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Semiconductor pioneer, Julius Blank, dies

One of the 'Traitorous Eight' who left the Mountain View, California, laboratory of William Shockley to start Fairchild Semiconductor

Julius Blank, one of the founding fathers of the semiconductor industry that gave rise to Silicon Valley, has died aged 86.

He died on Saturday of natural causes.

Blank, who lived in Palo Alto, California, was one of the so-called Traitorous Eight who in 1957 left the Mountain View, California, laboratory of William Shockley to start Fairchild Semiconductor, the valley's seminal chip company and an enterprise that spawned dozens of spinoffs.

Blank never liked the term "traitorous", explaining in a May interview that he and Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner, Jean Honeri, Victor Grinich, Jay Last and Sheldon Roberts never betrayed Shockley.

Instead they tired of Shockley's tyrannical management style and his reluctance to push ahead to the next phases of semiconductor development.

"Once it got into print," Blank said of the name, "it's hard to erase."

Whatever the motivation, there is no denying that Blank and the other seven changed history from their cramped Palo Alto headquarters.

It was at Fairchild that the brilliant engineers developed a viable process to mass produce the semiconductors that have become ubiquitous in everyday life.

At the time Fairchild launched, Blank recalled earlier this year, there was no road map to where the company wanted to go. First there was the struggle for financial backing, which eventually came from pioneer venture capitalist Arthur Rock.

Then there was building an industry from scratch.

"We had to create markets that didn't exist," he said. "We had to build equipment that didn't exist also."

It was Blank's job to build that equipment and oversee the rest of the operations at the fledgling company.

"He put a machine shop in place, hired the people we needed. He sure was a good engineer," Intel co-founder Gordon Moore recalled Monday.

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More about: Intel, Mountain View, Rock

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