The End of the Line

One company, plagued by competition of ex-employees, built a technical-information library and lost that, too.

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Poor old Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. For much of its life, it was plagued by ex-employees who kept going out and starting their own companies, often in competition with their progenitor. Today the list of Fairchild descendants reads like a corporate Who's Who of Silicon Valley: Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, LSI Logic, Performance Semiconductor, and on and on.

Fairchild generally responded to the challenges of its wayward children by going to court -- a losing strategy. But along the way, it did manage to build a first-rate technical-information library for use in its lawsuits and for other research. That asset allowed Fairchild to heave one more entrepreneurial gasp just prior to its acquisition in 1987 by yet another of its descendants, National Semiconductor Corp. In January 1988 two Fairchild veterans, A. J. Ley and Sandra Crabtree, negotiated a leveraged buyout of the library, around which they proceeded to form a new company, Lucid Information Services Inc.

Like the earlier spin-offs, Lucid seems to be doing quite well. Its Fairchild files include back copies of more than 680 journals, conference proceedings, symposia, reports, and theses, and it has buttressed these with current subscriptions to some 480 journals. It has already worked with more than 50 companies, including Unisys, Raychem, Control Data, and Schlumberger, the company that sold Fairchild to National.

Meanwhile, there's been nary a peep from Fairchild lately -- which may mean that the Great Mother of Silicon Valley start-ups has given birth to her last child.

-- Hal Plotkin

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