About Jean Hoerni
Jean Amédée Hoerni (September 26, 1924 – January 12, 1997) was a Swiss-born American engineer. He was a silicon transistor pioneer, and a member of the "traitorous eight". He developed the planar process, an important technology for reliably fabricating and manufacturing semiconductor devices, such as transistors and integrated circuits. == Biography == Hoerni was born on September 26, 1924, in Geneva, Switzerland. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Geneva and two Ph.D.s in physics; one from the University of Geneva and the other from the University of Cambridge. In 1952, he moved to the United States to work at the California Institute of Technology, where he became acquainted with William Shockley, a physicist at Bell Labs who was intimately involved with the creation of the transistor. A few years later, Shockley recruited 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 compelled the so-called "traitorous eight" (Hoerni, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts) to leave his laboratory and create the Fairchild Semiconductor corporation. In 1955 Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derrick discovered and patented surface passivation by silicon dioxide. Frosch and Derrick were able to manufacture the first silicon dioxide field effect transistors, the first transistors in which drain and source were adjacent at the surface.
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