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Jay Last, one of eight entrepreneurs who helped create the silicon chips that power the world’s computers and whose company formed the technical, financial and cultural foundation of Silicon Valley, died in Los Angeles on November 11. He was 92 years old.

His death at the hospital was confirmed by his wife and sole survivor, Debbie.

Dr. Last was finishing his PhD. When approached in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 by William Shockleywould share the Nobel Prize that same year for his invention of the transistor, the tiny electrical device that has become the world’s fundamental building block for computer chips. Shockley invited him to join a new effort to commercialize a silicon transistor at a lab near Palo Alto, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco.

Dr. Last, Dr. He admired Shockley’s intelligence and reputation, but was unsure of the job offer. Eventually, he agreed to join the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory because it sat in the valley of Northern California, where he harvested a summer of fruit after hitchhiking from his home in Pennsylvania steel country.

But he and seven of his collaborators in the lab were later made famous by the theory that Black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. He clashed with Shockley. They quickly left the lab to start their own transistor company. They came to be called later “treacherous eight” and their company, Fairchild Semiconductor, seen as ground zero for what is now known as Silicon Valley.

At Fairchild, Dr. Last led a team of scientists who developed a fundamental technique still used to manufacture computer chips and provides billions of digital brains for billions of computers, tablets, smartphones and smartwatches.

“Nothing was more important to the Silicon Valley experience as we know it today than Fairchild Semiconductor,” said David C. Brock, curator and director of the Center for Software History. Computer History Museum In Mountain View, California, “Many of the dynamics still going on were crystallized by Fairchild’s founders, and Jay was right in the middle of that.”

Jay Taylor Last was born on October 18, 1929, in Butler, PA. Her father, Frank, a German immigrant, and her Scots-Irish mother, Sarah, met when they were two of three teachers at a high school. Ohio. After their marriage, Frank Last felt he couldn’t support a family on a teacher’s salary, so they moved to Pennsylvania and went to work at the new Butler steelworks not far from Pittsburgh.

Jay Last grew up in Butler before making his first pilgrimage to the West Coast at the age of 16. He hitchhiked to San Jose with his family’s blessing and a letter from the local police chief saying he didn’t run away from home. , California was then a small farming town. He had planned to make some money by collecting fruit, but it arrived before the harvest began.

Until that happened, he lived on a nickel’s worth of carrots a day, as he often remembered in later years. Whenever he faced a difficult situation, he said: meeting “I got through this when I was 16 and it’s not such a bad problem,” he told himself for the Chemical Heritage Foundation in 2004.

At his father’s suggestion, he soon enrolled at the University of Rochester in New York State to study optics – the physics of light. When he returned to Pennsylvania during the summers, he worked in a research lab serving local glass sheet manufacturers.

Fulfilling a promise he made to himself as a teenager, he went on to earn his doctorate at MIT before returning to Northern California to join the Shockley lab. But Dr. He resented Shockley’s overly cautious and controlling management style.

“I was a lab assistant and that’s how he worked with everybody,” he recalled in 2004. “There was no such thing as everyone getting together at a seminar and discussing what we were doing.” About a year later, he and his colleagues split up to form Fairchild Semiconductor.

Using materials such as silicone and germanium, Dr. Shockley and two other scientists demonstrated how to build tiny transistors that would one day be used to store and carry information in the form of an electrical signal. The question was how to connect them together to create a larger machine.

Dr. After using chemical compounds to etch transistors into a silicon layer, Last and his colleagues could cut each one off the sheet and connect them with separate wires, like any other electrical device. However, this was extremely difficult, inefficient and expensive.

Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Fairchild, proposed an alternative method, which Dr. It was carried out by a team that Last oversaw. They developed a way to build both transistors and wires on the same silicon layer.

This method is still used to build silicon chips whose transistors are exponentially smaller than those produced in the 1960s. Moore’s Law, the famous maxim coined by another Fairchild founder, Gordon Moore.

Dr. With Last’s death, Dr. Moore is the last surviving member of the “treacherous eight”.

Fairchild Semiconductor’s leaders, Dr. Co-founded by Moore, Intel and Dr. He would go on to start several other chip companies, including Amelco, which was co-founded by Last. The company’s founders and employees will also create some of the leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms, and Dr. As Last did, he would personally invest in the many companies that had sprouted in the area over the decades.

Dr. He last retired from the chip business in 1974 and spent the rest of his life as an investor, art collector, author, and amateur mountaineer. His collection of African art was donated to the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a treasure trove of California citrus box labels – an echo of the summer of youth in Northern California – is now at the Huntington Library, Museum of Art and Art Museum. Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.

Dr. Last is finishing his PhD. In 1956, he was asked to head the glass lab in Butler, Pa., where he worked for the summer. It looked like a promising opportunity.

“I went and told my parents,” she remembered. “My mom said, ‘Jay, you can do so much better with your life than this.’”