A member of the traitorous eight, he left Nobel-winning physicist William Shockley's company to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
[3] In 1946 he returned home, where he completed his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the City College of New York, financed by the G.I.
[2] Blank worked as an engineer at Babcock & Wilcox in Barberton, Ohio, from 1950 to 1951,[2][5] making large steam boilers for the power industry.
[2] After their return, Blank found a job in manufacturing engineering at Western Electric in Kearny, New Jersey where he worked from 1952 to 1956.
4 toll crossbar switching equipment,[2] used in the first dialing systems for connecting calls automatically without a human long-distance operator.
One of the pieces of equipment involved was a card translator with an array of germanium photo transistors that routed calls in the switching system.
Blank also worked as a troubleshooter for a plating room, where he gained practical experience in metal finishing and the use of acids and chemicals.
[4] Shockley had a number of ideas about how to build a crystal grower so as to eliminate contamination from oxygen in the quartz, but the resulting equipment was elaborate and had several problems.
[4] Management difficulties accelerated after Shockley won the Nobel Prize: "He began to travel around the world rather extensively... And he would come back with new ideas and new projects, and we never really got to finish the ones that we started with.
[8][9] Julius Blank found the company's first home, a 14,000 square foot building at 844 Charleston Road, between Palo Alto and Mountain View.
Kleiner and Blank were in charge of transforming the empty building into usable spaces for production, research and offices.
[4] "I remember the day that we finally got the floor tile laid in the back main room on which we were going to put all our lab equipment.
Much of the responsibility for learning how to mass-produce silicon chips, and building the machinery needed to do it, fell to Julius Blank and Eugene Kleiner as the only engineers in the group.
Blank and Kleiner were in charge of designing "the first assembly line for the basic building blocks of the electronic world",[1] silicon chips, "from the ground up".
[3] "A brilliant mechanical engineer", Blank designed everything from furnaces and crystal growers to optical alignment and assembly equipment.
And then we did Hong Kong because of the assembly action, and then Korea and then I used to travel a lot to Europe ... they were building facilities outside of Milan [Italy].
At Fairchild, Blank was part of the team that established a "model for entrepreneurs for the rest of [the 20th] century": stock options, no job titles and open working relationships.
[12] The incubator of Silicon Valley, Fairchild was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of dozens of corporations such as AMD and Intel.
[10] The company's NOVRAM computer chip, a type of non-volatile memory, was designed so that systems could retain and save data in the event of power failure.
[11][15] In 2011, Blank lived in a retirement center across the street from the old Fairchild headquarters at 844 Charleston Road in Palo Alto, where he used to have his office.