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Shockley was born February 13, 1910.
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Graduated with a Bachelors of Science degree.
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Received PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with dissertation, "Calculations of Wave Functions for Electrons in Sodium Chloride Crystals"
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In 1938, he received his first patent, "Electron Discharge Device", on electron multipliers
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Shockley leave from Bell Labs to become a research director at Columbia University's Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Group. This involved devising methods for countering the tactics of submarines with improved convoying techniques, optimizing depth charge patterns.
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Bell Labs formed a solid-state physics group, with Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan, which included John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore, and several technicians. Their assignment was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers
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Bardeen and Brattain first demonstrated the point-contact transistor which, provided convincing proof of the phenomenon of solid-state amplification. Within a few weeks Shockley had invented the junction transistor, which was markedly more reliable
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he conceived the junction transistor, made by forming three chemically distinct regions a slice of semiconductor crystal and the two 'junctions' between these regions. At the time, Shockley conceived another device, formed of four regions and their three junctions that was soon named the four-layer diode.
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Shockley's 558 pageboy of critical ideas of drift and diffusion and the differential equations that govern the flow of electrons in solid state crystals
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In 1951, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Two years later, he was chosen as the recipient of the Comstock Prize for Physics by the NAS.
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Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor with Bardeen and Brattain.
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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was created in 1956 as a semiconductor developer. It was the first high technology company in what came to be known as Silicon Valley to work on silicon-based semiconductor devices
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a group spun off from Shockley's organization to create Fairchild Semiconductor just over a mile away. Fairchild also pursued silicon electronics and by 1961 had introduced transistors and integrated circuits
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Shockley joined Stanford University, where in 1963 he was appointed the Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, in which position he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1975
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Died August 12, 1989
