Joachim N. Burghartz
©SHUTTERSTOCK.COM/MICHAEL VI
William Shockley is one of the inventors of the first transistor, which was demonstrated 75 years ago. He is also the founder of Shockley Labs in Palo Alto, California, the actual origin of Silicon Valley. This article sheds light on his personality as described by his employee and colleague Adolf Goetzberger during 1958–1963.
Much has been written about Bardeen, Braittain, and Shockley and their demonstration and understanding of the physics of the first transistor in 1947 and 1948. This includes articles on their quite-different personalities. It is also well known that Shockley Labs, founded by Shockley with financial support from Beckman Instruments, Inc., although not successful itself, gave birth to what later became Silicon Valley. The so-called “traitorous eight,” among them Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, and Jean Hoerni, who left Shockley Labs in 1957 after a disagreement about the technical direction of the company and having coped with Shockley’s management style, founded Fairchild, which later became Intel. They made room for new scientific staff, such as Goetzberger, whom I had the pleasure of meeting after receiving the J.J. Ebers Award from the IEEE Electron Devices Society in 2014 as the second German to do so, following Goetzberger in 1983. The stories he told me about his time with Shockley were very interesting and so off the beaten path that I tried to engage him for a contribution to this inaugural issue of IEEE Electron Devices Magazine. However, Goetzberger, at the time nearly 95 years of age, was not comfortable writing an article by himself, nor going through with an interview. Instead, I found a solution by putting together an article about Goetzberger’s work with Shockley, using the information I had from that meeting with him in 2015, but also from an interview by Nebeker [1], from an article by Magoun [2], and from Goetzberger’s memoirs, which were published in a booklet in 2020 [3].
Goetzberger studied physics in Munich, Germany, during difficult times in postwar Germany, working first for Siemens in Munich on the development of germanium transistors; although, as he said, the work atmosphere was not all that exciting:
The work mainly consisted of getting literature from the United States and then trying to repeat what they had done before. This was, in the long run, not very satisfactory to me. Some of my colleagues had already gone to America, and I decided that this would be the right thing for me to do if I wanted to develop professionally [3].
A friend who worked for a Beckman Instruments subsidiary in Munich told him about Shockley Labs, which had been founded a couple of years earlier in Palo Alto. The intended product of that company was a complicated, four-layered diode invented by Shockley as a replacement of the mechanical relay used in telephone systems, which could never be fabricated with sufficient yield. Goetzberger did not yet know about those difficulties and decided to apply for a position. However, Shockley Labs was already fully staffed and Goetzberger’s application was rejected. A bit less than one year later, he received a phone call about Shockley being in Munich and that he wanted to see him. This was shortly after the traitorous eight had quit Shockley Labs. Shockley was assisted in the job interview by his wife, a psychologist, who was quite influential about whom Shockley would hire, as Goetzberger later found out. During the interview, Goetzberger explained to Shockey about a special type of drift transistor he invented:
We had a very interesting talk and he asked me all sorts of questions. But what really made the difference was that, from the literature, I had decided I was going to propose a new type of transistor, which had certain advantages [1], [2], [3].
This convinced Shockley, and he got the job offer. It was a tough personal decision for Goetzberger to move to the United Stated, having never before traveled overseas. The company he joined was very small, with only three scientists and roughly 10 technicians. The technology equipment was put up without any apparent system in a dirty environment. He shared an office with Kurt Hübner, a Swiss, and with Chi Tang Sah who, together with Wanlass, later pioneered CMOS. Shockley, an excellent theoretician, was complemented by Goetzberger, a gifted experimentalist, so the two got along very well. Shockley put Goetzberger on nonideal p-n junctions, which was the major issue at that time. This was not a surprise because of the dirty lab conditions. Metal contamination caused nonideal and very leaky junctions. Goetzberger discovered that metal contaminants could be diffused away from the junctions toward a phosphor glass layer at the surface of the silicon substrate, with perfectly ideal junctions as a result. He thus invented the gettering technique in semiconductors, a very important advancement of early semiconductor technology.
(Right) Adolf Goetzberger and Joachim Burghartz meeting in Freiburg, Germany, in 2015.
Goetzberger described Shockley’s character as being difficult for many of his employees in two ways. First, after having been a part of the pioneering team demonstrating the first transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 and 1948, and after having received the Noble Prize in Physics together with Bardeen and Braittain in 1956, he developed the ambition to become a successful businessman rather than continuing his career as a scientist. A statement Goetzberger frequently repeated was, “I have long enough read my name in Physical Review, but now I want to see it in [the] Wall Street Journal” [3]. Second, his management style was such that he always started out with the theory of a device and then asked his people to prove it experimentally. Because of that, according to Goetzberger, he was impatient and demanding: “He invented new devices much faster than we could realize them” [1], [2]. Quite often, he got occupied with a device that had little chance of becoming a yieldable product, such as the four-layer diode mentioned earlier. This was difficult for his scientific staff to tolerate, as in their view, this repeatedly put the company’s future in question. Those aspects of his personality eventually led to the departure in 1957 of the traitorous eight, who wanted to produce and sell transistor switches. As Goetzberger recollected it, “They had had some disagreements with Shockley about which devices to develop. Obviously, they were right because they were very successful” [1], [2].
In 1960, Shockley Transistor Corporation, as Shockley Labs was formally called, was sold to Clevite Semiconductors. Shockley had to resign and joined Stanford University as a university professor but stayed on as an advisor to Clevite. Goetzberger was assigned to take over part of Shockley’s former scientific management tasks. The company now aimed at simple diode rectifiers produced in large quantities and had little appreciation for the scientific interests and excellence of the scientific staff. So Goetzberger, along with his wife, moved to New Jersey to work for Bell Labs. The work conditions at Bell Labs were magnificent, a researcher’s heaven. He worked with Ed Nicollian on MOS surface physics, and investigated minority carrier lifetime effects in MOS structures when working in the group of George Smith. Smith, together with Bill Boyle, later built on this and other basic investigations to invent the CCD, for which they received the Noble Prize in Physics in 2009.
Goetzberger returned to Germany in 1968 to become director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Semiconductor Physics in Freiburg. However, he still had his dream about leveraging semiconductors for photovoltaics, which he shared with another German who had joined Shockley Labs one year after Goetzberger: Hans Queisser. Goetzberger was able to convince Fraunhofer to found the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy in Freiburg, which has become one of the leading research institutes in photovoltaics worldwide.
While this article went through a peer review process, I received the sad news that on 24 February 2023, Goetzberger passed away in Freiburg. I consider it a fortunate coincidence that in January, this article was on his desk and was reviewed by him, as I learned from his assistant. The electron device community, and photovoltaic community in particular, has lost one of their great pioneers.
Joachim N. Burghartz (burghartz@ims-chips.de) is with Institut für Mikroelektronik Stuttgart (IMS CHIPS), Allmandring 30a, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany.
[1] A. Goetzberger, Mein Leben: Ein Leben Für Die Sonne Und Wie Es Dazu Kam. Erlangen, Germany: Verlag Solare Zukunft, 2021.
[2] F. Nebeker, Oral-History:Adolf Goetzberger, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA, Sep. 1994.
[3] A. B. Magoun, “There, and back again: How Adolf Goetzberger got to solar energy,” Proc. IEEE, vol. 103, no. 3, pp. 476–481, Mar. 2015, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2015.2399072.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MED.2023.3265461
Date of current version: 28 June 2023