Overview

After Dr. Shockley invented the basic junction FET at Bell Labs in 1952, several years elapsed during which time the epitaxial process was also developed there. In 1958, Bell Labs' researchers invented photolithography, which allowed more complex devices to be created and eventually ICs. Another important milestone was reached in 1960, when yet another Bell Labs' researcher, Dr. John Atalla, developed the first metal-gate MOSFET. However, it was more of a lab curiosity and not too stable. Just before this in 1959, Dr. Jean Hoerni, a co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, invented the planar process, which led him to design the first planar epitaxial JFETs. This opened the door for further development of the JFET and research of other FET types.

Development of the FET in these early years was constantly delayed by the intense industry-wide focus on the BJT, where higher frequency and higher power were the main goals. The FET was considered all but impossible to make by those who tried, because it was so unstable. Then in about 1962, Fairchild Semiconductor made a huge discovery: that sodium impurities caused instability in silicon during processing, a problem that plagued the entire semiconductor industry at the time. Soon after, two young RCA researchers, Steve Hofstein and Fred Heiman, discovered the cause of and cured another old, nagging industry-wide problem surface states. This problem had first been uncovered and documented by Nobel Prize winner Professor John Bardeen at Bell Labs in about 1947. Surface states was a serious problem in which...