Jay Last, a physicist who helped create the Silicon chips that power the world's computers, and who was among the eight entrepreneurs whose company laid the technical, financial and cultural foundation for Silicon Valley, died in Los Angeles. He died at the age of 92.
His death was confirmed by his wife and only one survivor, Debbie.
Dr. Last was finishing his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he was approached by William Shockley, who had invented the transistor, the tiny electrical device that became the essential building block for the world. Dr. Shockley invited him to join a new effort to commercialise a Silicon transistor at a lab near Palo Alto, Calif., which is 30 miles south of San Francisco.
Dr. Last was unsure about the job offer because he was awed by Dr. Shockley. He decided to join the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory because it sat in the Northern California valley where he spent a summer harvesting fruit after hitchhiking there from his home in Pennsylvania steel country.
He and his team clashed with Dr. Shockley, who was known for his theory that Black people were inferior in intelligence to white people. They left the lab to start their own company. The traitorous eight, as they were later called, are now seen as the ground zero of Silicon Valley.
Dr. Last led a team of scientists who developed a fundamental technique that is still used to manufacture computer chips, providing the digital brains for billions upon billions of computers, tablets, smartphones and watches.
David C. Brock is the director of the Software History Center at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., and he said that there was nothing more important to the Silicon Valley experience than Fairchild Semiconductor. Jay was in the middle of many of the dynamics that still persist.
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One computer historian said that there was nothing more important to the Silicon Valley experience than the Fairchild Semiconductor lab.
Jay Taylor Last was born in 1929. Frank and Sarah met when they were two of the three teachers at a high school in Ohio. After they married, Frank Last felt he couldn't support a family on a teacher's salary so he moved to Pennsylvania, where he worked in a steel mill.
When he was 16, Jay Last made his first pilgrimage to the West Coast. He traveled to San Jose, Calif., with the help of his parents and a letter from the police chief that he was not running away from home. He arrived before the harvest began so he could pick fruit.
He lived until it did and used to eat a nickel's worth of carrots a day. He told himself in an interview that he got through a difficult situation when he was 16.
His father suggested that he enroll in the University of Rochester to study the physics of light. He worked at a research lab that served local plate-glass manufacturers.
He fulfilled a promise he made to himself as a teenager and went on to get his doctorate at M.I.T., before returning to Northern California and joining the Shockley lab. He disliked Dr. Shockley's management style.
In 2004, he remembered that he was a laboratory assistant. Everybody getting together in a seminar and discussing what they were doing was not a thing. He and his colleagues left to form a new company.
Dr. Shockley and two other scientists had shown how to build transistors out of materials like germanium and Silicon Dioxide, which would one day be used to store and move information. How to form a larger machine was the question.
Dr. Last and his colleagues could have connected the transistors to the wires after cutting them from the sheet. This was very difficult and expensive.
Robert Noyce, one of the founding fathers of Fairchild, suggested an alternative method that was realized by a team led by Dr. Last. The transistors and wires were built into the same sheet of Silicon.
Moore's Law, the famous maxim laid down by another founder, Gordon Moore, states that the transistors on the chips should be smaller than those in the 1960s.
Dr. Moore is the last member of the unfaithful eight.
Intel and Amelco were co-founded by Dr. Last and Dr. Moore, respectively. Many of the companies that sprouted up in the region over the decades were started by the company's founders and employees.
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His collection of African art was donated to the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.
After retiring from the chip business in 1974, Dr. Last spent the rest of his life as an investor, art collector, writer and mountain climber. His collection of African art was donated to the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his collection of California citrus-box labels is now at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.
Dr. Last was asked to take over the glass lab in the summer of 1956 after finishing his PhD. It seemed like a great opportunity.
He remembered that he told his parents. My mother told Jay that he could do better with his life.
