An electrical engineer, Grinich worked for Stanford Research Institute, then for Shockley Semiconductor. But he and seven other top-notch engineers there weren’t happy working at Shockley and in 1957 left to form their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. There, the “Traitorous Eight”, as Shockley called the defectors, developed the first commercial integrated circuit, which led to the microprocessor — and the PC revolution.
After leaving Fairchild in the 1960s, Grinich taught at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. He died November 5 from prostate cancer. He was 75.