Silicon pioneer, a physicist, and one of the members of “traitorous eight” who founded Silicon Valley, Jay Taylor Last died on 11 November 2021, in Los Angeles at the age of 92.
Dr. Last was the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor, which was one of the pioneers in laying the technical, cultural and financial foundation of Silicon Valley. Leading a team of scientists, Dr. Last developed a fundamental technique at the company that is still used to manufacture computer chips, tablets, smartphones, and watches and provide the digital brains for billion of computers. Using this method, silicon chips are still being built having exponentially smaller transistors than those manufactured in accordance with Moore’s Law, in 1960.
He was also the co-founder of Amelco, a chip company. He served as R&D at Amelco from 1961 to 1966. Thereafter he served as Vice President of R&D for Teledyne from 1966 to1974. He retired fromthe chip industry after that.
Who was Jay Tailor Last?
Bron on 18, October 1929 in Western Pennsylvania, Dr. Last did his Bachelor’s degree in optics from the University of Rochester. From there he went to MIT to get a doctorate in solid-state physics, a new field then, in 1956. While finishing his Ph.D, he was approached by a Nobel Prize winner, William Shockley, for the invention of the transistor, the tiny electrical device that become the essential building block for the world’s computer chips. Dr. Last was invited for a job in Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. After a year, he along with seven collaborators left the job and create their own transistor company, Fairchild Semiconductor due to Dr. Shockley’s theory about Black people. Later they came to be known as “the traitorous eight”.
After retiring from the chip business in 1974 Dr. Last spend the rest of his life as an investor, an art collector, a writer, and an amateur mountain climber.
