Present day Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. is a spin-off company resulting from reconstitution of assets in National Semiconductor. It inherits the Fairchild name of the original Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, which had been the cornerstone of the semiconductor industry since 1957. The original Fairchild had been acquired by Schlumberger which then sold it to National Semiconductor.

The company has locations in San Jose, California; West Jordan, Utah; Mountaintop, Pennsylvania; Bucheon, South Korea; Penang, Malaysia; Suzhou, China; and Cebu, Philippines; among others.

Its corporate headquarters is located in South Portland, Maine.

1956

Only a year later, the staff of eight engineers decided to leave Shockley and form their own company. The group later became known widely as the Traitorous Eight. The eight men were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. Looking for funding on their own project, they turned to Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument, an Eastern U.S. company with considerable military contracts. In 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was started with plans on making silicon transistors – at the time germanium was still a common material for semiconductor use.

According to Sherman Fairchild, Noyce's impassioned presentation of his vision was the reason Sherman Fairchild had agreed to create the semiconductor division for the Traitorous Eight. Noyce advocated the use of silicon as substrate - since the material costs would consist of sand and a few fine wires, the major cost would be in the manufacturing process. Noyce also expressed his belief that silicon semiconductors would herald the start of disposable appliances that due to cheap electronic components would not be repaired but disposed when worn out.

Their first transistors were of the silicon mesa variety, innovative for their time, but with several drawbacks. Later Fairchild pioneered the planar process developed by Jean Hoerni in 1958, which was a huge improvement—transistors could be made easier, cheaper, and with much higher performance. Fairchild's planar process made most other transistor designs obsolete. One casualty of this was Philco's transistor division, which had just built a $40 million dollar plant to make their now totally obsolete germanium PADT process transistors. Within a few years every other transistor company copied or licensed the Fairchild planar process.

Their first marketed planar transistor was the 2N697 (initially a mesa transistor), and was a huge success. The first batch of 100 was sold to IBM for $150 a piece. Only two years later they had managed to build a circuit with four transistors on a single wafer of silicon, thereby creating the first silicon integrated circuit. (Texas Instruments' Jack Kilby had developed an integrated circuit made of germanium on September 12, 1958, and was awarded a U.S. patent). The company grew from twelve to twelve thousand employees, and was soon making $130 million a year.