yeah. I like this though. It adds a little, a little

kind of dash of whimsy to the story. Um. And that same year, one of the engineers, Robert Noyce, developed the monolithic integrated circuit. Now, this is the invention you were talking about earlier in the show, Lauren, the one that truly defines the way we use computers and electronics, what what makes them what they are, Because it's what allowed an entire circuit to be put upon a single

chip of of silicon. Before it was that you would create different components and then wire them all together, which meant that you were limited by size. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to get too small. But this suddenly created the possibility of miniaturization on a level that they had

never had before. However, um it did mean that, uh, there weren't that many customers who needed this yet because they're just wasn't a market there, right, So it was it was a huge development and it was phenomenal and really important in computers and electronics. But at the time everyone's like, well, that's cool, but what does it do? I don't want to yeah exactly, but we'll we'll understand there's an interesting, first, really good application for it coming up.

So that he was not the only person to be to work on the integrated circuit and come up with us. There wasn't a separate group that came up with it independently right led by Jack Kilby over at Texas Instruments

and UM. And the story of that one goes that the Jack was had only been with Texas Instruments for a couple of months and was left alone therefore at the offices during a vacation time when everyone else had off and just sitting around came up with this with a very similar idea for how to um how to add layers to a wafer before before starting to catch out the chemical process. And I think the chemical process

is what Noise really came up with. UM but uh, but but but but yeah, anyway, you know they would they both applied for patents both companies, and a fair Child would wind up winning that one really hard, partially because because Noise had sort of expanded upon the same concept and uh and filed a much more detailed patent. Right. So, if you've listened to our episodes on Texas Instruments, you've probably heard our story there where we talked about the

integrated circuit. It's interesting and not unusual to see two different people in two different companies, not necessarily having any connection with one another, independently come up with the same thing. We've seen this happen again and again, and sometimes it just kind of indicates that the time was right, like enough of the groundwork had been laid that someone was

going to come up with it. And when you've got that many brilliant people working on it, surely it shouldn't come as a surprise that more than one person realized how it was going to work. In this case, we give the credit largely to two Noise. At least he got the patent for it UM. In nineteen fifty nine,

Gene Herny created the first planar transistor. Now it's gonna it's kind of complicated to talk about what exactly the planar transistor is, but in general, the earlier transistors had exposed junctions which made them less efficient when they were processing electricity, when they were doing whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. In that particular transistor, uh, there was a lot of leakage, which meant that not all the electrons were going where you wanted them to go,

and you had a lot of wasted power. In that case, the planar approach meant that. And planars p l A in a R, which was at least for a long time I'm not sure if it still is. Was a proprietary word owned by Fairchild. Interesting that that they've made a good couple million bucks on licensing for Wow. I

did not know that. I didn't see that in my research. Well, at any rate, they according to what I read the reason The main reason they called it that was because it ended up having these uh there were these protective layers that were on top of these transistors, and the conventional wisdom at the time was that you need to remove those at the end of processing in order for

this transistor to work. There are a lot of engineers who were of the opinion that if you were to leave those layers in place, it wouldn't either the transistor wouldn't work properly, it would be less efficient, or it just would It just was a wasteful idea. That was something that Hernie said, No, that's let's try this and created a transistor using this approach where those layers were left in place, and it actually created a much more

efficient transistor. And uh So, the reason I've seen of why it was called planars because the transistor itself was flat because those layers had not been removed. There are other, uh exact descriptions that say that the reason why it's called as because all the elements are within the same plane of each other. Your wage may vary, you know. The wacky thing about history is that different people define it in different ways, and we just have to go

with whatever one we like. Most. So then we that takes us up to nineteen six one, and that's when fair Child Semi Conductor got that patent on the monolithic integrated circuit. When I hear monolithic integrade circuit, I just imagine it must have been enormous. That's a model like the thing. Yes, exactly, that's the second biggest integrated circuit have ever seen. Anyway, the first integrated circuit that was commercially available from fair Child was the Resistor Transistor Logic

product also known as RTL. So, uh, you're gonna hear us talk about a lot of these terms. We're not gonna go into a lot of detail because every single one of these gets really really technical. But in any rate, this is what was what leading to true managerization, allowing these computers and like tries to come in those smaller form factors. Now, those first integrated circuits were hundred twenty

dollars per chip. It's pretty expensive. And again and there weren't that many customers out there that had need for it except for one big one. So nineteen what industry really had to conserve on how much space there stuff took up? Could that be the space industry could be you know, it's so ironic that there's nothing out there but space, and yet they needed to conserve space. Can

you guys hear me shaking my hat at him? So, yeah, the obviously when you're designing a space craft, some sort of space capsule, every single tiny Yeah, you gotta have enough room for if it's a manned spacecraft, you have to have enough room for the astronauts to move around and do whatever it is they need to do. And so conserving that was of the highest level of importance. So the space industry, NASA really relied heavily on fair

Child Semiconductor in those early days. In fact, some of the some of the component it's that fair Child would make would be used in the Apollo program for the guidance systems. Very important stuff. Uh. In nineteen sixty two, fair Child opened up a production facility in Maine, south Portland, specifically yep, south Portland that would become important. That's uh spoiler alert. This will come in and play in the second part of our series. That's where the headquarters are now,

South Portland, Maine. That that facility was open in sixty two and the transistors produced there were intended mostly for radios, and oscilloscopes and a few other uh instruments, you know, electronic instruments. In sixty three they produced the resistor transistor logic dual gate device, the RTL dual gate device, the first to incorporate buried layer isolation technology, which are the

Planer resistors. This was the first time they had actually incorporated that approach that Noise had had really and Hernie had pioneered. And now this was actually control product. So they were you know, you can think of those earlier to discoveries. They obviously took a couple of years to get worked into the manufacturing process, and those those one up with with Apollo, didn't they Yeah, yeah, they sure did. So these are the ones that the Apollo program would

rely on heavily for multiple systems, mainly guidance. In sixty four they created the n P N Planer power transistor, and that was kind of like you can imagine it like a sandwich, all right, So the the top piece of bread on your sin which is really negative, it's just a negative piece of bread. This is the N type silicon. Then you would have the delicious center of your sandwich, which in my case would probably be peanut butter and jelly because I'm you know, a man of sophistication.

That would be p types. That's very positive positive silicon. Then the bottom layer bread once again from that same negative loaf that you received earlier. It's the other end type and it used thin film resistors. This is important because previous versions of integrated circuits actually used little tiny metal connectors to connect the various layers right right, those were the film of This was than enough that it would let the electrons just pass through it directly rather

than needing those they have those connectors exactly. It made it simpler to to produce these types of transistors. And again according to Moore's law, we would find these developments making it more efficient cheaper to produce. That's what it allowed us to create more complex electronics using these components, and to make the components themselves more complex. So sixty five that's when Fairchild produces the operational amplifier or pp amp.

So that's essentially what it sounds like. An amplifier amplify something. It makes something bigger in this case is voltage. So what it would do is take the incoming voltage and amplify the potential difference from the input terminals significantly, remembering the voltage is a measurement of the difference in electric potential. Was also the year in which More actually published that that article um eloquently titled Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,

in which Moore's observation or law was laid out. Yep, yep, and boy, Moore's law. That's one of those things that even today you have people saying any day now is going to be the last day for Moore's law, and the engineers say, I will take you up on that challenge, and so yes, six six, let's let's move on. Let's keep going, because you know fair Child kept going, so

we will to sixty six. They created the first standard transistor transistor logic or t t L product, which was a quad to put uh two input negated and gait or nand in A and D. So that's a logic gate that creates a false output only if all inputs are true. So in binary terms, if you put if you put in two one's you get a zero. Any other input combination results in a one. So if you get to zeros, it comes out of one one one and one zero comes out of one one zero one

one comes out as one. I know this gets confusing, but you have to you do essentially think like with two switches, you have four potential combinations, even though you would mostly think, well, one's offen, one's on. Yeah, but it's important to designate that off on and on off are different in the sense of binary. Me getting on my binary soapbox which only has two sides. It's not

really a box, I guess. Alright. So nineteen seven, fair Child introduces the new op amp with temperature compensation and metal oxide silicon capacitor or MOSS m o S metal oxide silicon. We're gonna into a lot of initialisms and some acronyms than thank you, thank you, Twitter listener, um name I don't have right now in front of us, who corrected? Ut, Yeah, I do that all the being snarky, but yeah, I actually really appreciate it. No, I really

do too. I am that guy. I'm the who makes those corrections, So I cannot I cannot criticize others for doing the same to me, because I do that to other people. But yes. In sixty eight, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left the company. They leave fair Child. Now see the fair Child Camera and Instruments. They were kind of what well, fair Child semi Conductor was part of this company. The people over at fair Child Camera and Instruments were sometimes a little hands when it came to, uh,

the management style. Like they would they would sit there and override certain things that the engineers thought were really important. And so they, the founders sometimes referred to as fair Children, became less enchanted with the company they had helped create, and one by one or sometimes sometimes more than one by one, they left to go and either work for someone else or to found their own companies. Right in this case, more and noise left to found something called Intel. Yeah, yeah,

a little company get called Intel. Yeah, so they which is you know, you sit there and you think about this is a pretty interesting progression. First they worked for Shockley, the one of the inventors of the transistor. Then they went on to found fair Child Semiconductor, and now they they're leaving again to found Intel. We'll talk about some of the other companies that were founded by fair Children

as well. That will come into play and later on. Uh. Meanwhile, fair Child Semiconductor hired away a guy named c. Lester Hogan, who was formerly of Motorola's semiconductor business, to become the head of fair Child Semiconductor. And Hogan did something that made him extremely unpopular at Motorola and very popular, uh at fair Child Camera, but not not so not necessarily

so much at fair Child Semiconductor. He decided to cannibalize his old division at Motorola, and he brought on lots and lots of managers some would say around a hundred managers from Motorola, but he also along seven executives to become the new management of fair Child semi Conductor. They essentially wiped out the existing management of fair Child and replaced them. Right now, those um, those seven executives from

Motorola had a their own nickname. You had the traitors eight who made up the original fair Child Semiconductor group. The seven executives were called Hogan's heroes. Hogan's heroes, that's right. I did read about that, and they went on to star in a great television series. I don't think that's true. No, but Motorola did sue fair Child for damages due to all of this. UM. I think the final outcome of that case was that the court said, like, well, it

didn't help them that much if if they had any wrongdoing. Yeah, this is that was like the biggest backhanded win of all time, right, or it's very similar to something that happened in the Apple Samsung patent disputes. A judge ended up looking at this case that Motorola brought again fair Child, saying that fair Child had had essentially uh completely butchered Motorola semiconductor business. They kind of doomed it by taking

all the talent. And furthermore, I had had like stolen some trade secrets by by lieu of of exactly human people. The people who were developing the products of Motorola had in their heads the information that was important to Motorola success, and these were trade secrets, and therefore fair Child had stolen trade secrets in this process. And initially there was a ten percent drop in stock price at Motorola and

a nineteen percent increase at fair Child. But this lawsuit took years to play out, right, And by the end of it, the judge said, you know, I'm looking at fair Child's numbers and this has not done them any good at all. So I can't see how you can say that this is uh, this the fair Child was doing the story to good advantage, because if they that's what their intent was, it sure hasn't played out that way.

Fair Child was like, yeah, this is a that was a huge slap in the face for both companies at the same time Justice nineteen sixty nine, fair Child builds a semi conductor plant on Navajo Reservation Territory in Shipwrock in New Mexico, which will become important later. Yeah, it's a tough story. So nineteen seventy three, fair Child tries

out a new technique creating integrated circuit transistors. It's called isoplane AR two, and that actually lets them reduce the size of transistors by about seventy percent while keeping the power consumption at the same more or less the same level. That's also the year when we actually got that judgment against Motorola Um. Nineteen seventy four was when Hogan was dismissed as president of fair Child. He remained the vice chairman at the time, and the company starts to have

rounds of layoffs. They this was a point where they started talking about fair Child Semiconductor having a real problem with management and mismanagement. Of the company, and some of that was due to the executive some of it was due to the board of directors or or fair Child camera to be perfectly blunt. So Hogan, who had been this this sort of golden Child and you know, the center of this huge debate for several years, is now

on the Olts. He's no longer president. Was when a really controversial thing happened back at that that plant that was on Navajo Reservation territory. Um, there was a there was an armed protest there. Yeah, twenty Navajo protesters, armed Navajo protesters from the American Indian Movement took the plant by force, demanding better working conditions. And they also had demands that didn't have anything to do with fair Child Semiconductor.

It was more like about the plant. It was just a general plea to to really the United States, right, Yeah, it was to bring attention to, uh, the state of affairs that Native Americans were living under in reservations across the United States. It's saying, we want attention brought, we want better living conditions. So really they were using the plant as saw their platform to get this attention. They held it for eight days under armed force and eventually

gave themselves up peacefully. Uh. Fair Child's response once this was over was to shut down that plant entirely and they just left. It's now an abandoned building, or at least it was the last I saw from the last report I read, which I think was written in two thousand eight or two thousand nine, so it could be

something different now. But the story is pretty grim because while I think everyone at fair Child had maybe not the most honorable of intentions, but you know, they wanted to They wanted to build this this facility here, partially because they could get really cheap labor, but it would mean that they could help this community. They it seemed to me like they had that interest at heart, that they really did want to to take it not just

take advantage of people, but to help a community. Sure, although it was a very important protest to go on, I mean, yeah, I mean, this this was You could argue about whether or not it was done in the best way, but it was certainly this was an error part of that human rights movement that was that was transitioning from the nineteen sixties on. It was it was

critical for all of that. Although right, yeah, you know, you can you can argue about whether or not it was the right way to go, but yeah, it was a certain point when people are desperate. Yeah, yeah, there there was a point where they were feeling like there was no one listening and this was a way to make the world listen. So that kind of wraps up our first episode. This this this pivotal moment when fair Child has this this very public, very violent or potentially

violent moment, and they're they're really in the moment. The company itself is in in this sort of chaotic transition where they they've undergone changes in in their executive leadership. We'll talk more or about what happened in the years since nine in our next episode. Guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a company, it's a specific kind of technology, maybe it's

just a trend in technology, let us know. Send us an email our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. You'll find our handle is tech Stuff hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot Com