Early computer memory came from magnetic cores, tiny rings of material that stored each bit of information. Semiconductor memory promised something faster and smaller, but early chips had a weakness: a single defective cell could ruin the whole device. At Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank S. Greene Jr. and engineer Wendell Sander co-invented a way around that problem, using redundant rows or columns of cells so that chips with defective regions could still function. Their invention received a patent in 1972, and it addressed the practical barrier standing between laboratory promise and manufacturable memory.
Greene was an African American electrical engineer, entrepreneur and educator who lived from 1938 to 2009. He earned degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and Purdue University, then completed his electrical engineering doctorate at Santa Clara University in 1970, studying in the heart of the region that was becoming Silicon Valley.
He turned from manufacturing technology to business building. He founded Technology Development Corporation, a systems and software engineering company, and co-founded New Vista Capital, a venture firm that supported women- and minority-owned businesses. In an industry where access to capital has historically been uneven, the second firm directed investment toward founders who had less of it.
Greene also served as a Santa Clara University trustee and lecturer and mentored young people through educational and leadership programs. His career joined technical development with teaching and support for emerging entrepreneurs, and the university that awarded his doctorate became one of the institutions he served in return.
Semiconductor memory displaced core memory over the 1970s, and designs that made it reliable became part of nearly every computer that followed. Greene's work at Fairchild came in the years when Silicon Valley's semiconductor industry was turning research into products. The firms he founded later put that experience to work in a different direction: deciding which new companies get the chance to build anything at all.
Fairchild in that era was a company whose alumni founded much of Silicon Valley, and Greene's move from chip design to venture capital and education followed a pattern the region would come to know well. What distinguished his version was its direction: capital and mentorship aimed at founders who rarely received either.
