Obituary: Jay Last 1929-2021

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James R Hagerty, Physicist Helped Put Silicon Valley on Map. Wall Street Journal, Nov 27, 2021, at page A11,
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mic ... -valley-11637852400

Note"
(a) The surname Last can be: English from cobbler's lasts; Dutch, German and Jewish (Ashkenazic) for a porter, from Middle High German last.
(i) For cobbler's lasts, see last
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last
(ii) Modern Dutch-English dictionary:
* last (noun masculine): "1: load, weight, 2: burden"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/last

(b) Butler, Pennsylvania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler,_Pennsylvania
("is located 35 miles (56 km) north of Pittsburgh * * * As of the 2010 census, the city population was 13,757")
(c) Fairchild Semiconductor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor
(section 1 Company history, section 1.1 1950s)

(d)
(i) In 1886, Clemens Winkler discovered a new element. "Winkler named the element after his country, Germany."  en.wikipediua.org for germanium.
(ii) With atomic number 32 and symbol Ge, Germanium is in the same column/group as silicon. See periodic table
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table
("The rows of the table are called periods, and the columns are called groups. Elements from the same column group of the periodic table show similar chemical characteristics")

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Jay Last, a founder of Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. in 1957, figured out ways to manufacture integrated circuits in bulk, helping to put the silicon into Silicon Valley and make the region a synonym for digital technology.

Dr. Last, the son of a steelworker from Butler, Pa., started out with a more modest career goal: to parlay his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into an interesting job that would let him live in California.

After graduating from MIT in 1956, he joined Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory near San Francisco, run by William Shockley, who won a Nobel Prize the same year for research [done at at Bell Labs in New Jersey] on transistors and semiconductors. A year later [1957], Dr Last was one of the eight people who boltd from Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor. The others included Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, later co-founders of Intel Corp, and Eugene Kleiner, who went on to help form the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

When Fairchild Semiconductor was formed, transistors were typically produced one at a time out of germanium. "We felt that the future lay [past tense of the verb lie] with silicon," Dr Last wroe later. His team developed mass production processes or silicon chips, which initially went into military hardware and spacecraft and later made possible low-cost calculators, computers and myriad other electronic devices.  

Dr Last died Nov 11 on Los Angeles. He was 92.