Analog Footsteps

Analog Semiconductor Spin-offs

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 20:34:00 +0000

Silicon Valley Analog Semiconductor Companies

Decades ago, when Don Hoefler made the phrase "Silicon Valley" famous, Fairchild Semiconductor was the center of the universe. This was still mostly true in the myopic view of analog semiconductor veterans, as well.

Some may argue.

And they would be right.

Absent from this view are the companies outside of Silicon Valley (and a few select others). I'll get to those, later.

Link to external presentation

Absent from today's landscape are ALL of these companies.

Fairchild Family Tree

One could argue that the seminal analog integrated circuit was the µA702, designed by Bob Widlar in 1963 (released in 1964) when he joined Fairchild. It wasn't good enough, in his opinion, so he designed the µA709 which was superior - both in performance and in sales revenue.

Frustrated with Fairchild management, he and Dave Talbert (an equally brilliant fab process engineer) joined Molectro. You could argue that Molectro - founded by James Nall from Fairchild - was a spin-off, but it was intended to create custom logic ICs. Talbert and Widlar thought their process would be good for analog.

Back then, National Semiconductor was a stodgy transistor company from back east. In 1967, Charlie Sporck, Fred Bialek, and Pierre Lamond - all from Fairchild - essentially re-founded National as a Silicon Valley company by acquiring (or merging with, and then relocating to) Molectro. That brought Widlar to National.

Signetics was founded in 1961, Intersil in 1967, and PMI in 1969 - all from Fairchild.

In The Beginning

Analog has been around forever; it's the way the natural world works. Analog circuits, like op amps, were made with vacuum tubes before integrated circuits or even transistors were invented.

The semiconductor transistor was invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1947. The effort had begun years earlier with government funding during World War II. There was a wartime culture of cooperation and communication among research labs, universities, and military-industrial companies.

The invention was licensed to many companies in 1952. William Shockley, whose group at Bell Labs demonstrated the first transistor, left in 1955 and started his own company - Shockley Transistor.

In 1957, key members of his company left to start a new company - Fairchild Semiconductor.

Silicon Valley in 1963

By 1963, when Widlar was designing the µA702, Fairchild was attracting talented engineers but also losing them.

A few original Fairchild founders had already started new companies. This wave was significant because they were all emerging IC companies - they probably still made transistors and diodes - but the future of ICs was clear.

Ill-fated Rheem Semiconductor is an interesting story. They stole some IP from Fairchild on their way out. But it was for "mesa" transistors right about the time Jean Hoerni invented "planar" processing, which is what made ICs practical.

Amelco was renamed Teledyne Semiconductor rather quickly. Ultimately, they were acquired by Microchip Technology.

Schismogenesis

Schismogenesis literally means "creation of division". Gregory Bateson first used the term in a publication in 1935 to describe certain forms of social behavior between groups.

"Spin-off", in my opinion, has a neutral feeling and implies that the parent company agreed to release some part of its organization as a new company. The Fairchild spin-offs were generally not amicable and often involved lawsuits.

Typically, a group of engineers believed they had a great idea that needed funding but Fairchild management felt otherwise. That created a schism. Very quickly, that lead to the genesis of a new company founded by those engineers.

In "The Dawn of Everything" (2021), anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow suggest that schismogenesis describes the way groups define themselves in opposition to other groups. "Fairchild management only gave stock options to senior executives, we will give stock options to every employee."

Fairchild, National, Intersil, and AMD were all broadbased chip companies, i.e., they made logic, memory, discrete transistors, and analog. Invariably, the schism was that analog went underfunded and the genesis was a group of pure analog companies.

Acquisitions

Starting on the top row:

American Microsystems (1966) was renamed AMI Semiconductor (AMIS), then acquired by ON Semi in 2008.
What was left of the original Fairchild was acquired by National Semiconductor in 1987, then spun-out several years later, then acquired by ON Semi in 2015.
ON Semi, itself, was a spin-off of Motorola in 1999. What was left of Motorola Semiconductor was spun-off as Freescale in 2003.

The blue hats are the analog companies shown on the earlier slides. Several of the companies shown here are analog companies.

Second row:

Signetics was acquired by Philips in 1975 and later became Philips Semiconductor.
Philips spun-off the semiconductor group as NXP in 2006.
In 2015, Freescale was acquired by (merged with?) NXP.

Third row:

In 1965, Analog Devices was founded as a vacuum tube module company. In 1971, it created an IC company which it then acquired.
Computer Labs (data acquisition boards, later data acquisition ICs) was acquired in 1978.
Precision Monolithics was acquired in 1990.
Hittite Microwave was acquired in 2014.
Linear Technology was acquired in 2016.
Maxim was acquired in 2020.

ADI has acquired many other companies along the way. This only highlights the significant analog acquisitions.

Fourth row:

Texas Instruments was founded in 1951 from a reorganization of Geophysical Services, Inc.
Unitrode was acquired in 1999.
Burr-Brown was acquired in 2000.
National Semiconductor was acquired in 2011.

Fifth row:

Amelco was acquired in 1960, the first acquisition of the newly formed venture group called Teledyne. It was spun-off as TelCom Semiconductor in 1993 and acquired by Microchip Technology in 2000.
Supertex was acquired in 2014.
Micrel was acquired in 2015.

Sixth (bottom) row:

The original Intersil was absorbed into GE then acquired by Harris in 1988, who then spun it off in 1999.
Elantec was acquired by Intersil in 2002.
Xicor was acquired by Intersil in 2004.
Intersil was acquired by Renesas in 2017.

The companies aligned on the right of the chart currently exist, but none of their headquarters are in Silicon Valley. They do, by virtue of these acquisitions, have a presence here.

You may have noticed the prevalence of mega-mergers in the most recent decade. The dog-eat-dog (acquire or be acquired) nature of the industry today is not for me to explain. Personally, I think the demand for growth by shareholders and the fiduciary responsibility of boards has a lot to do with it. I think it is a bad thing.

The question for all of these acquisitions is whether or not they succeeded. Did the employees of the acquired company stay? Did the acquired product lines expand and continue to innovate?

Or did the schismogenesis - that self-definition based on differences - cause an internal culture clash, ultimately causing the acquiring company to crush them?

Was the long-term effect simply the legacy revenue of the acquired product lines? (Obviously, I believe that is true in most cases.)

The Meaning of Value, The Value of Meaning—Bob Swanson at Transitron

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:50:00 +0000

Robert H. Swanson, Jr., built a company — a culture — that was the most profitable in the semiconductor industry, yet flew below the radar. Its employees famously ‘never left’ in Silicon Valley where job-hopping is applauded. Once called the Toughest CEO in the Valley, he attracted and retained many of the most talented and fiercely independent analog engineers. For over three decades, relentlessly vigilant to his founding strategy, Linear Technology Corporation focused on analog while the rest of the industry went digital.

There’s no simple equation for how he did it, nor did he do it alone. To understand better, you have to integrate the legendary characters he met and the forces at play throughout his career, including his early years at the star-crossed Transitron Electronic Corporation.

The Cold War

In the skies outside of Boston after World War II, you couldn’t mistake the screaming whistle of a P-51 Mustang in flight. Bob Swanson could watch military training exercises from his house near Hanscom Air Force Base and dream of flying. Some people look to the sky and see possibilities, Bob looked to the sky and saw dogfights.

Like many kids of his generation, he wanted to be a fighter pilot. American nerves were on edge in the 1950s due to the Cold War and the constant threat of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. In 1953, news of a Soviet rocket launch proved they were ahead in the arms race, making war more likely and intensifying the need for the nation’s best and brightest to do their part.

The most direct path to flight school was the Navy’s 18-month program that required at least two years of college. So Bob enrolled at Wentworth Institute of Technology for a two-year degree in Engineering. No one from his family had ever attended college.

While in school, the inter-continental ballistic missile program had a series of spectacular failures with Atlas rockets blowing up within seconds of lift-off. That made the news of the Sputnik satellite all the more shocking. In October of 1957, the Soviet Union succeeded in launching a beachball-sized satellite into orbit — proving nuclear warheads could reach America.

The urgency created by Sputnik highlighted the shortage of scientists and engineers; one could sense throughout the community that studying engineering was a patriotic duty. Bob’s focus was math, but he was intrigued by a course in transistor physics. The nascent transistor technology was still cutting-edge and it was quite rare for any school to offer such a course. He would go on to get a degree in Industrial Engineering from Northeastern University.

Fresh out of school in May 1960, Bob took the test to go into the Navy. Had there been an immediate slot for pilot training he would have gone down that path. But Bob would have to cool his jets until December if he wanted to be a Navy pilot. Meanwhile, he needed a job to make car payments.

Transitron Electronic Corporation

The world’s second-largest semiconductor electronics company at the time, Transitron, happened to be less than 10 miles from his home. They had just won a major contract with Lockheed to build transistors for the Polaris missile program and were hiring. Despite having a safer job offer from the more established Polaroid, he decided to apply.

Transitron Electronic Corporation company headquarters, used with permission © the Nick DeWolf Foundation

He stood in line with people applying to be operators, engineers, and clerks. There was a line on the application for special skills, so he wrote “advanced statistics”. The personnel manager happened to be milling around the lobby and picked up his application. “Do you know statistics?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Bob nodded.

“Come with me,” he said as he walked away.

They took Bob to a room and brought in several people who started grilling him on statistics. Bob knew statistics, including how to do a chi-square test. Along with the heads of manufacturing and transistor development, was the chief engineer — a tall, lanky guy named Nick DeWolf. Bob had no idea who they were or why such senior folks were so interested in him. Evidently, one of the requirements from Lockheed for the Polaris germanium transistors was statistical control including the chi-square distribution. They offered Bob a job on the spot.

Bob explained that he had an offer from Polaroid but he couldn’t start for two weeks because his new boss was on vacation. So Nick said, “I’ll tell you what. You work here for two weeks and if you don’t like what you’re doing then you can go work for them.”

Let’s pause for some context. The transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1947. Western Electric licensed the technology in 1951; Western Electric was the commercial arm of AT&T whereas Bell Labs was the research arm. Many people bought licenses and started companies to make transistors. One of them was David Bakalar, a Ph.D who had worked at Bell Labs, and he started Transitron with his brother. He recruited Nick DeWolf from General Electric, along with many folks from Europe. Nick had been focused on testing transistors at GE because two-thirds of every batch were trash. The technology was still in its infancy; no manufacturing or test equipment existed so you had to build your own. The biggest market was the military and there was plenty of money behind it thanks to Sputnik. So any type of engineer was in demand, but one who could implement statistical process control was particularly valuable to Transitron.

Bob figured he had nothing to lose and it could at least help with the car payments on his ’57 Ford convertible until he went into the Navy. He took the job.

He immediately started analyzing the data; eventually, his work only took a few hours a day, so the operators taught him how to take measurements using a Tektronix 575 curve tracer. Then they invited him out on the manufacturing line to see how the transistors were made. He was doing experiments and learning quickly; learning what they weren’t yet teaching in school. When the Polaris transistor was ready for production, Pierre Lamond offered him the job of production engineer.

Instead, he opted for a role they called ‘control engineer’ on their diode line. Beyond just diodes, he went to all the other departments to see if his knowledge of statistics was of value to them in any way. Obviously, he never went back to Polaroid. After three months he gave up on the Navy.

The Lesson

David Bakalar was 34 when Transitron went public in 1959. Together, he and his brother made over $34M that day. He was a prolific recruiter and attracted some amazing talent to Transitron, but he didn’t share the wealth. They were creating a brand new industry while doing meaningful work for the Cold War effort, but management didn’t value the workers.

Within a year after hiring Bob, Nick DeWolf left to start his own company, Teradyne, making semiconductor test equipment.

Nick said, “…the people who owned the company made the mistake of not sharing the stock with any of the employees… We were all working for love. Then they went public. And they got on the front cover of Fortune Magazine… So the stock shot up. The people who owned the company [the two Bakalar brothers], were suddenly possessors of a big pile of dough… And they grew to believe that it was all just their own personal efforts that had made the company work.”

People have a natural sense of fairness. They know when they aren’t being valued or respected. As Nick said, “We were all working for love,” but they weren’t treated fairly in return.

Hardly anyone remembers Transitron today. Those who do remember it, think of it as a place that had a lot of talent but couldn’t manage to retain any of it. They clearly thought of engineering talent as a commodity. Within the electronics industry, many well-known people passed through Transitron:

Wilf Corrigan (co-founder/CEO of LSI Logic)
Nick DeWolf (founder of Teredyne, Inc.)
Dave Fullagar (inventor of the uA741 op-amp, co-founder of Maxim Integrated)
Jim Diller (Fairchild engr mgr, National Semiconductor, founder of PMC-Sierra)
Hans Camenzind (inventor of the 555 timer at Signetics)
Pierre Lamond (Fairchild mfg exec, co-founder* of National Semi., venture capitalist)
Tom Longo (founder of Performance Semiconductor)
Les Vadasz (part of the founding team of Intel)
George Wells (former CEO of Exar)

Value and Meaning

It’s not all about the money, though. Money is feedback, but meaning propels you forward. Feedback can be positive or, in these cases where the money seemed unfair, feedback can be negative. According to Jim Collins in Good to Great, if you have the right people, they will be self-motivated. That motivation or sense of meaning is personal; you have to have it already. For some, it may be patriotic duty, the creative freedom to invent something, or perfecting your craft.

“A lot of things make me angry. I’m obsessed with everybody doing the best job they can. I mean, we’re talking about survival,” Bob said in a 1991 interview.

As his career progressed, he found ways of aligning everyone to the strategy and doing the best they could. Finding the right level of pressure wasn’t always easy. Whether it was engineering, customer service, or finance, everyone needs to do their best. Respect the value and meaning in every role; that seed was planted early on.

For Bob, it wasn’t the money that caused him to leave Transitron. He could see that the company didn’t value the talented engineers around him. He could also see that the germanium technology was quickly being passed by new silicon technology developed by Fairchild Semiconductor in California. But that’s another story.

In 1963, he and his new wife moved to California.

I’ve worked for three companies that were at the top of the industry;
they all made a fatal mistake.
— Bob Swanson, Feb. 2021, referring to Transitron, Fairchild, and National Semiconductor

* National Semiconductor was initially founded in 1959, in Connecticut, but was totally reorganized in 1967 — effectively as a spin-off of Fairchild.

Sources:

“Bob Swanson: Hard-driver focuses on low-tech chips”, The Business Journal, May 13, 1991
“CORPORATIONS: The Transistor Tycoons”, Time Magazine, Dec. 21, 1959,
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,865172,00.html
“Interview with Bob Swanson, 2006 March 11”, Stanford University, Department of Special Collections and University Archives
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/silicongenesis/catalog/wn597dw7970
“Linear Technology oral history panel: the founding years”
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2014/07/102746888-05-01-acc.pdf
“Oral History of Nicholas (Nick) DeWolf” Computer History Museum, Recorded: September 24, 2005,
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/05/102746344-05-01-acc.pdf

[Reprint] Living and Learning with Barrie Gilbert

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 17:33:00 +0000

Reposting an article written by a co-worker for Microwave Journal. If I'm violating some copyright, I'll take it down. Source: microwavejournal.com

February 4, 2020
John Cowles, Senior Director of Engineering & Technology, Analog Devices, Norwood, MA

Barrie Gilbert was unconventional.

For those who might have attended one of his standing-room-only performances at panel sessions or read his science-fiction blogs, featuring a curious young designer, or learned from one of his many short course lectures, you know what I mean. Perhaps, you have heard stories of mythical proportions from others. In any case, those are just a few facets of this remarkable man.

For those few of us who worked closely with him for many years at Analog Devices’ Northwest Labs, he represented much more. He could be a philosopher, an expert, a mentor, a team member, a critic and an advocate, all in a single day. While he is best known for the Gilbert cell mixer, the Translinear Principle and his unwavering dedication to the bipolar transistor, there is so much more to Barrie. I would like to share a few examples that capture the Barrie Gilbert who only we knew.

Full disclosure: Barrie hired me 20+ years ago and gave me the opportunity to run “his” design center. What a privilege it has been to have Barrie in my career all these years.

Analog Devices’ founder, first CEO and chairman of the board, Ray Stata, famously said that our success was based on the premise of hiring great people and then getting out of their way. No one epitomized this philosophy more than Barrie, who was hired by Ray in 1972, following his years at Tektronix in Beaverton, Oregon. In 1979, Barrie founded the Northwest Labs, ADI’s first remote site — before the age of computers, internet, telecons and email. He loved the Pacific Northwest that reminded him of his native home in England, but with mountains.

Rules are for Insects

Barrie despised arbitrary constraints, whether they be schedules, the infamous voice of the customers or circuit topologies.

Many marketing directors struggled to control and direct Barrie’s efforts. A laundry list of pre-defined specifications accompanied by demands to stay within its scope would be unceremoniously tossed into the trash bin and replaced with a complete self-inspired data sheet.

Those who could appreciate his insights and trust in his instincts were more often than not rewarded with years of high margin revenues. Barrie’s total product revenues are estimated to be >$2 billion, primarily from products that he defined and designed “despite marketing.”

Make Transistors Dance

Barrie was not a fan of standard circuit cells. He was the ultimate tinkerer, which, according to Barrie, originated in his post-World War II youth with surplus electronics. He saw analog circuits as living beings, prone to mutations and individuality.

Barrie had a passion for classical music and, much like the instrumentation of symphonic pieces, he crafted each sub-circuit for its job, working holistically and in concert with its sister sub-circuits. In many cases, the next product was an opportunity to try out one of many new bandgap bias cells or transconductors or output stages he was “inventing.”

It was sheer pleasure to gather around his impromptu white-board discussions as he took us on a what if? journey along his thought process from the creation of a brand new topology through its refinements and embellishments.

The office walls ran out of room for his 100 or so patent awards. I can personally attest that there were many more clever inventions that the patent lawyers never got around to. It seemed so simple when he did it — but suddenly became incredibly liberating to explore the wealth of topologies possible with only a handful of transistors!

Start at the End

Before Barrie ever placed one transistor on a schematic, he had already deliberated the package pin-out, the detailed specifications, the block diagram, the multiple customer application circuits, etc.

He had a sense of balance and aesthetics. Barrie’s inception of the product down to the proposed chip layout were deliberate works of art. Clarity of purpose guided design choices and exposed potential issues early on. He had an uncanny ability to anticipate what the customer would want, even if he or she had no idea yet.

At one notable internal planning meeting for the following year’s products, we were all asked to bring our proposals for review with the marketing and product support teams. Barrie volunteered to go first and proceeded to show 70 slides (with animation) on his new variable gain amplifier and the 20 unique ways it could be configured for different applications. I sheepishly followed with an unimaginative one-pager. I quickly learned that product design is much more than circuit design.

Good with the Fundamentals

For all the sophistication of his circuits, Barrie was not a believer in complex equations. His foundation design philosophy proposed a balance between simple models with layered complexity and thoughtful simulation, in order to develop intuition and insight.

“If your circuit does not work as expected with the simplest of models, it certainly won’t get better with non-idealities added.”

He strongly articulated for concept re-use rather than cell re-use, fearing their unintentional misuse and abuse. I learned early on not to take one of Barrie’s magical cells and simply drop them into my design without fully understanding its operation.

Over time, we, as a group, communicated our concepts using recurring icons or memes that captured the essence of our ideas: crossed arms represented the bandgap principle of PTAT (proportional to absolute temperature) and CTAT (complementary to absolute temperature) components.

To this day, our search for new talent prioritizes strong fundamentals over a collection of facts: the WHY rather than the WHAT.

Life after Barrie

Barrie and I had many conversations over the years, ranging from op-amp compensation to cosmology to the quantum nature of noise and beyond.

The wider design community and Analog Devices have lost a true icon of the industry for over 50 years. His family has lost a husband, father and grandfather. I have lost a mentor, colleague, manager, idol, sounding board and dear friend, to whom I owe so much. He has left a great technical legacy, the many young designers he inspired and especially our band of innovators at the Northwest Labs.

We all know that he spent every day of his adult life doing the kind of work he loved most: inventing and refining.

Rest in Peace

Silicon Valley Tilt-Up

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 00:33:00 +0000

The movers trucked my boxes from the former Linear Technology buildings in Milpitas across town to the new Analog Devices campus in Santa Clara. It's not far; it's just a new building. There was no closing ceremony. It's not like this was hallowed ground. It was just another Silicon Valley tilt-up.

The term "tilt-up" refers to the way many buildings are made here. They pour a concrete slab. Then they pour concrete walls horizontally and tilt them up to form the sides of the building. It's the same way pioneers had barn raisings 150 years ago. Except that barn raisings were a community event that pulled everyone together. They were built by hand and they were built to last for generations. A modern tilt-up is quick, cheap and the community barely notices. Typically only two stories tall, they are built to barely survive the shaky ground beneath Silicon Valley and its relentlessly shifting tectonic plates.

The ground is not the only thing that is constantly shifting here, the names on the buildings are constantly shifting, too. Silicon Valley is legendary for start-ups and spin-offs. Those from Fairchild Semiconductor are remembered for the people, not the buildings. The tilt-ups represent the footsteps along a journey for those companies, only to be trodden by another in their wake.

I've got an aerial photo of Silicon Valley, vintage 1980. In the upper left of the frame, near Moffett Field, you'll find the first Fairchild building. Where Bob Swanson was hired away from Transitron. Mid-center in the photo is the old National Semiconductor campus, where he rose to VP of Analog and met Bob Dobkin. To the right are the empty fields that Swanson and Dobkin chose to build the first Linear Technology tilt-up. The progression of time and autonomy paralleled the arc across the valley. And now we are looping back over to Santa Clara, not too far away from the original location of Precision Monolithics - one of ADI's earliest acquisitions - the new home of its latest.

Linear occupied that Milpitas space for over 35 years. Of the five buildings, I have the rare distinction of having had an office in each one at some point. Building number one was the original fab and offices. Building two became more offices and the test floor. There were other buildings called three and four, that were occupied for several years then knocked down for a new "building four" which would become the executive offices, marketing, and the shipping dock. Probably unintentional, but the symbolism of Swanson as CEO sitting in the same building as shipping echoes LTC's culture - roll up your sleeves and never forget where the money comes from.

Looks big, but it's a 4" wafer

Building three was leased (when real estate was booming) then purchased (when real estate crashed) from LSI Logic. Wilf Corrigan, the founder of LSI, sat next to a conference room that we called "the round room" in that building. A former president of Motorola who came to Fairchild with "Hogan's Heroes", Wilf became CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1974 - leaving in 1979 when it was sold to Schlumberger. He redeemed his legacy with LSI, next door to LTC, walking the hallways of the future building three.

Building five became Linear's engineering building once they outgrew building three. Building five was purchased (when real estate was cheap) and moth-balled until it was needed. The former tenant was Xicor. Its CEO in those days was Lou DiNardo, a former vice president and general manager at Linear - and my old boss for a time. Linear generally retained its people; it was a great place for the right people to work and built to last. But there wasn't much room at the top. Another high-level defector was Dave Bell, former president. Dave went to Intersil as CEO. Intersil acquired Xicor from Lou. Few noticed within the walls of our tilt-up; few look back.

There aren't many acknowledgments of the buildings in Silicon Valley. Hewlett and Packard's garage is now a museum and a recognized historical landmark. Shockley Semiconductor's building received modest recognition. Few companies stayed put long enough for the accomplishments of the people to be associated with the place. Companies move places, people move companies.

And so we move. But we stand on the shoulders of giants and we carry that forward. We bring that to the new community to build something better, like reclaimed beams from a 150 year-old barn.

Ides of March in The House of Bob Swanson

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Sat, 25 Mar 2017 03:22:00 +0000

It was March 15, 2017. I spent a few hours with Bob Swanson on his last day as Executive Chairman of the company he founded with Bob Dobkin over 35 years ago, Linear Technology Corporation. A few days earlier, the legal transaction concluded with Analog Devices acquiring the company. Bob had packed up what he wanted from his office and graciously let me sort through the rest and keep it for historical purposes. As I work through it, I will post more articles here.

Bob confessed that he is a bit of a pack rat. There were documents from 1981 about the initial incorporation of the company. The first documents were filed before the founders had decided on a name for the company, so it was referred to as “THOBS” which meant “The House of Bob Swanson.” He would later say that he liked that title, but the other founders didn’t so they settled on Linear Technology. And that is very fitting. For LTC was created by Bob Swanson but also very much by the other founders - it was never about him, but he was a relentless driving force and steered it on a very deliberate, unwavering course. Yet he gave so much freedom to the brilliant technical people that created the products, built the products and supported the products. The face of the company would be the “IC design gurus”. Bob was the heart.

(I photographed this out of a book, which was obviously a poor photocopy. I need to find the original. I could write paragraphs on this photo - who is standing where, who is missing, who isn't wearing a tie.)

Next to the leatherbound copies of the incorporation documents and the initial public offering documents, was a full set of Linear Technology data books. The world has since gone digital, but in 2004 we printed the last full set of these books. Bob didn’t use them, but he liked to look at them. It was a visual representation of all the products we had created. It’s impressive.

As I shuffled through file folders, employees came in to say thanks to Bob. Scattered around the office were many items from customers, employees and professional organizations expressing thanks. Bob kept them. There are small note cards from employees that he still has. There are framed articles that featured Bob, tucked away. He didn’t display those but rather a mix of quotes, architectural drawings of Linear Technology buildings and framed mementos of the IPO. It wasn’t about Bob, but it was the house of Bob Swanson.

I had Bob sign his copy of Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great”. He quoted that book to employees over the years and Bob’s copy is dog-eared and highlighted. Collins also wrote “Built to Last” and both represent the way Bob ran Linear Technology.

He had a photo on his desk of his first Porsche. He mentioned what a good car it was; he always like Porsches. His son has that a first red car now and has restored it. It runs great; built to last. I need to ask him if that red Porsche in the architect’s rendering was meant to be his.

March 15 - the ides of March - is just another day. There was no betrayal. There is no animosity or sense of relief, either. This isn’t necessarily the way Bob wanted it to end; he would have preferred it to continue on as an independent company forever - it was built to last. He may not come into this office anymore, but his presence will always be felt. The sign out front now says Analog Devices, but it is also the house of Bob Swanson.

A CMOS Op Amp Story - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 20:16:00 +0000

The quintessential analog component is the operational amplifier. And the overwhelming majority of modern integrated circuits are made on CMOS processes of ever-shrinking geometry. But early on, the “low and slow” use of MOS transistors in an analog circuit was ridiculed. “Complementary” was, well, not complimentary. So, how did we get to the CMOS op amp? And how would the Vegas strip and TV test patterns play a part in the story? Read on!

Wikipedia says that Frank Wanlass patented CMOS in 1963 while at Fairchild. It doesn’t say he invented it. Much like Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, he got to the patent office first. Coincidentally, also in 1876, W. G. Adams and R. E. Day published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society entitled, “The action of light on Selenium.” It was the first observation of surface effects and described what we know of as the field effect transistor.

The footsteps for this story go back and forth between RCA on the east coast, Silicon Valley on the west coast and Utah, of all places.

Why Utah? I’ll save that for “part 2” of the story. As well as the Silicon Valley folks.

Why RCA?

Briefly, during World War I, the U.S. government commandeered all the radio companies and their patents for the war effort. After the war, they cut a deal with General Electric to take the assets from the American Marconi company and create the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as well as the National Broadcast Company (NBC). Also part of the patent pool were GE, AT&T, Westinghouse and the United Fruit Company (yes, bananas). RCA bought the company that made the Victrola and moved into television in the 1930s. The TV tube research and development complemented their vacuum tube development in support of their own end-to-end television business. RCA Laboratories (similar, but not as famous as Bell Laboratories) was set up in Princeton, NJ. RCA was second only to Bell Labs in the number of transistor related patents during the 1940s and 1950s, indicating a strong commitment to basic semiconductor research.

Sarnoff set an ambitious vision for RCA and the lab, part of which included transistors. At RCA, Jerome Kurshan replicated the Bell Labs point contact transistor less than a month after their announcement. (Second place.) Prior to the consent decree, RCA tried to design around the Bell patents and by 1952 had solved the production issues for point-contact transistors. Under Kurshan’s guidance, George Sziklai developed “complementary” circuits in the early 1950s with H. C. Lin, long before MOS or even integrated circuits - but well after the 1876 (Adams and Day) or 1925 (Lilianfeld) “field effect” disclosures. J. Torkel Wallmark started a project assembling several amplifiers, switches and passives to make a prototype digital logic device in 1957 - but Kilby had his “integrated circuit” working first. Nobody remembers who came in second. No matter how you look at it, RCA made a blunder by not putting “complementary” and “MOS” together. Wanlass got the patent first, but Fairchild did nothing with it for several years. For the record, in 1960 Karl Zaininger and Charles Meuller fabricated a MOS transistor at RCA and then Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein followed in 1962 with an experimental 16-transistor CMOS device at RCA. (Arguably first, but forgotten.) But it would be many years before all of the stability and production problems were resolved. So, at this point, RCA was in the lead - but CMOS was not yet practical.

As with the whole industry at that time, government contracts for the military and space programs funded and directed much of the development. Almost everyone felt that CMOS was too difficult and had too small of a market. Bipolar logic ruled. Straight NMOS dominated elsewhere. Even RCA wanted to focus elsewhere. But, Air Force contracts forced RCA to continue efforts on CMOS despite their problems and internal hostility toward it.

George Rotsky wrote a nice piece for EETimes about the struggle with making CMOS, most of which is probably true. I’ll paraphrase. In 1959, Steven Hofstein and Frederic Heiman joined RCA's David Sarnoff Research Center as part of a work/study program with Princeton. The group leader of the Electron Devices Research Laboratory, Tom Stanley, offered a choice.

"Follow everyone who are working on the junction field-effect transistor that Shockley invented in 1952. If you accomplish anything, you will end up working as a technician for some senior engineer. Or, work on the MOS transistor which everyone says will never work. There are problems with surface states, a problem Bardeen uncovered at Bell Labs. If you succeed, you'll be a hero. If you fail, so what?"

The initial focus was to find a better way to clean the silicon before growing the oxide. There seemed to be a million cleaning recipes, Hofstein recalls, none of which did any good. He then remembered that, to improve surfaces, metallurgists annealed metals in a hydrogen atmosphere. He tried it. Success! It was an exhilarating moment. Instead of cleaning the silicon before oxidizing, the trick was to anneal after oxidizing. Hofstein and Heiman were in inventor's heaven. Unfortunately, the MOS transistors weren't stable.

Meanwhile, Fairchild had discovered that sodium makes silicon unstable, but didn't know how to overcome surface states.

Along about 1965, Hofstein, with the blessings of the IEEE, organized the Silicon Interface Specialist Conference. He chose Las Vegas for the location, unknowingly sowing the seed for Las Vegas becoming a major site for technical conferences.

Rotsky paints this scene: Hofstein and Andy Grove are in the Stardust swimming pool, possibly chatting about the weather and the Las Vegas ladies. The conversation may have shifted to MOS transistors. Grove may have said that Fairchild had spent more than a million dollars tackling the surface-state problem. And Hofstein may have said that RCA had spent a similar sum on the instability problem. No one knows if or what was said in the pool, but it's possible that Hofstein said, "hydrogen," and Grove said, "sodium." Two million dollars and two words. Within a few weeks, the industry benefited from two good sources of MOS field-effect transistors and, not much later, from a growing industry that made larger and larger MOS ICs.

The Air Force computer system used RCA CMOS logic and memory circuits in 1965. In 1968, RCA introduced their CD4000 series logic family. Finally, they were first! Although they were a commercial success, it did not endure. In addition to government contracts, RCA’s solid state developments were disproportionately focused on television. As early as 1952, RCA had a prototype all-electronic television. And it was only in the late 1950s that RCA entered the merchant semiconductor market, prior to that it was all internal consumption for television and military contracts.

My research into CMOS pointed in several directions: CMOS logic, CMOS memories and CMOS image sensors. And these paths crossed from time to time. RCA, for example, invented the TFT (Paul Weimer, 1961) and did a lot of development of CMOS image sensors. They built the first solid-state camera in 1967 (prior to Bell Labs’ CCD Picturephone, remember that?). Image quality has always been important to RCA even way back in the tube era. I got sidetracked into researching an engineer named Otto Schade. Schade was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1926. He joined the Tube Division of RCA in New Jersey in 1931. His first widely recognized achievement was in 1936 on the electron optics behind the 6L6 beam power tube. He was a brilliant and prolific engineer, most noted for his work on the Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) - a well-known and widely used metric to characterize the resolution of almost any optical or display component as well as the resolution of overall imaging systems. This metric is used to characterize the entire display system as well as the performance of each individual system component from the camera lens to the human eye. This manifested itself in Schade’s high resolution test pattern. In the course of his career, Otto Schade presented or published more than 30 papers and received 85 patents. He spent the rest of his career at RCA.

Unlike modern Silicon Valley, not only did engineers of that era spend their entire careers at one company but often their children joined the same company. And this was the case for his son. According to an interview with the Society of Information Display, sometimes Otto, Jr., had to cancel dates to serve as the test audience for his father’s lectures, and the planned building of a model-train layout in the cellar was scrapped in favor of a home darkroom to further study image quality. Few sons in history have been told by their father: “Sit down, I want to get the sine-wave response of your eye.”

Turns out, Otto, Jr., also had an impressive career at RCA with many, many patents. And some of his work involved CMOS analog!

I had the pleasure of talking to Otto Schade, Jr., on the phone. He said he joined the Solid State division (semiconductor division) in 1966, coming over from the “tube” division where he had been working on broadcast TV tubes. At the time, the digital group (developing the CD4000 family of digital logic devices) and the analog group were separated. He said, “the analog guys talked to the logic guys as seldomly as possible.” Otto, Jr., was constantly compared to his father and it made things difficult at times. Within the Solid State division, he struggled because his background was in mechanical and tube technologies, not semiconductors. He said, “It wasn’t much fun; there was so damn much learning to do.”

Otto gives much credit to Murray Polinsky for developing the analog version of the CMOS process. The process used by the CD4000 logic family was prone to ESD damage. The analog process developed by Polinsky included the necessary clamps and protection circuits to help these devices survive. RCA is not very well known as a semiconductor company, not even in those days. And the “RCA Review” probably didn’t reach as many people as the Bell Labs Technical Journal but there is a lot of good reading in there. But in that spirit, they tried to spread the information as much as possible. Otto had attended many ISSCC conferences and had attended some of the after-hours sessions where competitors would freely talk about the latest technology. They would say, “Turn off your recording devices and let’s just talk.” Even though he was well aware of Bob Widlar, Bob Dobkin, Dave Fullagar and many others, he didn’t really know them. They still felt isolated back in New Jersey.

Otto was working for Dick Sanquini (group leader, linear integrated circuit development) and the Vice President of the division was Bernie Vonderschmitt. In those days, management was able to talk to the engineers; they had their respect because they had also been engineers. Bypassing the normal organization because he knew Otto, Sr., Bernie asked Jr., “Can’t we make a circuit that has both bipolar and CMOS on one chip?” Schade’s team built a FET-input, 10V op amp with a CMOS output stage. And with that, we have the birth of the CA3130, arguably the first “CMOS op amp”.

That first op amp development was like the old saying, “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”. Technically, there are bipolar transistors in the chip, but perhaps that’s splitting hairs. It was introduced in 1974 and marketed as a CMOS op amp for use in predominantly CMOS systems. It would be several years before anything like it hit the market. I have yet to find anything particularly interesting about the CA3130 or its design but you can still buy them. It was reasonably popular in its day but not particularly precise.

I asked Bob Dobkin about the CA3130. He said it was really useful in “Ideas for Design” - as a noise generator! Coincidentally, I’ll remind you that Dobkin once considered joining General Electric to start up their integrated circuit group. He would have inherited this part.

Bob Pease made a vague claim to a CMOS op amp design in this same timeframe, albeit as part of a larger IC. From April 1999, “What’s All This CD4007 Stuff, Anyhow?”:

“I am slow, dumb, STUPIDO. However, the sudden cessation of stupidity is worthy of some mention. I knew about CMOS circuits in the 1970s. I even designed a CMOS operational amplifier back in '74. It used about 15 transistors to run on ±5-V supplies and provide a gain of 10,000. At the time, several engineers looked at my two-stage, cascoded differential amplifier and asked, ‘Why do you make life so complicated? Why don't you just use TWO transistors of a CMOS inverter for an op amp, like everybody else does?’ … This op amp went into the Teledyne Semiconductor 9400 analog to-digital converter with 8-, 10-, or 12-bit resolution.”And Pease also suggested: “If you want to read about an analog CMOS circuit, you should obviously read AN-88 in NSC's CMOS Databook. (Hey, don't waste your time. It mostly tells you how you can use a 74C04 as an op amp.)”

In 1986, RCA Solid State was acquired by General Electric and Jack Welch. The combined RCA/GE Solid State division was sold off to Harris Semiconductor in 1988 and combined with the original Intersil which they had acquired at about the same time. Otto noted that the lab in Princeton, NJ, (RCA Laboratories) was transferred to Stanford Research International, so they became “SRI East”.

Name Dropping

Dr. H. C. “Jimmy” Lin worked at RCA in the late 1940s and 1050s, working on linear applications with discrete bipolar transistors. He would be instrumental in the development of integrated circuits at RCA and, later, Westinghouse. He is referenced many times by Bob Widlar and most other great analog designers of the 1960s… on the shoulders of giants.

Dick Sanquini worked at National Semiconductor, initially as vice president of microprocessors, microcontrollers, and peripherals with subsequent roles as senior vice president of the consumer and commercial division and as the company's chief technology officer. Mr. Sanquini's career began in 1959 at RCA's Solid State Electronics Division, where he designed the company's first commercially available integrated circuits, and eventually served as general manager and director of memories and microprocessors. Mr. Sanquini holds a BSEE degree from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Wisconsin.

Bernie Vonderschmitt worked at RCA for 34 years and was involved in an early industry rivalry over the design of color television. In 1953, Mr. Vonderschmitt was picked to head the development of a color television project at the company. Mr. Vonderschmitt headed the RCA solid-state division from 1972 to 1979. At that point, he moved to Silicon Valley to lead the component division of Zilog. At the age of 60, Vonderschmitt and two partners founded Xilinx.

Robert S. Pepper, Ph.D., served as a Vice President and General Manager of the Solid State division of RCA Corporation from 1979 to 1984. He had spent over 15 years in the semiconductor industry, notably as a Vice President and General Manager of the Semiconductor division at Analog Devices, Inc. Dr. Pepper joined Level One Communications in 1986 as the Chief Executive Officer and President. Dr. Pepper holds a BSEE, MSEE, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

NOTES

Wikipedia

Phone call with Otto Schade, Jr, November 11, 2016.

“Otto Schade – A Pioneer with an Insight into Image Quality” Society of Information Society, staff article, http://informationdisplay.org/IDArchive/2006/January/OttoSchadeAPioneerwithanInsightintoImage.aspx

“Current Sources and Voltage References: A Design Reference for Electronics” By Linden T. Harrison

“What's All This CD4007 Stuff, Anyhow?” by Bob Pease, Electronic Design, Apr 5, 1999 http://electronicdesign.com/analog/whats-all-cd4007-stuff-anyhow

Tennis and Transistors – A Story of Dr. H. C. Lin

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 05:06:00 +0000

Dr. Hung Chang Lin is referenced in many analog circuit patents and papers for several ideas: single-diode compensation for temperature stabilization in bipolar transistors, the use of a diode-connected transistor instead of an actual diode to improve matching, and the invention of lateral transistors. The audio community also references him for the so-called “quasi-complementary” output design, and later for “active noise cancellation.” He was a creative, energetic scientist at a key time in the early days of transistors and integrated circuits. He spent 20 years as a scientist, and 21 as a professor at the University of Maryland.

I was curious about his footsteps – where did he go to school, where did he work and what other analog greats had he crossed paths with? It wasn’t MIT, Stanford or Fairchild. Instead, biographers cite his BSEE from Chiao Tung University (Shanghai) in 1941, MSEE from the University of Michigan in 1948 and a PhD from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1956 (now part of NYU).

Hung Chang Lin was born in Shanghai in 1919, the son of Dr. Dao-Yang – the former president of Chung Chi College in Hong Kong. This was during the warlord period following the fall of the Qing Dynasty. The Kuomintang (KMT) enlisted help from the Soviet Union to defeat the warlords and unite the country, starting in northern China. The Soviet Union created the Communist Party of China (CPC) sowing the seeds of Civil War that would reach Shanghai by 1927 and drag on for ten years. The period from 1937 to 1945 was the Second Sino-Japanese War, the latter part of which coincided with World War II making China an ally of the United States against Japan. Somehow among all this, Lin attended Chiao Tung University on a tennis scholarship and studied electrical engineering. In those days, “electrical engineering” meant communications and utility power distribution. Chiao Tung University was modeled in many ways after American Universities and brought in American professors. It was encouraged for graduating students to travel to America for post-graduate education and work experience – sponsored at times by the government – and return to China later. It is quite likely that Lin was acquainted with An Wang, the founder of Wang Computers. Wang graduated a year prior to Lin, stayed another year to teach and then worked at China Central Radio Works before coming to America.

By 1937, Japan occupied Shanghai. Many of the students and faculty relocated to the French Concession, an area adjacent to Shanghai owned by the French until 1943. As the war continued, the university offered scholarships to maintain enrollment. In 1940, a state-run branch of the school was set up in Chongqing, the provisional capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. Lin graduated before the occupying forces took over the Shanghai school in 1942. From there he worked as an engineer for the Central Radio Works in Kweilin and then the Central Broadcasting Administration in Kunmin, far to the southeast of Shanghai. There was a strong feeling of patriotism with many students joining the army and others serving technical roles. It is estimated that between 1 and 3.5 million Chinese died during the war. Wang lost his parents and a sister. In Wang’s autobiography, he said, “Confidence is sometimes rooted in the unpleasant, harsh aspects of life, and not in warmth and safety. It is an intangible quality but it has its own momentum. The longer you are able to survive and succeed, the better you are able to further survive and succeed.”

Lin moved to the United States in 1947, receiving his MSEE from the University of Michigan in 1948. This was shortly after Bell Laboratories had announced the invention of the transistor. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) offered Lin a position in their patent department. RCA was eager to catch up with Bell Labs and quickly replicated their point contact transistor. In the early days of the transistor, RCA was second only to Bell Labs (Western Electric) in the number of transistor related patents. After working in the RCA patent office for two years, Lin moved to the Industry Service Laboratories group (RCA ISL) which had been formed to teach people how to use that patents they were licensing. This involved writing reports or visiting licensees to support the patent information. This was in contrast to the frustration felt by Bell/Western Electric licensees who were flooded with theory but little practical help to manufacture and utilize transistors.

For the 1952 ISL Symposium held at the RCA Labs in Princeton, NJ, Lin wanted to present something other than the transistor radios his colleagues were developing. He created a roving microphone and an audio amplifier. He also created a wireless, musical keyboard. Of his temperature compensation patent, he said,

“If I did make any contributions to early transistor technology, then my study of the temperature effect was one. In the early days, when we tried to bias transistors in the same way as was done for a vacuum tube, it wouldn’t work. You see, the heater for the tube keeps the internal temperature pretty constant, but in the transistor, the temperature depends on the ambient temperature, which can vary widely.”

“I built a 20 watt amplifier and took it to my boss to demonstrate, and took it outside where it was cold – it wouldn’t work. Another time, it overheated in use, and wouldn’t work. On the original 20 watt, I played music through a loudspeaker. I only needed one amplifier for monaural, because stereo was just coming out then. That amplifier really was one of my favorite circuits, because I used the so-called “Quasi- Complementary” design. I got a patent on this design and it is widely used today. You see at that time, we only had PNP (power) transistors, and these were all germanium. George Sziklai had just patented the complementary symmetry circuit (using both NPN and PNP), but we couldn’t get any good NPN (power) transistors, so that is why I developed the quasi-complementary.”

(Photo credit: Lin family photo)

Lin completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1956 while his wife, Anchen, worked to support them. That same year, he joined his friend Dr. Chu at Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS). CBS was a broadcasting company that wanted manufacturing capability and therefore had just acquired Hytron, a maker of TV tubes. This quickly progressed to semiconductors and Lin was hired to manage their applications group. Their biggest merchant business was power transistors for audio amplifiers in car radios. CBS ultimately divested this group in the 1960s.

George Sziklai joined Westinghouse and convinced them to hire Lin to work on integrated circuits in 1959. Lin recalled that in those days, anyone working on integrated circuits was considered a “laughing stock” by most of the industry. Westinghouse was heavily involved in military contracts and Lin was not immediately told the nature of his projects. In 1962, Autonetics was instrumental in forcing Westinghouse to abandon their mesa technology and develop a planar process similar to Fairchild’s. As part of the Minuteman II missile project in 1963, Westinghouse developed a differential amplifier. Texas Instruments, the other contractor, used a 4-layer PNPN process but this consistently failed radiation testing. This is when Lin came up with that lateral PNP which could be produced alongside an NPN transistor without any changes in processing or additional masking steps. Harry Knowles, Lin’s boss and a recent arrival from Motorola, bet Lin $5 that it wouldn’t work. Lin won. This is still widely used in analog integrated circuits, today.

Roughly parallel to all this, alumni of Chiao Tung University in New York helped resurrect the school in Hsinchu, Taiwan, officially established in 1958 as the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU). Initially, the only courses were in the Institute of Electronics. Lin and many others would support as visiting professors, conducting research and heading development projects. The establishment of the Semiconductor Lab in 1964 is considered the foundation of Taiwan’s semiconductor foundry industry. From the outset, the decision was made to focus on CMOS and to cooperate with RCA as its development partner. Dr. Lin was instrumental in fabricating NCTU’s first IC in 1966.

In 1969, Dr. “Jimmy” Lin joined the University of Maryland as a full-time professor where he only missed one class in the next 21 years. After his retirement in 1990, he continued to mentor students as Professor Emeritus. He held more than 60 patents, wrote the 1967 textbook “Integrated Circuits” and co-authored three others. He was elected a fellow of the IEEE and inducted into the Innovation Hall of Fame at the University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering. He was generous with his time and always remembered his fatherland. The Jimmy H. C. Lin Graduate Scholarship for Entrepreneurship supports graduate student applying from his Alma Mater, the Chiao Tung University in Taiwan and the (renamed) Jiao Tong University campuses in Shanghai and Xian.

And apparently, he was an avid tennis player until he was 90.

NOTES

“Early Transistor History at RCA: H. C. Lin” http://semiconductormuseum.com/Transistors/RCA/OralHistories/Lin/Lin_Index.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR2009032801762.html

Many thanks to the University of Maryland

https://www.eng.umd.edu/html/ihof/inductees/lin.html

“Made by Taiwan: Booming in the Information Technology Era” edited by Chun-Yen Chang, Po-Lung Yu

Digitized copy of the 1964 Reunion Record, published by the Chiao Tung Alumni Association

“History of Semiconductor Engineering” Bo Lojek

http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-25/news/mn-214_1_wang-laboratories

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1990-03-25/news/9001310328_1_wang-laboratories-core-memory-computer

“A Chinese-American Exciting Journey Into the 21st Century”, K. P. Wang

Japan’s First Transistor

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 19:34:00 +0000

I read the following blog post last week. I’ve met David Manners a few times during my marketing days and always looked forward to his visits. Quite often, his posts lead me to do a little more research, as is the case today. He wrote:

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/mannerisms/yarns/man-made-japans-first-transistor-2015-04/#sthash.Neq3sWy4.dpuf

David Manners, 4/17/2015

The Man Who Made Japan’s First Transistor
Tadashi Sasaki went to America in 1947 to investigate ways of improving the vacuum tube technology used by his firm Kobe Kogyo.He visited Western Electric’s tube factories and had access to Bell Labs’ scientists one of whom was John Bardeen.Just before Christmas 1947 Bardeen hinted to Sasaki that they’d found something interesting.In 1951 Bardeen was more forthcoming, telling Sasaki about transistors and giving him some single-crystal germanium.In 1953, Kobe Kogyo became the first company in Japan to make a transistor.

I’m well aware of the post-war situation in Japan, the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs and the eventual licensing of the transistor technology. I’m also burdened with the Japanese stereotypes that tended to subdue individuals pursuing crazy ideas. So something about David’s post seemed to be missing.

Tadashi Sasaki was born in a small fishing port on Japan's western coast but grew up in Taiwan, then a Japanese colony. His father, a former samurai from the garrison at Hamada castle, was a teacher there. Sasaki studied electrical engineering at Kyoto University. During World War II, he was assigned to an aircraft maker called Kawanishi Machine Works, based in Kobe, where he did research on vacuum tubes for use in telephones, wireless, and radar.

Kawanishi separated its vacuum tube business as a new company called Kobe Kogyo. In post-war Japan, a top allied priority was the reconstruction of the telephone system, so many doors were opened. As you know, vacuum tubes were key components in telephone switching. In 1947, Sasaki was sent to study modern methods of tube production at Western Electric's factory in Allentown, Pennsylvania. When he didn't understand something, Sasaki was permitted access to the Bell Telephone Laboratories in nearby Murray Hill – none other than John Bardeen.

Timing is everything. Shortly before Christmas 1947, just as he was about to return to Japan, Sasaki had a meeting with Bardeen. Normally the most mild-mannered, soft-spoken of men, Bardeen seemed uncharacteristically excited. He told his Japanese visitor that he and his coworkers had discovered a most interesting new phenomenon but he was not at liberty to say what it was.

In September 1951, Sasaki happened to be in the U.S again, meeting with RCA on subminiature receiving tubes. Sasaki and a colleague, Arizumi Tetsuya, heard about the transistor symposium Bell Labs for its licensees. They took a train to Murray Hill and found Bardeen, who told them all about the transistor. Kobe Kogyo signed a licensing agreement with RCA, which had a cross-licensing arrangement with Western Electric. In early 1953, ahead of all other companies in Japan, Kobe Kogyo became the first company in Japan to bring the transistor to production. The company's first transistorized product was a car radio it supplied to Toyota, which in 1955 was just beginning to produce passenger cars in earnest.

I had never heard of Kobe Kogyo. It was destined to become one of those companies that disappeared. They failed to invest heavily in transistors, since they had a vacuum tube business to defend. Matsushita, linked to Toyota, pushed them out of the car radio market. Eventually, the banks stepped in and forced an acquisition by Fujitsu in 1963 – you may be familiar with Fujitsu-Ten, that’s what happened to Kobe Kogyo. Taking the blame for the company’s failure, Sasaki resigned from the company's board. His only reasonable option was to return to Kyoto University as a professor.

This is all well within the stereotype that I’ve been taught over the years. But what happened next wasn't.

Returning from the United States in December 1963, he stopped for a layover in Honolulu. He had a chance meeting with Saeki Akira, senior executive director of a consumer electrical appliance maker called Hayakawa Electric Industry. Hayakawa had purchased vacuum tubes from Kobe Kogyo in the past. Over a meal on the terrace of his hotel at Waikiki Beach, Saeki invited Sasaki to join Hayakawa as head of the company's newly formed industrial equipment division. It was an exceptionally brave decision for him to accept. It was more characteristic of American entrepreneurs than my Japanese stereotype. Instead of taking a comfortable window office, he chose to jump from the frying pan into the fire – from a bankrupt firm to one that was in bad financial shape. Hayakawa was struggling so badly that it was believed it was about to be acquired by Hitachi.

He couldn't resist the challenge. "Everybody wants to join an elite company," he said, "because they want to have it easy. But I'd rather try and rebuild a company that has collapsed." A former colleague once said of him, "He has tremendous drive, and he's extremely interested in getting new technology applied in new product areas… Dr. Sasaki loves to talk, he loves to give ideas, he loves to encourage people to get into new areas – he's a tremendous man." This is not the type of description I expected.

At Hayakawa, his energy soon won him the nickname "Doctor Rocket." "Once he takes off, he's unstoppable," said Wada Tomio, a researcher who worked under Sasaki at Hayakawa for many years.

Hayakawa himself, the founder, was also an energetic entrepreneur. In 1915, his firm manufactured a mechanical pencil, dubbed in English, for export purposes, the Every-Ready Sharp Pencil. To this day, mechanical pencils (which are commonplace in Japan) are commonly known by the generic name shya-pu penshiru.

Later, on the lookout for promising new products, he discovered an early crystal radio set that had been imported from the U.S. One mark of a true entrepreneur is a refusal to be put off by lack of knowledge. Despite an almost complete ignorance of the principles of radio – or of electricity for that matter – Hayakawa decided to make radio sets. This was in 1924, the year before radio broadcasts were scheduled to begin in Japan. Hayakawa Electrical Industries would be the first Japanese company to make radios, which they sold under the name Sharp, the old brand from mechanical pencil days.

This spirit and enthusiasm for new, yet often unrelated, ideas is shared by Sasaki. Years before joining Hayakawa, one of Kobe Kogyo's picture tube customers was a Los Angeles-based television assembler called Packard Bell. This firm had entered Chapter 11 owing the Japanese firm a lot of money for parts already shipped. Sasaki went to L.A. to see what he could salvage.

Instead of forcing them to sell assets, he suggested product ideas to generate sales. One of the things he suggested was a wireless remote-controlled garage door opener. It was easy to produce, and it became a big hit product. When he joined Hayakawa, Sasaki remembered this asked himself what sort of product could pull the ailing firm out of trouble? His conclusion: an electronic calculator.

The idea of a calculator came from an obscure English company called Sumlock Computometer. The “Amita” was based on vacuum tubes that Kobe Kogyo manufactured. Perhaps Sasaki was at the right place at the right time, or more to my entrepreneurial stereotype, he knew a good idea when he saw it and matched it with the right technology when it finally arrived.

These were desktop calculators, some with CRT displays – not what we used in college. The leaps from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits to portable pocket calculators took vision. Around 1965, two men far apart geographically (yet similar in their strategic thinking) independently come up with the idea of the calculator as something more than an office tool. One was Sasaki. The other was Patrick Haggerty, chairman of Texas Instruments.

TI was one of the first companies to put transistors into production and it was clear to Haggerty that they needed a product to demonstrate its usefulness. Therefore, he launched an R&D program to build a pocket transistor radio. Eventually, they partnered with a small company to manufacture radios for them. That was their first step into the consumer realm. The next step was into calculators.

TI could conceivably also have been a major player in consumer electronics. In 1967, the R&D team prototyped the world's first handheld calculator. They had integrated a desktop machine into just four chips and a product slightly larger than the transistor radio. Then, as Jerry Merryman, one of Kilby's collaborators on the project recalled, things started to go wrong: "What they did was they assembled a marketing task force.” They essentially concluded there was very little market.

Conventional wisdom in Japan was similar, but Sasaki pursued his vision. He was convinced that calculators needed to be truly portable and that MOS (Metal Oxide Semiconductors) technology was the key to integration and low cost. At the time, the three biggest Japanese chip makers were NEC, Hitachi and Mitsubishi. None of them were interested, they all viewed LSI MOS-ICs as untried technology, bound to fail. A logical opinion at the time; it was extremely difficult to produce reliable MOS components. Sasaki continued to aggressively pursue his vision; he was desperately searching for a company which could supply MOS-ICs.

Sasaki flew to the U.S., where he visited Fairchild and most other semiconductor companies from Silicon Valley to the East Coast. "We're too busy making chips for the Air Force, we don't have any spare capacity for you." (If you recall your Fairchild history, you know how important the military market was in the early days.)

His last visit was at Autonetics, the electronics arm of the giant aerospace conglomerate North American Rockwell in Los Angeles. If you've seen Jim William’s artwork, you’ll recognize Autonetics as a manufacturer of defense products, too. Sasaki offered an order worth tens of millions of dollars. But profit margins would be low. He thought he had convinced Fred Eyestone, who headed Autonetics. But once again the answer was a polite, "Sorry, we'd like to help you, but we're fully booked."

He went to LAX airport to fly home. Then, just at boarding time, he was paged: "Would Dr. Sasaki please come to the information desk?" There he found a message that a helicopter was waiting to fly him back to Autonetics. Timing is everything.

Sharp QT-8D, under the hood

In September 1969, Autonetics shipped its first 25,000 MOS chips. The following year, Sharp produced one million calculators equipped with Autonetics/Rockwell MOS-ICs.

Today, Sharp is still making calculators. Rockwell is no longer making calculator chips. Toshiba replaced Rockwell and soon migrated to new C-MOS (Complementary MOS) technology. CMOS calculators would be truly portable. Sharp finally chose to make their own chips.

As an aside, Sasaki felt an obligation to Robert Noyce for licensing the planar patent. Noyce in turn, asked for advice after he left Fairchild. Sasaki shared his thoughts on a single-chip calculator, while in parallel had invested 40 million yen into a company run by his old Kyoto University friend, called Busicom. As you are now predicting, Busicom contacted Intel in 1969 to develop ICs resulting in the single microprocessor known as the 4004. I’m sure you know the rest of that particular story.

I recommend reading Bob Johnstone’s book. It certainly reversed my stereotype. Here was a story about an engineer with boundless energy, creativity, charisma and the drive to break with convention to follow his vision.

NOTES
http://www.xnumber.com/xnumber/mister_rocket.htm
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/history_of_electronic_calculat.html
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/rockwell.html
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/we-were-burning-bob-johnstone/1111985584?ean=9780465091188 “We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age”, By Bob Johnstone

http://www.jamesbutters.com/kobekogyokt75.htm
http://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_hersteller_detail.cfm?company_id=7428
http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Tadashi_Sasaki

The Heart of the Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 20:11:00 +0000

Sometimes you get off track temporarily, and sometimes you change course completely. I have many interests and Analog Footsteps is only one of them. I’ve been off track lately. Cycling is another interest and usually there is almost no crossover between the two. Cycling picked up for me in the fall and consumed a bit more of my free time. So did another chip veteran’s story. If I were writing “Digital Footsteps” then the two tracks would have been aligned perfectly.

A friend sent me a link to a story about an executive from Intel who had a stroke. His recovery was amazing, given the severity of the stroke, and now he’s planning to ride his bicycle across the country to raise awareness for the American Heart Association. So I began to research the story of Sean Maloney and it fueled my own bike riding. Although he received the Lee De Forest Award from the Radio Club of America (for WiMAX), Sean was not an analog circuit engineer. Sean’s background is in software and microprocessors – although he does concede that analog engineers are more and more important. Accordingly, he wouldn’t normally be of interest for this blog but portions of his story are closer to my own than many of the others that were recounted in the cloud-space occupied by Analog Footsteps.

Born on July 5th, 1956, Sean Maloney grew up the Lewisham district of South East London. It was a rough place to be a kid. He was the youngest of six, the grandson of a dock worker, and got kicked out of school at age 15. In the 1970s, he sold left-wing newspapers outside the docks in London for the Socialist Labor League, a group pitched against the neo-Nazi movement. Sean organized anti-government demonstrations and used his passion to recruited new members while developing his charismatic speaking style. “That boy has a skill,” his father told Sean’s mother once, “He’ll do something great with it or something terrible. Either way, he’ll inspire people.”

Sean attended Thames Polytechnic in London – formerly Woolwich Polytechnic prior to 1970 (and now the University of Greenwich since 1992). However, he didn't finish his degree. Instead, he became interested in programming and discovered an enthusiasm for computing. He worked briefly at Barclays writing mainframe software, and then joined Intel in the UK office. “I joined Intel because of the microprocessor. I believed, like many people, that the microprocessor was going to change the world.” He said, “I came to Intel for a pay cut. I was in software, and deliberately came to Intel because I believed the microprocessor was it.” “If not the 386, then the 486 ...eventually they would rule the world.” He was right.

“I started out as a field applications engineer with responsibility for LAN technology,” said Sean. And constantly promoting Intel, he added “we created the first LAN networks. Later on, we built Wi-Fi.” Sean rose through the ranks; applications engineering manager, then country manager and then director of marketing for Intel Europe. In less than 10 years, he had the unique good fortune to be hand-picked by Andy Grove to be his technical assistant. It wasn’t luck, of course, he relentlessly pursued Grove for the position. Grove needed someone with knowledge of the Internet, network bandwidth and communications. But Sean also brought a gritty determination and work ethic, a visionary quality and was a truly gifted, passionate, inspiring speaker.

He said Grove was the first boss who totally knew what he was doing. “Some days, he would really piss me off because he would say to me, ‘It’s not good enough. It’s not good enough.’ And then, late at night, he would call me at home and he’d say, ‘I know I went too far.’” He said Grove kept the pace red hot. “He’s very kind as well. He didn't come across as being kind at work, but he was really kind.”

Sean rose quickly to EVP of Intel Communications Group, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, and co-GM of the Architecture Group. Eventually, Sean was being touted as next in line to be CEO. Along with a punishing work schedule and global travel, Sean was an avid sculler. (“Rowing” is a generic term, I've learned. Athletes with two oars – one in each hand – are scullers. Athletes with only one oar are sweep rowers.) During the Olympics in 2008, while in Beijing on business, he managed to get a boat and permission to scull down the Olympic course at Shunyi. He still recalls the awesome feeling of rowing down the lanes where the world’s best would compete a few days later.

Sean Maloney at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park in Beijing

Then he had a stroke.

On February 18th, 2010, his youngest daughter, Catherine, – a premature baby who was still on a respirator – almost died. Sean was away on business and chartered a private plane to fly home to be at Catherine’s side.

By Sunday, Catherine’s condition had stabilized and that afternoon he felt normal enough to run the Stanford Dish, a hilly loop near Stanford University. He ran with his son George, competitive as usual.

Around 4 o’clock, he had an awful headache and felt “really weird,” he told George. “I went up and sat on my bed,” he said, “and the stroke happened.” His carotid artery seized up and – bam!

Sean’s stroke resulted from a clot in his left carotid artery, the main supplier of blood to the brain’s left hemisphere. The left hemisphere controls movement in the right side of the body and, for most people, speech as well. So he couldn't talk. The doctors didn't know whether he would ever walk or talk again.

During his first week in Stanford Hospital, he was frustrated, angry and impatient. “By Wednesday or Thursday, I was thinking, ‘How can I come back?’” he recalls, adding, “I had to get back.” A few days after the stroke, the right side of his body came back to life. One of the first words he was able to croak out was “now!” Ten days later he was heading home to Palo Alto. Margaret remembers driving Sean home as he excitedly pointed and grunted directions: “Uhhh … Uhhh … Uhhh!” He was taking her to the rowing club. Margaret recalled “With his left arm, he lifted the boat. He uncovered it, washed it off, and put the cover back on.”

The next morning Sean appeared, dressed in his rowing clothes and pointing toward the car. Margaret called Jean-Pierre van Tiel, Sean’s rowing buddy from Intel. Sean and J.P. took out a double scull. In the weeks that followed, he started rowing alone, at first in circles (“I nearly cried,” he says) but straighter and straighter each time.

Learning to speak has been his toughest challenge. The stroke destroyed a walnut-size section of his brain that produces language, so he had to learn to speak from the right side of his brain. To help him relearn the “flow and melody of speech,” speech pathologist Lisa Levine Sporer says they read poetry – Keats, Byron and Tennyson, his mother’s favorite – standing up, because talking to 1,000 people is Sean’s natural way of speaking.

Once a month the doorbell would ring and Margaret would open the door to find Steve Jobs asking whether Sean could come out and, well, play. “Like this nice, giant adult kid,” Margaret recalls. They occasionally walked and biked around the neighborhood together.

On Jan. 3rd, 10 months after suffering his stroke, Sean Maloney returned to Intel.

Determined to prove his worth, he led the company’s business in China, but he got passed over for the CEO position and decided to retire and focus on preventing strokes in others. He became chairman of the American Heart Association’s Silicon Valley Chapter. The viral success of the Ice Bucket Challenge for the ALS Foundation gave him the idea for the “Heart Across America” bike ride. He will ride his bike from Palo Alto to New York City to raise money and awareness about stroke and heart-attack prevention. He will launch his ride on March 22nd. It will be “the second-hardest thing I've ever done.”

And he’s recruiting friends – execs at companies such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Qualcomm, Dell and Google – to ride at least part of the 5,000-mile route with him through San Diego, Dallas, Chicago and a dozen other cities, where the American Heart Association will host events. He’s creating a movement and reaching out to everyday cyclists like me to join him for a day or even a few hours.

This is not a complete course change for me, however, just a little shift. I’ll get back on track with more analog stories. But for now, I’m riding for Sean. I donated. I tell people about arterial ultrasound scans. I had the scan, myself (clean). I rode over 1,400 miles in January as a fundraiser, with friends and coworkers pledging a penny or a dime per mile. And I’ll ride a few days with Sean in California and a few more days in Mississippi. If you are a circuit cyclist, consider riding with us (www.heartacrossamerica.org). If you are feeling charitable, donate (heartacrossamerica.kintera.org/todd_nelson). If you have the classic profile of an analog guru, please get the scan. If you are an endurance athlete and feel immortal, get the scan anyway.

Todd Nelson (me) and Sean Maloney after a bike ride

I've spent some time with Sean. He’s kind and appreciative but clearly very determined and mildly impatient. You can’t help but be inspired. Sometimes I forget he had a stroke and see him as a cyclist in training for a long ride. Knowing how his brain was affected by the stroke, it’s amazing he can ride at all. But he’s so eminently likeable; you just want to join him.

“I am incredibly grateful for my life” says Sean. While he appreciates his family more than ever, he has the same inspiring grit and the same drive that got him this far. “Never give up,” he says. “No matter what anyone says, you can attain your goals if you never give up.”

Sean Maloney is back.

NOTES

“Intel's Sean Maloney: The man who couldn't speak” By Patricia Sellers, September 9, 2011, http://fortune.com/2011/09/09/intels-sean-maloney-the-man-who-couldnt-speak/ This article is from the September 26, 2011 issue of Fortune.

“Sean Maloney Looks Back” December 26, 2012 (https://www.intelfreepress.com/news/sean-maloney-looks-back/3627/)

“Andy Grove: How to Be a Mentor” By Andy Grove, September 22, 2011 (http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/andy-grove-how-to-be-a-mentor-09222011.html )

“Intel’s executive vice-president Sean Maloney on the future of Culv and how he’s solving a chicken-and-egg problem with cheap chips” Jack Schofield, Wednesday 10 June 2009 (HTTP://WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM/TECHNOLOGY/2009/JUN/11/INTEL-CULV-SEAN-MALONEY )

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Affiliate/Sean-Maloney-joins-local-board-to-advance-stroke-awareness-in-Silicon-Valley_UCM_463050_Article.jsp
http://fortune.com/2014/10/30/intel-maloney-bike-ride-stroke/
“Sean Maloney’s Rowing Recovery” Published by David Churbuck

“Back in the running and rowing” By Kathrin Hille, February 26, 2012, The Financial Times LTD (London) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8a0ddbb8-5d6b-11e1-889d-00144feabdc0.html

Fairchild, Oldsmobile - Spin-off Comparison

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 20:56:00 +0000

I grew up in Michigan as a "car guy" with virtually no awareness of what what happening in Silicon Valley ...when everything was happening in Silicon Valley. Detroit was the place to be. And I went, only to find out that I didn't want to be there because it wasn't what it used to be. After accepting a generous package to voluntarily quit General Motors, I moved to Silicon Valley. Seeing both places up close and personal, I concluded that they had nothing in common - in fact, they were polar opposites. Imagine my surprise to find a research paper proposing that they were quite similar!

To compare the two areas in context, the study focused on the period when growth and spin-offs were rampant. For Silicon Valley they chose 1957 through 1986 and for Detroit they chose 1900 through 1924. So, for those of you who think of Detroit as GM, Ford and Chrysler (and GM as Chevy, Buick, Olds, Cadillac, GMC and Ponitiac; Ford as Ford, Mercury and Lincoln; and Chrysler as Chrysler, Dodge and Plymouth) as I did, that's not they way it looked back in 1924. But let's start in 1895.

As the semicoductor industry did not start in Silicon Valley, the automotive industry did not start in Detroit. The early companies were in New York, New England and the closet to Detroit was Cleveland. And these companies did not start out building cars with internal combustion engines - the technology wasn't there yet. Those companies were established horse-drawn carriage makers, sewing machine and bicycle manufacturers who branched out. The technologies were steam, electricity and eventually gasoline. The first significant gasoline-powered car was from the Olds Motor Works - founded by Ransom E. Olds in Lansing, MI, about 100 miles from Detroit. Olds used two main sub-contractors in the Detroit area: the Dodge Brothers, and Leland & Faulconer.

Meanwhile, a young Henry Ford was working for Edison and left to start his own company: the Henry Ford Company. But Henry Leland (subcontractor to Olds) was brought in to manage the company so Henry Ford quit - and Leland renamed it Cadillac. Henry Ford then started the Ford Motor Company that we know today with significant investment from the Dodge Brothers (subcontractor to Olds, and now the captive engine supplier to Ford). Eventually, the Dodge Brothers started their own company. So now we have Cadillac, Ford and Dodge as spin-offs of Olds.

Ransom E. Olds was pushed out of the Olds Motor Works and he started REO (presumably they made the Speedwagon); another spin-off. Two other Olds defectors, Benjamin Briscoe and Jonathan Maxwell teamed up to start the Maxwell-Briscoe Company in New York (with financing from Buick). It struggled, succeeded, was bought out, then spun out in a new location near Indianapolis and struggled some more. New management moved the company to Detroit where it did quite well. Much later, during another struggling period, Walter P. Chrysler was brought in and it eventually became the Chrysler Corporation. Chrysler had just left the Willys-Overland company (the original Jeep), but his early career was at Buick.

Henry Leland also founded the Lincoln Motor Company after selling Cadillac to William Durant. Durant was the head of Buick and on a buying spree that eventually became General Motors. That spree went too fast and Durant was pushed out and so he founded Chevrolet with Louis Chevrolet (a former racer employed by Durant at Buick). Years later, General Motors acquired Chevrolet and things began to look like what I remembered. Incidentally, both Mercury and Plymouth were never independent entities; they were creations of Ford and Chrysler, respectively, for marketing purposes and both are now defunct. Pontiac was somewhat similar for General Motors, and is also gone.

From 1895 to 1924, there were 112 new firms in the automotive industry in Detroit and 48% of them were spin-offs. As noted, many firms were acquired so the actual number of spin-offs was 142 which exceeds the estimate for semiconductor spin-offs (91). Olds and Buick each had seven spin-offs. Cadillac, Ford and Maxwell-Briscoe had four each.

I will assume you are familiar with the semiconductor genealogy; from vacuum tubes to Bell Labs and the transistor; from early transistor companies like Transitron; and Shockley and Fairchild and all the Fairchildren in Silicon Valley. So you recognize that the tube companies didn't make the jump to transistors. And the transistor companies didn't make the jump to integrated circuits - just like the carriage and bicycle companies didn't make the jump to automobiles; and the steamers and electric car companies didn't make the jump to gasoline-powered cars.

There is another parallel with the types of cars and with management style. Many of the early car companies made big luxury cars and failed to see the market for smaller, affordable cars and so people left to pursue those markets. I view this as similar to what many semiconductor spin-offs did, for example, leaving a digitally-focused company to make analog circuits. And a lot of the defections were basically disagreements with management or stockholders about how to run the company. Like Fairchild and Intersil disputes about stock options.

Both Fairchild and Olds were first to jump on the new technology. Both were full of very talented engineers yet had ineffective management. Their success was enough encouragement for people to venture out on their own. And in the beginning, neither area had venture capitalists. But while some talented people from Fairchild and Olds started companies, other talented people from Fairchild and Olds used their new-found wealth to help finance those start-ups. The study uses the term agglomeration to extend to all of the support companies necessary for the industry and the abundance of experienced labor. It is probably an effect, not a cause of the growth. Other studies point to the perfect storm of Stanford University, venture capitalists, the cold war and Silicon Valley's flat hierarchical structures as the reason for its growth. But Detroit lacked all these things yet seemed to spawn more spin-offs.

Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight to see how Detroit evolved. Forty years after 1924, Detroit was peaking in world domination only to get derailed by the oil crisis a decade later - of which it's arguably never really recovered. Forty years after 1986 is just around the corner for Silicon Valley. To some extent, the semiconductor industry is not the only game in Silicon Valley anymore. Regardless, it's still the epicenter of the semiconductor world. Will it get derailed in the next few decades? Are there lessons to be learned?

NOTE:
"Silicon Valley -- A Chip off the Old Detroit Bloc", Stephen Klepper, Carnegie Mellon University, January 2007

Ray Zinn and Micrel - Interesting Character

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 19:21:00 +0000

Most analog semiconductor companies can trace their roots to Fairchild, or Bell Labs, or MIT or Stanford or possibly the vacuum tube op amp companies like Philbrick. But even though Micrel’s founder had previously worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, it doesn’t seem appropriate to call Micrel a Fairchild spin-off. Most analog semiconductor companies have some interesting characters. Most fall on the wild side of “interesting” – eccentric, rebellious, arrogant. Micrel’s founder, Ray Zinn, is an interesting character – but at the other end of the spectrum.

Raymond Zinn was born in 1938 (estimate), the eldest of 11 children in a devoutly Mormon family in the farming community of El Centro, California, where his father worked as a cattle rancher. El Centro is a desert community near the Mexican border – between the Salton Sea and Mexicali. It’s 50 feet below sea level and gets about 3 inches of rain per year. It was hard work just to survive there. Ray was an unselfish hard worker from the beginning. When he was 4, his mother sent him to the store to bring home the heavy bottles of milk for the family. He had a driver's license at 14 and transported his siblings in a Ford pickup truck. Like any farm kid, he baled hay and milked cows before and after school. When he wanted toys as a child, he built them - everything from wood planes to gas-powered scooters. He had a knack for technical projects. "He always understood how things worked and shared that information with his siblings," said Marilyn Eckard, one of his sisters.

He attended Brigham Young University but grew impatient and decided to quit and get a job. This was in 1958. He left midway through his junior year at BYU and drove home to tell his father. His father was not happy. "First, my father took my car keys," Ray said. His father told him to take off his shirt and socks. "Then, he marched me into the office restroom and told me to hand my pants through the door." Ray waited, spending six hours in the bathroom, trying to figure out what his father was doing. "He was saying, 'Well, if you're going to quit school, you're going out in the world the way you came in.' He wanted me to think about living with decisions." Ray returned to Brigham Young, earned an B.S. degree in industrial management, and continued his education, receiving a master's degree in business from San Jose State University.

Ray moved to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1960s after finishing college to follow a sweetheart. I don’t know whether the SJSU master’s degree followed immediately or if there was a job in between (or in parallel). Regardless, that was an ideal time to be in Silicon Valley. The space program was a driving factor for many companies at the time. Ray wanted to be an astronaut and worked two years for rocket motor maker United Technologies. He spent two years at United Technologies. Then he joined Fairchild as an engineer in 1963 through his father-in-law, who worked there. By that time, Fairchild was already starting to suffer under poor management and people were leaving to start new companies. By some accounts, Ray wasn't good at office politics and was too straightforward for some bosses which caused him to have trouble keeping a job. I can’t say for sure, but I’ve met plenty of people who are apolitical and painfully straightforward but have no trouble keeping a job. I think Ray was just too impatient, possibly somewhat attention-deficit. Either way, the experience of working at Fairchild and seeing the highly successful spin-offs must have convinced him that ultimately he should launch his own company.

After leaving Fairchild, he worked at several semiconductor-related companies, including Electromask TRE (wafer processing), Electronic Arrays Inc. (digital and memory chips), Teledyne Inc. (which at around that time had just acquired Amelco), and Nortek Inc (nebulous reference to “electronic semiconductor components” on the internet and now makes unrelated things including bathroom fans). In 1978, he formed a partnership with Warren Muller to start Micrel. The pair used $300,000 in savings and bank loans to found the company, eschewing the financial support of venture capitalists. "I wanted control of my destiny and to do it my way." He wanted to be independent so badly that, at one point, he was personally guaranteeing $4 million in bank loans to keep Micrel afloat.

Micrel initially operated as a testing facility for other chip manufacturers, offering wafer-test services as a way to fund the development of its own products. In 1981, it acquired a fabrication facility from Siemens AG, and began to offer wafer foundry services. The company then began to manufacture chips designed by the end customer. The slow start was reported in the May 19, 1997 issue of Electronics News as "glacier-like growth and the sex-appeal of a mud hen."

Micrel recorded its first meaningful growth after it began designing its own analog and mixed-signal chips in the early 1990s. In order to grow and diversify, they started on a strategy of acquisitions. In 1998, the company entered the high-bandwidth communications market by acquiring Synergy Semiconductor Corp. In 1999, Micrel purchased Altos Semiconductor, which competed in the thermal management market. They have since acquired Electronic Technologies, Kendin Communications, Bluechip Communications and most recently, Discera who make MEMS-based oscillators and clock generators.

Ray still exhibits the impatience that caused him to bounce around various companies before starting Micrel. Executive Vice President Bob Whelton recalled that Ray called Micrel's top executives into his office, told them the Asian market was going to pot and gave them a week to come up with a plan to cope. "That meeting lasted a half-hour. We came back a week later and had another half-hour meeting to tell Ray what we could do. Two half-hour meetings recast what we did for '98," Whelton said. In one article, it says Ray sometimes watches three TV programs on three televisions at the same time. He makes fast decisions, but he thinks things through first. He also has some interesting views on managing. He's the kind of guy who asks why vanilla ice cream is white. "I believe the only stupid question is the one that wasn't asked," he once said. He prays and attends church regularly. He's not trying to convert anyone, but believes his religious values make Micrel a better place to work. Accordingly, Ray set some rules of behavior for Micrel employees. Swearing or using condescending language at the company is banned. Workers are urged to be honest, show integrity and respect others at the company. "We believe that work should be an extension of the home," he said.

He developed a serious eye problem in 1995. He used to take notes, but then couldn't see well enough to write anymore. That would be severely limiting to most people. But not Ray. "I memorize everything now," he said.

He's apparently uncomfortable talking about himself yet he recognizes that there's value in the stories for others. His stories have evolved through repetition to become a way to pass on his acquired wisdom; they are simultaneously personal and universal. They are stories of stubborn perseverance and inspired creativity, such as how he raised financing when there were no VC firms and banks didn't lend to tech companies; his upbringing on a cattle ranch in a large family of eleven kids; his early days at Fairchild and the "Traitorous Eight;" how he went blind in one eye then years later on the eve of Micrel's IPO he went blind in the other eye. He also has many maxims that he uses to help define his company's culture and his approach to life. His favorite is: "Do the hard things first." He adds, "Why did your mother tell you to get your homework done first before you went out to play?"

In comparison to many famous analog people, that makes him a unique character.

NOTES

Baljko, Jennifer L., "Proactive Strategy Keeps Micrel on Profitable Path," Electronic Buyers' News, September 28, 1998

------, "Raymond D. Zinn--Executive's Pithy Sayings Sum Up Successful Business Principles," Electronic Buyers' News, December 21, 1998

Hardie, Crista, "Micrel: A Growing Sense of Power," Electronic News, May 19, 1997

Tsuruoka, Doug, "Entrepreneur Raymond Zinn: His Hard Work and Independence Built Chip Empire," Investor's Business Daily, August 9, 2000

Covell, Jeffrey L., http://www.answers.com/topic/micrel-incorporated#ixzz3AUdON0Hb Tsuruoka, Doug, “Entrepreneur Raymond Zinn His Hard Work And Independence Built Chip Empire,” Investor's Business Daily 08/09/2000

http://news.investors.com/management-leaders-in-success/080900-351718-entrepreneur-raymond-zinn-his-hard-work-and-independence-built-chip-empire.htm#ixzz3FbApuRAN

Foremski, Tom, “Ray Zinn: 'Do The Hard Things First' - Advice From Silicon Valley's Longest Serving CEO,” Silicon Valley Watcher, July 14, 2014

When Radiation Meant Radio Communications, and then Harris

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:12:00 +0000

Most of the Analog Footsteps seemed to have trodden over neighborhoods around MIT and Stanford. So I always know I’ll find an interesting story for companies based elsewhere. For this post, I’ve chosen Harris Semiconductor in Melbourne, Florida.

According to its website, Alfred and Charles Harris founded the Harris Automatic Press Company in December, 1895. From their day job in a jewelry store in Niles, Ohio, they invented an automatic sheet feeder and a new printing press to better accommodate it. By the middle of the last century, it had grown into one of the world's largest and most successful manufacturers of printing equipment under a new name – Harris-Seybold. In 1957, Harris-Seybold merged with Intertype Corporation, a world leader in typesetting equipment. The 1957 acquisition of Gates Radio brought Harris in to the radio equipment industry, specifically broadcasting transmitters and microwave equipment as an extension of the media industry. Even with the acquisition of Gates Radio, the focus of the company remained on the printing press. Now called Harris-Intertype, they foreshadowed that the printing press would move away from a strictly mechanical product and depend more on electronics. Therefore, in 1967, they acquired Radiation Inc., a manufacturer of space and military technology located in Melbourne, Florida, just south of the Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral to people of my age). In 1974, the company changed its name to Harris Corporation, and moved its headquarters from Cleveland, Ohio, to Melbourne. Many other acquisitions followed. It later sold its printing business to focus exclusively on electronics.

So, who was Radiation, Inc. and why would Harris abandon print and broadcast media for what Radiation did?

Homer Denius and George Shaw

Let’s go back to World War II. Henry Stimson was the Secretary of War and therefore was in close coordination with Vannevar Bush, particularly on the Atomic Bomb. One of Stimson’s assistants was Thomas Meloy. After the war, the U.S. Navy suggested that he and Joseph Parks move from New York City to Washington, DC, to get government contracts. Putting their names together, they formed Melpar, Inc. Homer Denius and George Shaw worked at Melpar in Virginia. They presented plans to the Melpar management for expansion into instrumentation, specifically telemetry. Melpar rejected this proposal, so Homer and George decided to try it on their own.

In 1950, they founded Radiation, Inc. The context of “radiation” actually referred to radio frequency radiation, (communication by radio) and not nuclear fallout or electronics suitable for satellite applications. They started in Melbourne, Florida, in cheap buildings available on the former World War II Naval Air Station in close proximity to Cape Canaveral and its missile range activities. Actually, the good boating in the area was probably a major factor to the founders, since they were both enthusiastic yachtsmen. The company was funded from their own savings and likely some money borrowed from friends. As with Melpar, their focus was on government contracts. The company soon developed expertise in several areas, including: PCM telemetry systems (airborne and ground); digital data acquisition and processing systems and large tracking antenna. In many cases they were working decades ahead of the practical state of the art. John Hartley joined the firm in 1956 after serving on the faculty of Auburn University. That was the year that Radiation stock went public. Hartley later went on to become CEO of the company.

Radiation's involvement with the aerospace program included equipment for the Telstar and Courier communication satellites and the Nimbus and Tiros weather satellites. Military systems that relied upon Radiation equipment included the Atlas, Polaris, and Minuteman missiles.

Source: Radwiki (see notes)

The earliest Radiation hardware known to still exist is the "Force Amplifier"; this one pictured was purchased on E-Bay by a Radiation memorabilia collector at Harris. Yes, apparently there is at least one Radiation memorabilia collector! It dates back to about 1955. It was designed to measure and indicate the forces applied by the pilot to the various control surfaces of an aircraft in flight. The amplifier contains three vacuum tubes: 6U8 triode-pentode; 12AX7 dual triode; and 6AQ5 power pentode.

Source: Radwiki (see notes)

Radiation also had several facilities in Orlando. There was an Instrumentation Division located on the McCoy Airport property; a Research Division near the Herndon Airport. The Space Communications Division was established in Mountain View, CA, near Moffett Field. In 1960 Radiation acquired Levinthal Electronics Inc, in Palo Alto, CA (founded by Elliott Levinthal from Stanford University). Levinthal built high power transmitters, including a 430MHz radar transmitter at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico producing 2.5MW of peak power. In 1959, Radiation started a new facility in Palm Bay, Florida, and by the end of the year were occupying the first three buildings of what eventually became a large complex there.

Another person who left academia to join the staff at Radiation was Dr. Joseph Boyd. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Boyd taught electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. At the same time he was also director of the Willow Laboratories, a prestigious science and technology research institute with a staff of more than 1,000 scientists and engineers. Boyd joined Radiation in 1962 and within a year was made president. His first significant action as president was to set up a microelectronics plant to develop and produce integrated circuits. For PCM telemetry products, Radiation had contracts with Fairchild and Motorola for integrated circuits. But Boyd wasn’t quite satisfied, so he said “I’m going to start my own.” It’s difficult to verify, but it seems that a strong proponent for a captive semiconductor group was Peter Petroff.

Who was Peter Petroff? Petroff was born in the Bulgarian village of Brestovitsa, in 1919, to an Eastern Orthodox priest. After attending a religious seminary, Petroff enlisted in the French Foreign legion in October 1939. He was captured by the Germans while defending the French Maginot Line in 1940, and sent to a German Prisoner Of War camp in Poland. There are two post-war stories that are in conflict (in my mind, at least), one is that during the war he was conscripted into military service as a Nazi soldier. At war’s end, the Bulgarian government offered a short period of amnesty, but after that anyone who had served in the German army would be declared a war criminal and sentenced to death. The other story is that he returned to Bulgaria in March 1941 and became an officer in the Bulgarian Army. His duties included being a palace guard to King Boris III of Bulgaria and participating in the Honour Guard for the funeral of Turkey's President, Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. If I can resolve the conflict, I will edit this post.

In 1944, he moved to Germany to study engineering. He graduated from Darmstadt and Stuttgart universities with a master's degree in electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering. While in Germany he also studied his life-long passion, naval architecture, and designed and built the first of over 60 boats in 1947.

The Canadian government offered a visa and he immigrated there. Petroff arrived in Toronto in 1951. He worked on arctic engineering and construction projects for the US Air Force at Goose Bay, Labrador, and Thule, Greenland. He joined an overseas construction company and went to Indochina in 1956 for assignments in bridge and power plant construction. While in Vietnam, he built a 65-foot catamaran of his own design. He had the catamaran shipped to Canada, and sailed south on the intercoastal waterway to Florida with his wife and two sons.
After berthing in the Melbourne city harbor, his unique catamaran was noticed by George Shaw, the co-founder of Radiation. George always had yachts and after a tour of the boat with Peter he pulled strings to get him a position at Radiation. This chance meeting gave Peter access to executive row at the company and he never ceased to use it.

The family version of the story is slightly different, but not necessarily in conflict. Ralph Petroff, his son, said he might still be living in Canada if it hadn't been for Sputnik. Peter Petroff, tried to emigrate from Bulgaria to the United States after World War II, but he got only as far as Canada. Petroff said his father was told by U.S. immigration authorities that, with the waiting list at the time, it would be 2007 before he and his family could get into the country. That changed after Sputnik. His father was an engineer, and the United States was scrambling to find technically trained people. His father got his green card about 18 months after Sputnik launched, Petroff said.

I found an unauthorized obituary written by former colleague, Don Sorchych, who concluded: “…as far as the semiconductor division, which I later managed, it never would have existed without Peter. Peter was viewed as an expert in microminiaturization. And he correctly argued integrated circuits, then in their infancy, would be the ultimate solution in future systems.”
“With his connections in the executive suite, he badgered and bullied them, virtually wearing out the carpet in visits followed by lunches in the company cafeteria. He was the ultimate salesman, bright, persuasive and persistent.”

Petroff’s story continues long after his brief employment at Radiation, Inc., but I will save that for some other blogger. I’ll only offer a few highlights. His most unique distinction was to be officially declared an Enemy of the People by the communist regime in Bulgaria, for which he received a death sentence in absentia. The sentence was later lifted. He is also credited for renovating the Gemini II, a boat that served as the base of operation for Lee Taylor's successful assault on the world water speed record on Lake Guntersville in 1967.

In its obituary for Peter Petroff, The New York Times quoted Ralph Petroff, who said it was ironic that his father had died a peaceful death. "He always laughed at danger and he laughed at death. He should have never made it to his 83rd birthday, let alone his 20th," Ralph Petroff said. "I guess if you were to combine Indiana Jones with Thomas Edison, the result would be Peter Petroff." (The New York Times also credits Petroff with inventing the first digital LED wrist watch – which isn’t true, although he was at Electro/Data, Inc., headed by R&D manager John Bergey, where the first Pulsars were developed. I’ll avoid that whole story, thank you.)

The idea of developing semiconductors was radical. Executive row rocked with dissent, but Shaw’s booming voice could be heard arguing the strategic necessity, according to Sorchych. “It was a huge risk for a small company, which at that time was a 100 percent U.S. government contractor.”

Finally the decision was made to proceed, solely due to Peter’s persistence according to Sorchych. So, “although he never ‘organized’ the division as stated in his obit, it wouldn’t have happened without him.”

It is unclear to me what role Petroff played after that. To start the group, Dr. Boyd hired Uryon Davidsohn in 1962 to be the director of the new group, called the Physical Electronics Department, and the charter was to introduce new techniques for thin-film, silicon and hybrid forms of integrated circuits. Urie was the first person hired. He came from General Electric, where he was a consultant, and claimed to have a PhD – but didn’t. According to Don Sorchych, Urie was a short, humpbacked, bug-eyed, homely guy, exceedingly brilliant, weird, but with a certain charm. Urie hired Clyde Combs from Texas Instruments, who in turn brought over many more engineers from T.I. Don worked on the “systems” side of the company and was brought over because of his extensive knowledge of circuits. Don says, “I was offered the Director of Engineering position, I refused. Pressure was applied and I reluctantly agreed to take the position.” Don said the group was consuming lots of money but not producing much at first. He added, “Urie’s staff meetings were a riot, …these engineers were out of control, undermining each other and trying to figure out why the limited output of circuits suffered from a failure mode no one understood.”

He said, “a technician named Ed Guerra, also from Texas Instruments, found the answer in a technical paper published by IBM, but what did a technician know? Eventually, Guerra’s findings solved the problem.”

Don says that Urie was an extremely anal person and a clean freak. Apparently, Urie invited Hartley to his home (Jack Hartley, the division VP at the time). “It had been raining and he told Hartley to clean his shoes on an outside carpet. When Hartley came inside, Urie pulled a four barrel .22 caliber Derringer from his pocket and shoved it in his face. That resulted in Urie being involuntarily committed. When he was released, he would call me at all hours of the night and threaten suicide unless I came and had a brandy with him.”

Don tells another story about Urie and his ex-wife that ends with Urie asking her to bring him and Don a glass of brandy.

“She handed each of us a drink and sat down. He looked at his glass, looked at mine and yelled, ‘Bring me Don’s glass.’ She did. He held the glasses up side by side and screamed, ‘You f***king bitch you gave him more than me!’”

Eventually, they found that Urie didn’t have a Ph.D. as claimed, among other things. Urie left Radiation and joined his friend Dr. Arnie Lesk at Motorola in Phoenix. “One day Urie told one of his sons to clean the pool. His son resisted. Urie insisted, apparently strongly. The boy went in the bedroom, retrieved a shotgun, came out and blew Urie away.”

But let’s not let Peter Petroff or Urie Davidsohn affect the story. Let’s just say that Dr. Boyd decided to start a semiconductor group and the first director hired Clyde Combs away from Texas Instruments.

Clyde Combs was the son of sharecropper in North Carolina. He worked the oilfields of Texas and then joined the Air Force. He was stationed out of West Palm Beach, Florida, during the Korean War. After the service, he went to college at Southern Methodist University and worked as a co-op student at Texas Instruments on Lemmon Avenue, its first manufacturing site. This was 1955. For context, remember that in early 1952 Texas Instruments purchased a patent license to produce germanium transistors from Western Electric Co. for $25,000. Then in April 1954, Gordon Teal (formerly of Bell Labs) created the first commercial silicon transistor at TI. In 1954, TI designed and manufactured the first transistor radio.

Clyde worked on a little bit of everything, including helping Jack Kilby. The engineers took courses in semiconductor processing, taught by Walt Runyan. Walt was a former T.I. engineer who moved to academia and for many years Walt’s text was the only one on the subject. Each engineer was assigned a chapter, Clyde took diffusion. At the time, they had grown junction and mesa transistors. Fairchild developed the planar process but TI stayed with mesa for awhile. Clyde worked with Al Stein on “special projects” and that’s how they got TI in the planar technology. Al was also an expert in EPI technology through his research at Arizona State University.

Clyde heard about the group at Radiation in Florida through his “engineering network.” Having grown up in North Carolina and served in the Air Force in West Palm Beach, he was interested in moving. He joined Radiation in 1963 before there was anything more than office space for the group. He set up the whole process, all the fabrication equipment, diffusion ovens, etc. Other early members of the team were Phil Garner for assembly and test, Dane MacNeil for thin-film, Ernie Poplan for administration. These were the first four guys. Later, Clyde brought many of his colleagues over from T.I., including John Short and Ed Guerra. A bit later on, Don Sorchych was brought in as the first circuit guy.

I found an old issue of Microelectronic News by Don Hoefler with a spin-off tree. It went back further than Fairchild, and included Bell Labs, T.I., Hughes Aircraft and Motorola among others. It showed Radiation, Inc. and listed Sorchych, Combs and Garner and implied that they left T.I. to start Radiation in 1963. Well, obviously, Radiation started before 1963 but that’s when the semiconductor group started. Clyde Combs was from T.I. but not the others.

Clyde had quite a few stories including when his boss, Urie, would pull out his Derringer and put it on the table during meetings. Urie had lots of ideas but didn’t fully understand the technology. But he was the boss, so they tried to implement his ideas. Clyde wanted to build mixed signal circuits but worried about keeping the tubs isolated. So he had some logic wafers thinned, then cut out a single dice. He did the same with an analog circuit. Then he deposited carbon dioxide on a new wafer, planarized it and attached the two die. Ultimately, this led to the development of what became Radiation’s (and therefore Harris’) dielectrically isolated process. Urie, the boss, put his name on the patent but Clyde did much of the work along with John Short and Ed Guerra. Years later, Dick Casey from General Electric suggested that the process should work well for radiation-hardened circuits for space applications.

To reinforce how small the world is, Clyde also told me about the time he interviewed with Charlie Sporck and Bob Widlar at National Semiconductor. Widlar had his ax in the office. He told Clyde that when he got frustrated with a problem, he’d take the ax up into the woods and chop logs. Earlier, he had interviewed with Andy Grove and Gordon Moore at Fairchild. Clyde did not join Fairchild or National.

Clyde's notes on the EPI reactor, note the actual wafers!

The D-I process helped Radiation, and later Harris, win many government projects. The Navy was a big customer with Posiden, Trident, Peacekeeper and Minuteman missile programs. They did 34 circuits for the W71 program (familiar if you’ve seen “The Falcon and the Snowman”; W71 was history's first completely operational Early Warning and Surveillance Satellite, at the time it was so classified they didn't even give it a name. It is now called the Defense Support Program and is the program that Reagan used to scare the crap out of Gorbachev).

In 1964 Jack Hartley was chosen to run the physical electronics department, later elevated to be called the Microelectronics Division. "Radiation was by far the smallest company – by a factor of 10 – to enter into the integrated circuit business," he says. The technology was difficult and demanding. Initially the company wanted the circuits to support its digital telemetry products. On Jack's recommendation, the company expanded operations to become a merchant supplier, providing integrated circuits to other companies. Radiation developed early programmable devices and the dielectrically-isolated process generated a lot of revenue for radiation-hardened devices for space and defense applications.

Radiation invested heavily in semiconductors, but it evolved into a stand-alone business and not an integral part of the “systems” businesses. In the early years of the Microelectronics Division, “systems” projects were pushed to design-in circuits that were being developed by internally. It was not an easy sell for management, because the “systems” guys had to choose the optimum device for their project. Only rarely, did they have to resort to internally-developed custom circuits to accomplish their goals.

Now let’s return to 1967, when Radiation merged with Harris-Intertype. (Notice that I said “merged” because we’re now looking at it from the Radiation perspective, compared to “acquisition” from the Harris perspective.) Radiation wanted the merger because it was felt that major investments in integrated circuit manufacturing capabilities were needed to remain competitive, but that the investment would stress the company. Harris-Intertype wanted the merger because they wanted to branch out into communications. The name Radiation persisted as a division of Harris-Intertype through 1974. The merger was eventually reasonably successful, although the organizations had quite different cultures.

The systems side of Harris had too many mergers and acquisitions to mention. On the semiconductors side, more acquisitions occurred. In 1988 Harris acquired General Electric’s semiconductor operations, which included GE’s prior acquisition of the RCA solid-state business and its 1981 acquisition of Jean Hoerni’s and Jack Gifford’s Intersil. 1988 happened to be the year I entered the semiconductor industry at National Semiconductor. I distinctly remember having one of the Harris/RCA/GE/Intersil data books and thinking it looked like a crazy consolidation of a company. I’m told that the RCA and GE-Solid State acquisitions were useful for their patents but the products were dogs. The Intersil acquisition was very good and a nice complement to the military-focused Harris products.

In 1999 the entire semiconductor unit was spun off under the name Intersil.

As expected, I found a very interesting story with no direct path to Silicon Valley or MIT. There were some mentions of Jack Kilby, Bell Labs and Vannevar Bush, but they were not crucial to the story. Radiation, Incorporated was mostly a home-grown enterprise. And I found a strong sense of loyalty to the old Radiation group within Harris. It has very much a family feel, as you might expect. If you are one of the loyal Radiation people or a Radiation memorabilia collector, go visit http://radiwiki.wikispaces.com/ and contact Frank Perkins. And if I've gotten anything wrong or left something out, please let me know.

NOTES

Radiation, Inc. http://radiwiki.wikispaces.com/ (wow!)

My View, Don Sorchych http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2008/2008-08/080806/myview.html

My View, Don Sorchych http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2014/140226/myview.html

www.harris.com

Wikipedia

https://www.google.com/patents/US3813584

http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/46/Harris-Corporation.html
http://caseymoore.blogspot.com/2007/10/newhouse-news-story-on-sputnik.html?m=1 Times-Picayune, “Newhouse News Story on Sputnik: Beeping ball lights fire that launches U.S. to moon” Sputnik's ascent pushed Americans 50 years ago Wednesday, October 03, 2007 By Kent Faulk

Widlar's U.S. Air Force Performance Review

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 19:55:00 +0000

Bob Widlar's brother sent me a copy of the Air Force's official review of Bob's service. The actual document should eventually be available at the Computer History Museum. Bob, by all accounts in later years, was a difficult person to manage. So I was anxious to see how he was perceived in such a structured organization. He received superior marks except for the category of "getting along with others" - apparently it wasn't always harmonious.

Below are the written comments:

Strengths: A/2C Widlar is perhaps the outstanding electronics technician assigned to Course ABR33130. His background in the field of electronics as a civilian and his present endeavours in off duty educational pursuits serve to put him "head and shoulders" above the average technicians. He demonstrates a willingness to assist his fellow instructors, who looks to him for guidance on complex electronics problems. Airman Widlar is not satisfied with mediocrity in his efforts and constantly strives for perfection. He has an above average ability to use clear concise words to express himself.

Recommended Improvement Areas: Airman Widlar, in the past, has tended to dramatize his frustrations at inefficiencies that exist, to a point that he creates an impression of immaturity. He has improved greatly in this area, toning down his approach to problems, and has evidenced a willingness to accept that which he cannot control. No further recurrence of this comment are anticipated.

Facts and Specific Achievements: Airman Widlar was assigned to the Nuclear Weapons Branch 28 October 1958. On graduation from Instructor Training School he was assigned as an instructor in the electronic blocks of Course ABR33130A. The critique comments from the classes he taught were full of praise for the outstanding manner in which he presented the course material and expressed gratitude for the extra effort that he expended in assisting the weaker students. Due to his electronics background and outstanding knowledge, he was assigned duty as a course writer. He has produced clear, concise work which has required a minimum amount of editing. He has devoted a great deal of time in working out solutions for problem areas in the course and submitting suggestions on methods of presenting technical material. In this vein, he revised, in part, the method of teaching in the electronic phases by producing simplified schematics and developmental schematics with the text material. This has aided our new instructors a great deal in presenting this material. Some of the material he has provided required original effort. With a minimum of assistance, Airman Widlar produced training projects on the MC 627/628 and the T-187, although no adequate reference material other than schematics and test procedures were available. His efforts were commended by the Sandia Corporation Representative, Mr. Mark Elich, as being outstanding. Airman Widlar is now preparing an "In Service Training Course" for the Nuclear Weapons Branch, on transistors. Adequate technical material was not found on base. He, on his own volition, went to the Denver Public Library to accomplish the necessary research.

Airman Widlar has accomplished more in the way of self-improvement than any airman I have had the occasion to meet. Since entering the service he has acquired 26 semester hours of college credit. He is at present taking 16 semester hours during off duty time at Colorado University. In accomplishing this, he has never permitted his job performance to go below a superior level. Airman Widlar has also been instrumental in initiating and accomplishing the draft work on many visual training aids used in Course ABR33130. These have proven superior for use in this course to those which were commercially procured.

Suggested Assignments: Airman Widlar can be most effectively used by the Air Force in his present assignment. Should he desire, at the end of enlistment, to make the Air Force a career, I recommend that he be given further training by the Air Force and also that he be assigned to ARDC as a scientific aide.

Route 128, Data Converters and Hybrid Systems

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 20:09:00 +0000

Route 128 around Boston is home to many great analog stories. Before analog integrated circuits, companies in this area made board-level products. Stephen Ohr wrote a wonderful article back in Y2K. For years the region’s biggest electronic firms made minicomputers –Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), Data General, Prime Computer and Apollo, etc. As a reporter, Stephen called on data converter makers – Datel, Micro Networks, Analog Devices, Data Translation, Hybrid Systems and Teledyne Philbrick. Apart from the hybrid circuits produced for military customers, the analog signal-conditioning circuits, data converters and integrated data-acquisition systems were all board-level products, sometimes potted in epoxy, for industrial control manufacturers that would use a minicomputer as a host. As you know, hybrid circuits were bare-chip module circuits on ceramic substrates with thick-film interconnects, packaged in hermetically-sealed gold tubs.

One name that disappeared was Hybrid Systems, founded in 1965 by Sam Wilensky and Don Bruck (and others?). It had a strong lineage to MIT and possibly some influence from Philbrick. Brian Lowe gave me some insight into the early days:

Sam Wilensky was the catalyst for everything at Hybrid Systems, he was a great guy, tall and slim, confident and friendly. He had had aspirations to be an astronaut but said he was disqualified because he was too tall. He had a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT and I believe he knew Jim Williams there. He was one of the founders, with Don Bruck, of the company. He was always positive and upbeat.
Sam had an Apple II in 1983 and liked to run Flight Simulator on it during lunch. One day I asked him why he didn't go get a pilot's license and fly for real. He replied that, statistically, if he flew a small plane over a period of ten years, he had a 100% chance of being involved in a crash, so this was his way of flying safely. Sam has an entry in Jim Williams' first compendium Analog Circuit Design, Art, Science and Personalities.
As a mixed signal manufacturer, Hybrid Systems was a competitor to Analog Devices, Analogic, Burr Brown, Micro Networks and others, especially in the military market. Starting in 1965 they manufactured data conversion modules from discrete components, then moved to hybrid chip-and-wire, then ultimately ICs. Hybrid Systems was the "first second source" of the AD574 12 bit A/D converter you mention in one of your blog posts. The HS574 was done as a two chip hybrid, one bipolar chip with a voltage reference, comparator and op amps, one CMOS chip with SAR, MDAC switches, output buffer logic, and a thick or thin film network.
Sam had pioneered the decoded DAC structure where the first 3 or 4 MSBs were split into 7 or 15 equally weighted currents, with the remainder of the ladder being R-2R. This increased the circuit real estate but reduced the glitch energy of the MSB switch event by a factor of 8 or 16, which cut settling time. Also, it decreased the sensitivity of output change when trimming the resistor ladder, which made manufacturing easier (and thus increased yield). This and more are described in his chapter of Analog Circuit Design, Art, Science and Personalities.
The DAC + SAR chip was manufactured as a custom circuit by Micro Power Systems in their proprietary Moly gate CMOS process. The resistor network was manufactured by Hybrid Systems in an internal facility that made NiCr and TaN thin film resistors. The manufacturing floor had a room full of manual laser trim systems consisting of stereo microscopes with lasers attached, poised above X-Y tables, with test sockets attached to custom built relay switched test jigs attached to HP 9825 Desktop Calculator via HPIB.
The bipolar chip was designed by Jerry Collings, a consultant to MPS who had originally been a control systems specialist. He had moved out of Silicon Valley to, as I recall, San Luis Obispo, and commuted to and from the Valley on Monday morning and Thursday night. I believe the bipolar chip was also fabbed by MPS.
An interesting side bar passed along to me by Sam – in 1976 Hybrid Systems introduced, through its subsidiary Audio Pulse, the first digital audio delay product, the Audio Pulse One. Designed using bucket brigade device (BBD) chips as delay elements, it sampled audio with an A/D, passed the digital data through various BBD loops, reassembled the audio for presentation through stereo rear channel speakers. It simulated a concert hall experience at about the same time that quadrophonic audio systems were entering the market.
During R&D of the One, a "golden ear" audiophile and frequent magazine author and reviewer Peter Mitchell was hired as a professional listener to evaluate the sound. The recirculation of the various BBD paths was rerouted numerous times to find the best sounding reverberation, and Mr. Mitchell would evaluate and say whether it sounded better or worse than before. Blending of various samples of delayed signal was done in such a way that the delayed signals were statistically uncorrelated with each other, providing a more realistic blend of delay.
At one point, Mr. Mitchell stopped the audition and told them one of the channels was slew rate limited and could not accurately follow the audio. The engineers looked at each other skeptically. They were using µA741 op amps, which are rated at 0.5V/µsec. They did some evaluation measurements and determined that Peter was correct, replaced the op amps with something faster and, after an audition, Mr. Mitchell was happy and the engineers were amazed and no longer skeptical of his golden ears.
The product was, according to Sam, so successful that it caused a serious cash flow problem for Hybrid Systems due to inventory, tooling and manufacturing start-up costs. They ended up selling the business and it never was a huge market success. A few years ago I bought one on eBay but due to time and other constraints have yet to hook it up in my listening room.

I re-read Sam’s chapter in the 1991 Analog Circuit Design book, “Reflections of a Dinosaur”. He provides a nice discussion of DAC topologies leading up to the Hybrid Systems’ DAC371-8. There is much to love in this chapter. He said in the 1950s the top-of-the-line Chevrolet and a year at a private university cost about the same – $2000 – and implied that it was still true (in 1991). I think it’s still true today. He uses the classic line, “It will be left as an exercise for the student to show that…” He also substituted diodes for transistors because they were smaller and cheaper (this was for a discrete circuit on a PCB – through-hole, of course). Today, on silicon, we use transistors configured as diodes because it’s so easy and there’s no cost or size penalty of any significance. And he gives some timeless advice:

“You should keep up to date on recent developments and not be afraid to research how a particular function was implemented in the past. You can benefit from the accomplishments and the mistakes of others. Fight the NIH (Not Invented Here) attitude and improve on the work of others with your own original ideas.”

He also relayed a useful distinction between digital and analog engineers from Don Bruck, but let’s finish the story.

In the mid 1980s, Hybrid Systems made a transition into "monolithics" according to Jim Donegan, former Sipex Chairman and CEO. Because of IC integration, it was only a matter of time before every hybrid circuit became a monolithic device. "It was easier to move into ICs," he recalled. "You could live in the hybrid arena for three or four years – until it became a monolithic," Donegan said.

My friend Joe Sousa co-designed, their version of the AD574 with Jeff Van Auken (now at Vicor).

In 1986, Hybrid Systems merged with a Harris spinout, Data Linear, and changed its name to Sipex – meaning Signal Processing Excellence. “95% of its sales were to the Pentagon and all its products were hybrid circuits,” Donegan said. Two years later it acquired a BiCMOS supplier, Barvon, and inherited a position in the market for 1488/1489 RS-232 line drivers/receivers. “Sipex's business is now (in the year 2000) 95% in commercial markets, with a third of that in communications, another third in data communications, and the rest in consumer devices,” Donegan said in Ohr’s article.

In 2002, Sipex formally moved their headquarters from the Route 128 area to Silicon Valley. "With the previously announced exiting of the hybrid business, the Billerica test operation no longer made sense," said Walid Maghribi, the CEO who followed Donegan. Frank DiPietro, CFO and VP of finance at Sipex, said “the company's headquarters has effectively been in Milpitas for some time and today's announcement just makes it official.” In 2007, Sipex merged with Exar Corporation “with Sipex surviving the merger as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Exar” according to Exar’s website. I find that choice of words, “surviving the merger,” interesting. Whether it is good or bad, it is no longer a Route 128 story.

NOTES

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1224816 “The remaking of the 128 Circle”, Stephan Ohr, EETimes, 11/9/2000

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2002/10/sipex-to-pare-billerica-operations-move.html “Sipex to pare Billerica operations, move headquarters to Calif.”, Matthew French

Analog Circuit Design, Art, Science, and Personalities, 1991, edited by Jim Williams

Email from Brian Lowe (check out his current work at http://belleson.com/ )

COMMENTS

Please add comments below or send me an email if you have things to add to this story or corrections that need to be made. Thanks!

More on Maxim, Who is Sam Ochi?

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 19:51:00 +0000

After writing the back-story of Maxim, I wanted to figure out how Sam Ochi got involved. He stood out because he was the only Maxim founder who was not from Intersil. He was easy enough to find and more than happy to tell me his story.

Sam Seiichiro Ochi was born in Japan, shortly after WWII, when it was still occupied by the US. He recalls having an American G.I. wave him and his friends over and gave them some chewing gum and candy. The American also had a little camera with him and took a picture of them. A week or so later, the G.I. found them and gave them the snapshot he took. Sam and his friends and family had no feelings of animosity or ill will toward the American G.I.s. They viewed the American G.I.s as very warm and friendly.

When he was about seven years old, in the mid 1950’s his parents and four sisters got on the American President Lines passenger ship and sailed to Hawaii. His mother had grown up there, still had three of her sisters there, one of which offered her a job in her flower shop. His father, a high school teacher by training worked part time in a local Japanese language radio station as a radio announcer. They moved again to San Mateo, CA, where they finally settled. His father worked as a Japanese Gardener. Sam’s interest in electronics started when he was in the 4th grade. He started buying old, used radio sets and learned to repair them and then progressed to repairing TV sets. By the time he was in 6th grade, he made spending money repairing TV sets for his parent’s friends and neighbors. In 7th grade, he started taking formal electronics training from an old WWII electronics technician. He learned to read schematics, learned the various types of vacuum tubes, and the basics of the superhetrodyne radios.

He received his Ham Radio Novice license and then his Amateur Radio General license, call letters WA6UIV, two years later during his freshman year at Aragon High School in San Mateo. His skills in electronics had progressed to where he was able to earn all of his spending money working as a part time TV repair technician. In fact, his boss at the TV repair shop offered him a full time job as soon as he graduated from high school, but he turned his boss down because he wanted to become an engineer with a four year college degree.
Ochi attended UC Berkeley and completely supported himself as a TV repair technician. After classes he would go to work at a TV repair shop on Shattuck Ave as a “piece worker” on TV sets needing repair, charging $15/TV set.

While attending UC Berkeley, he got caught up in the Anti-Vietnam protests, and as a result, delayed his graduation date from June 1969 to December 1969. His first job was as an engineer for a small medical electronics manufacturer, Berkeley Bio Engineering. He started as a Junior Engineer, and left the company three years later as Chief Engineer for the company, reporting directly to the CEO. At the same time, he started his Master’s at UC Berkeley. His Master’s advisor was initially Dr. Dave Hodges, and then as his field of study changed, Dr. Paul R. Gray (of Gray & Meyer fame).

Having finished all of his course work for the Master’s program, but not his thesis, he started work at National Semiconductor as an Applications Engineer. He was working under Jim Sherwin in Jim Solomon’s Standard Linear Integrated Circuits (SLIC) group in June 1973. He transferred to one of Jim Solomon’s IC design teams. Under Adib Hamade, he started work as part of a team to design an 8-Bit A/D converter for automotive applications. In the meantime, he completed his Master’s thesis: “An Integrated Circuit Instrumentation Amplifier.” Adib Hamade left National to join PMI around 1976, and so Ochi was promoted to take over his position and worked directly for Jim Solomon. In 1977, he left National to join AMD and work for John Schoeff, who just arrived from PMI to form a design team. Remember, in the early days at AMD while Jack Gifford was still there, they were doing a lot of analog. John developed the first monolithic, untrimmed 12-Bit DAC. John wanted Ochi to work on AMD’s first family of ADCs. By 1979, he had designed a 1µs 8-Bit ADC in AMD’s bipolar Schottky technology, AM6108, and initiated then transferred a 4µs 12-Bit ADC to a design engineer then working for him, Gerald McGlinchey.

Ochi got a call from a head-hunter to join Teledyne Semiconductor (formerly Amelco). John Lemons, President of the division, had just been promoted and was in need of someone to re-start the division. They were working on a second source prototype of single chip DVM. Ochi spent the first month attempting to understand the work of the previous design group, to no avail. They hired a consultant to completely reverse engineer the chip, an ICL7106. They had evaluation boards of the ICL7106 and 400X black and white chip photographs of the entire chip. He and the consultant started from the pads and the data sheet descriptions of the various functions to create the schematic. They then verified the correctness of the schematics by running SPICE circuit simulations of the various blocks extracted. Simultaneously, Ochi had an IC layout designer create the layout designs of the blocks. In approximately three more months, they had completed the schematics, the layout, and verified each of the blocks in SPICE. They got functional silicon of their first version of the ICL7106, called TSC7106, in another three months. He says that customers preferred the TSC7106 because of its low drift internal reference and its lower flicker noise over the ICL7106. Ochi had three senior level design engineers, and a junior design engineer working for him. Between them, they developed over 12 second source products in CMOS from both GE-Intersil and Motorola, and four proprietary products for Teledyne Semiconductor over a span of four years.

Here are Ochi’s recollections of joining Maxim in 1983 as a founding member.

“My recollection of the founding of Maxim goes back to early 1980 – Jack and his team were still at old GE-Intersil. At the time, I was the newly promoted Director of R&D for Teledyne Semiconductor, then a division of Teledyne Corporation in Mountain View. Because of my promotion, I had an open position for my old job as Manager of R&D, and I wanted to staff it with the very best technical talent. I recall interviewing Derek Bowers, then at PMI (now ADI), and Bob Pease, then still at NSC (now a division of TI) for the position. I then came across in one of the trade journals an article about GE-Intersil’s, ICL7115, a 14-Bit successive approximation A/D converter. It was just introduced and designed by Ziya Boyacigillar. I knew a little about the key technical hurdles needed to be overcome in creating such a device. Somehow, I got Ziya to show up at Teledyne Semiconductor for an interview. Of the three engineers I interviewed, Ziya stood out by far, in spite of the fact that he, at the time, was the most junior of the three interviewees. I was blown away. I was impressed with Ziya’s maturity and technical expertise he had already gained and possessed. I offered him a job on the spot. Unfortunately, he turned me down. Prior to meeting Ziya, still then at GE-Intersil, my belief then was that the most capable and experienced analog design engineers were all at either PMI or National Semiconductor. I now knew that there were some exceptional engineers at GE-Intersil as well.”

I admit that when Sam wrote to me and mentioned Ziya Boyacigillar, I had no idea who that was. I assumed it was a dreadful typing mistake. Boyacigillar has Bachelor of Science degree from Bosphorus University, Istanbul, and a MSc in Engineering from UCLA. He worked at Intersil on the industry’s first CMOS laser-trimmed DACs and CMOS mixed-signal circuits. He designed the world’s first 14-Bit 25µs ADC, using EPROM calibration and digital error correction – when the state-of-art was a 10-Bit 100µs ADC. He left Intersil to start E/Z CAD and later went to Maxim (not surprisingly). Sorry, I love these tangents – now back to the Ochi story.

“About a year or so later, a head-hunter contacted me and informed me that Jack Gifford was planning a start-up and would I be interested in joining. I had known and read of Jack Gifford – from the trade press. One infamous trade press that comes to mind was Don Hoefler’s “Microelectronics Times” newsletter. At the time, I recall reading that Jack had some issues with GE-Intersil, and that he and his team of key executives had left a few months earlier. Also, prior to Teledyne, I had worked at AMD, a company Jack co-founded with Jerry Sanders. I recall meeting Jim Giles and Alan Seales, who both knew of Jack not only at AMD but at Fairchild. Because of Jack’s past successes in both AMD and then Intersil, I reasoned that whatever start-up he forms would be a slam-dunk success as well. This was my chance of a life-time and I would be a fool to miss it.”

“To get to know and introduce myself to Jack, he invited me to the ‘Wagon Wheel’ for dinner with him and his team. I don’t recall all of the people there but I believe Jack brought Dave Fullagar to the dinner. This was the very first time I personally interacted with both Jack and Dave. Shortly thereafter, Maxim was founded.”

Sam Ochi: front row, second from right (next to Jack Gifford)

With all the Intersil founders, why did they seek out Sam Ochi? I don’t know. But Sam proposed the idea that Gifford wanted to limit the competition for his new venture. Maxim’s original plan was to second-source a few products to generate quick revenue and then focus on proprietary products. Ochi had recently proven that he could copy the ICL7106 and make it better. Why not eliminate competition and simultaneously gain a known developer of products he wanted to create for Maxim in one fell swoop?

Today, Ochi’s resume includes:

Director of Standard Products at Asic Advantage Inc. (Purchased by Microsemi Corp. in 7/2011)
Director of IC R&D at IXYS Corporation
Member of Technical Staff at Analog Devices
Director of Research and Development at IXYS Corporation
Founder and Senior Member of Technical Staff at Maxim Integrated

Ochi was instrumental in the design of IXYS' isoplanar driver IC family and the then-new concept known as Digital Power Management. His products based on the technology were first introduced in the late 1980s.

“I believe I was born to be a circuit designer, even when I became a Ham operator when I was in junior high school, I really couldn’t afford to purchase any of my equipment. I put together my Ham Rig using old TV parts, wound my own coils, and learned by trial and error followed by some reading of circuit theory. Also, my debugging skills were honed while working as a TV repair technician, paid by piece part fixed. Finally, I truly believe that how one draws a schematic is extremely important. I learned from the old WWII veteran military technician that signals must flow left to right, except for feedback where it flows right to left, and is clearly marked and drawn as a feedback path. The most positive potential nodes are at the top of the schematic and the most negative at the bottom. I take pride in my schematics even today. I would draw and re-draw, and if I could, I would simplify or clarify as necessary.”

Does Anyone Read Databooks?

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 19:52:00 +0000

Several times in my career, I had to answer customer calls – still do. Well, I take that back, I've always answered customer calls. But at several times I was the primary technical support engineer. On “the front lines” as we called it, we got all kinds of questions: “how many pins on your SO-8 package?” “do you make linears?” “what frequency do your garage doors operate at?” We also got questions on parts that were no longer available, obsolete years ago. This was before the internet. This was when the communal computer had a 5 ¼ inch floppy, 512kB of RAM and a 10MB hard drive which was useless for real-time customer calls. So we looked information up in databooks.

For anyone under about 35 years old, you may have never seen one. You can find old ones on e-bay, now. They were paperback; about 7” x 9” and some were well over 2” thick. Semiconductor companies gave them away, of course, because that was the only way you knew what products they offered. Big companies like National, T.I. and Motorola had so many product lines that their collection of databooks took up several linear feet of shelf space. Engineers had bookshelves full of them; some companies had librarians to manage them. Unlike the internet, it took so long to publish them that they were always out of date – there were new parts. So there was a steady flow of replacement books and many put the date on the spine so that you could see if yours was current or not. Some companies printed “new releases” databooks with only the new parts that were released since the previous book.

Databooks were a place to take notes, a method of organization, a source of education on the state of the art of electronics, an anticipated experience not unlike Christmas morning as a child. Engineers took notes in the margins of the pages. They dog-eared pages of parts they used frequently. They would sketch circuit ideas and spill coffee on the pages. Databooks spent time in the lab, in the cafeteria and who knows where else. Engineers would read databooks like a textbook, learning application tricks, learning about brand new types of integrated circuits. Until parts got too complicated, the entire circuit schematic of the chip was usually included. People had time to study them and figure out how the chips worked. Instead of looking for a function that you needed, people would scan the entire book to see what was new. New chips with new application circuits would create new product ideas. I always looked forward to getting a new databook.

As a self-described micro-historian, I enjoy the hunt for arcane information. I had some much worn books with yellowed pages containing just that one piece of information that some frustrated engineer would need the week between Christmas and New Years. For whatever reason, newer editions of a databook edited out certain sections or often certain parts. Usually I would find the oldest copies on the shelf of some old-timer who would grudgingly let me have the book (they did everything grudgingly). The normal protocol was to write your last name on the top edge of the book to prevent its theft. I had a great collection of names that were not mine.

But sometime around 1992, beta copies of Mosaic started popping up on SPARC workstations and people found akebono.stanford.edu and – fast-forward a couple decades – now I can get any data sheet I want on my phone. As nostalgic as I may be and despite the effort spent on my databook collection, things are so much better today. I have one old databook on my shelf for old times’ sake. It is a 1985 Linear Technology databook. The name on top is “RITTER” – Ed Ritter was the second marketing engineer at LTC, I believe. But I never look at it. I don’t keep hard copies of any data sheet. It’s just so much faster to find things online.

I also have a FEB 1973 Linear Applications Handbook from National Semiconductor that I bought on e-bay. It has application notes AN-1 through AN-75 and linear briefs LB-1 through LB-20 – although a lot of them are missing and a lot of them have no author identified. I believe as engineers left the company that they were edited out. The list of authors includes many of the characters I’ve mentioned in other posts: Dobkin, Frederiksen, Vender Kooi, Widlar and even Yamatake. One is an old boss of mine and I never knew he wrote any app notes. And a few others will be mentioned in future posts, I’m sure.

I have a question for you. (Seriously, I want to know… send me an email or leave a comment.) What replaced databooks in your everyday life? Not the internet. No, not as a source of circuit specifications, but as a vehicle to deliver information you didn’t know you needed. How do you stumble across new circuit techniques? How do you learn what’s new? Or do you really “browse” with your “browser”? How do you organize your “feeds” and remember things that you may not need right at this moment? Was it fun to skim through a new databook and, if so, what replaced that as a source of fun? I assume that for legitimate projects that you have some sort of online repository, but what about future projects or toys for the home lab?

When I was a kid, my family had an encyclopedia set. As a young engineer, I had databooks. I read everything. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to read some emails.

Maxim - Before It All Started

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Fri, 16 May 2014 19:03:00 +0000

The story of Maxim Integrated Products, or Maxim Integrated, or just Maxim, is fascinating. They built Lucite monuments in tribute to Jean Hoerni and Bob Widlar in front of their headquarters in Sunnyvale. Neither Hoerni nor Widlar were employed at Maxim but they are very tightly connected to the story. In one sense, without Hoerni's planar process, modern integrated circuits would have taken a different path or at least been delayed in time. And without Widlar's sheer genius, analog circuits would also have taken a different path or at least been delayed in time. But Hoerni left Fairchild to eventually found Intersil and it is from Intersil that Maxim directly spun-off. And Widlar's first product manager was Jack Gifford (hand-picked by Widlar, according to Gifford), who founded Maxim and was its CEO until his retirement in 2007. But there is so much more to the story. So let’s go back to before it all started.

Hoerni

Jean Hoerni was born in Geneva, and earned a B.S. and his first Ph.D. in physics from the University of Geneva. After earning his second Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1952, he became a research fellow with Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology. William Shockley recruited him to join Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories and assigned him to do theoretical calculations of diffusion rates. As one of the “traitorous eight”, he left Shockley Labs and co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor where he devised the "planar process" which made integrated circuits possible. In 1961 he left Fairchild to become vice president of Amelco (the semiconductor division of Teledyne, then TelCom Semiconductor and ultimately Microchip – a story for another day). Hoerni was a consultant for Union Carbide, Hughes Aircraft and Fujitsu before he founded Intersil in 1967.

Widlar

Bob Widlar grew up in Cleveland and enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In February 1958 Widlar joined the United States Air Force. He instructed servicemen in electronic equipment and semiconductor devices and wrote the textbook for the course (concurrently). In 1961 he joined the Ball Brothers Research Corporation in Boulder to develop analog and digital equipment for NASA. He simultaneously continued studies at the University of Colorado and graduated in 1963.

His work at Ball Brothers brought Widlar in contact with Jean Hoerni and Sheldon Roberts at Fairchild Semiconductor, regarding radiation hardened transistors. In 1963, Jerry Sanders, at the time a Fairchild salesman but later CEO of AMD, recruited him to join Fairchild. The interview with Fairchild research and development (R&D) manager Heinz Ruegg didn’t go well; Widlar told him what he thought about Fairchild's analog circuits: "what they are doing is bullshit". Fortunately, the Applications Engineering division head, John Hulme, hired Widlar despite objections from the first round interviewers. Widlar's first assignment at Fairchild targeted IC reliability which connected him with process engineer David Talbert.

Fairchild engineers before Widlar designed analog ICs like conventional circuits built with discrete transistors, capacitors and resistors. This was impractical using Hoerni's planar process due to component values and matching requirements so they used thin film hybrids which dramatically limited their reliability and manufacturability. Working in secrecy with Talbert, Widlar soon grasped the benefits and drawbacks of the planar process: it permitted matched performance of all components at all temperatures, but these components possessed parasitic capacitance not present in discrete parts, and the process ruled out the use of large-value resistors and capacitors. Armed with this insight and Hung-Chang Lin's theory of compensated devices (look for references to H.C. Lin in Widlar's early application notes), he designed the μA702 – the industry's first true linear integrated circuit and first monolithic operational amplifier. Widlar did not consider the μA702 prototype good enough for production, but Fairchild decided otherwise and rushed the chip into production in October 1964. Widlar agreed only if he could select the product manager – enter Jack Gifford.

Gifford

Born in 1941, Gifford grew up in Torrance, CA. He was passionate about baseball and played competitively throughout his school years, including UCLA (the University of California, Los Angeles) where he graduated with a BSEE in 1963. Gifford started his career at Electronic Specialties as a design engineer. At the age of 24, Fairchild Semiconductor recruited him, but insisted on starting him out as a salesman calling on Hughes Aircraft.

Gifford recalled, “I was a salesman, a year out of college in L.A. and I was one of the few guys, myself and I think Vic Grinich, in the company that had any real understanding of gain and phase relationships and how amplifiers worked and things like that. We had a design background and Bob (Widlar) recognized that through dealing with me as a salesman. Then as he and Dave Talbert developed the 709 (probably µA702), they bootlegged samples out to myself and Floyd Kvamme and asked us to see if customers were interested in it as it was a very complicated circuit. In fact no one, maybe with the exception of Dave Fullagar and Bob Widlar, knew exactly what the real circuit looked like. People had the schematic explained to them by myself, Widlar, Mike Markkula and others. That circuit was not the actual circuit; there was another circuit that no one ever saw. We became stars explaining the circuit that was on the diagram. As we sold this idea and explained this circuit, there became a huge interest in the product.”

“So Tom Bay and Bob Noyce went to Bob Widlar, who had defined and designed this circuit all on his own without any sponsorship, and Bob (Noyce) said, ‘you’re gonna be happy to hear that we’re gonna make a product line out of your products’. Bob (Widlar) just looked at 'em both, and remember this is a junior engineer, I mean he’s got a BS degree like I did, he was an applications engineer, shouldn't have known anything about device physics, he taught himself all of that and he says ‘The hell you are.’ He’s talking to Tom Bay and Bob Noyce, two of the most sophisticated, impressive people that I've ever met and he’s telling 'em ‘get screwed, you’re not gonna do this.’ The next day they asked ‘Why not?’ And he said ‘Well first of all you guys don’t know what you’re talking about, you don’t know what the circuit is, you don’t know how it works, and furthermore no one in the company knows how it works and is used. I’m not gonna let you ruin my reputation.’”

“He says ‘Well I want some people competent communicating and dealing with my products.’ They said ‘Okay well we’ll put our best product managers in front of you and you can pick one.’ They ran a bunch of guys through him and he didn't like any of 'em and they finally said ‘Who is it that you would like?’ ‘Well there’s this kid down in LA, Gifford.’ They didn't even know who I was and so I get a call the next day from Bob Graham who was Director of Product Marketing and he says ‘Jack come up and talk about being a product manager for the linear circuit business, we’re looking for candidates.’ I come up and within ten minutes I’m hired, you know, the interview lasted 7 minutes and I go home and I tell my wife I just got promoted, I don’t know why, I have no idea, from being a salesman to running this product line.”“Within a period of a couple of years we owned 80% of the market. The design talent at Fairchild was unbelievable with Bob Widlar, Dave Fullagar, Jim Giles, Darryl Lieux, and Dave Talbert as a process developer.”

“I could tell you the 709 story too about shutting half the world down. If it wasn't for Fullagar's 741, we probably wouldn't have survived as an analog company.”

Widlar and Talbert went to Molectro Science Corporation that was acquired shortly thereafter by Charlie Sporck and National Semiconductor. Gifford took over running the whole analog research and development department. But who would he rely on after Widlar left? – enter Dave Fullagar.

Fullagar

Dave Fullagar described how he started his career.

“Until I was 12 years old, we lived on the moors in the north of England in a house with no electricity, so a crystal set was my only option. In 1954, I read an article entitled How to build a radio in a flashlight. It used something called a transistor – a Mullard OC71. I went down to the local radio store to buy one. ‘Never ’eard of a transistor, boy. Don’t know naught about that,’ said the proprietor in a broad Yorkshire accent.”

“My first job was with Ferranti (a leading UK defense contractor) in Edinburgh, Scotland. I worked on a terrain-following radar for a bomber that was supposed to fly to the Soviet Union at treetop height. They used to fly the engineers over the highlands of Scotland – at 300 feet – to validate the radar’s terrain-following ability. It was a good incentive to get the design right. Ferranti's offer was the best paying – at about $2200 a year; no, I didn't omit a zero – of the four or five jobs offered.”“In the 1960s, there were two principal routes to the United States for Brits. One was via Canada; the other, through Transitron in Massachusetts. My colleague and fellow Cambridge graduate Wadie Khadder had joined Transitron a year earlier, so the transition was an easy one. It soon became apparent that Transitron was in decline. So both Wadie and I moved to Fairchild in early 1966.”

“My assigned task when I joined Fairchild R&D in 1966 was to design the successor to the μA709. The target specification I was given by marketing was of the ‘let’s-improve-all-the-key-specs-by-50%’ variety. However the biggest problems with the 709 were its idiosyncrasies, not its specifications: It was tricky to stabilize, there was no short-circuit protection, and it would latch-up and self-destruct in nanoseconds. National’s LM101, which Widlar designed, addressed many of the user-friendliness issues but still required external compensation and had a kludgy front-end bias scheme. Widlar must have come to the same conclusion, because he later redesigned it as the LM101A with a much-improved front end.”“I proposed the internally compensated μA741 in mid 1967 to Garth Wilson and Marv Rudin, who ran the Linear R&D Group (and later founders of Precision Monolithics Inc.). Next thing I knew, I was sitting in Gordon Moore’s office. He asked me if I’d mind moving to Mountain View because that would expedite the introduction of the part, which occurred in May 1968.”

“It was exciting, it was just a creative period when Fairchild was absolutely king of the heap and thanks to Jean Hoerni's planar process, it had the best processing in the industry, the highest performance transistors, a very successful logic family. In early 1966 a processing R&D group under Andy Grove was writing the book, it turned out literally, on semiconductor processing and the emerging MOS technology. A prolific consumer group and absolutely number one in linear circuits, in fact honestly there was nobody else in the business at that time. (Widlar) and Talbert formed this incredible duo and with almost no official sponsorship from Fairchild created a linear family, the 702, 709, 710 and 711. Those products went on to form the basis for the Fairchild linear products and I think all of us in the design community pay homage to that effort because it was so incredible.”

“By 1968 there were a host of second generation products under development, Dick Lane’s 722 D to A, Colin Barry’s 715 high speed amplifier, Darryl Lieux’s 723 voltage regulator, Bill O’Neil’s 733 wide band amplifier, George Erdi’s 725 we’ve already mentioned my 741 and a host of other products. Fairchild seemed to rule the world with National really being the only competition in sight.”

“Then something happened and it all seemed to unravel. Between the fall of ’68 and the spring of ’69 Jack together with Jim Giles, Larry Stenger and Frank Botte went off to form AMD. Marv Rudin, Garth Wilson, George Erdi went off to start PMI. I joined Jean Hoerni, Don Rogers, and Murray Siegel at Intersil shortly thereafter joined by Bill O’Neil. Dave Bingham went to Cermatek, Colin Barry went to Signetics, Len Brown went to Motorola, and Mike Markkula joined Intel (the latter two from the marketing group).”

“Speaking for myself, I don’t think it’s because I thought that I was going to get rich by going to Intersil. Frankly I didn't even know what an IPO was, you know, I didn't know what a stock option was in any real sense of the word and it wasn't because I had in any inkling that Fairchild was about to implode. It seemed like I was leaving at the crest of the wave frankly. Neither is it really fair to blame it all on the cultural change brought on by the arrival of the guys from Motorola, although it did seem like a management style change which maybe took some of the fun out of Fairchild as I perceived it. But I think the overriding factor for me anyway was that I was looking maybe for more of a challenge, I wanted to start my own group, have more say in the way the company ran and Intersil at that time offered that opportunity. My office was two doors down from Jean Hoerni's, company strategies were discussed around the coffee table and by comparison, Fairchild seemed kind of ponderous.”

So let’s get back to Gifford for a moment. He had the inspiration that a pure analog company could do really well. But his first attempt was forced in a different direction. He sought funding for a startup company, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, perhaps you've heard of it?), but was repeatedly turned down because the financial backers wanted someone with a little more experience. Enter Jerry Sanders. Together they finally obtained funding in 1969. Sander’s version goes like this: “First a young man named Jack Gifford, who I'd worked with, you know, at Fairchild, who had an idea to start a company to make linear integrated circuits? And that was interesting to me, but frankly linear integrated circuits in my view were a niche opportunity and although the analogue world will always be with us, because that's what the real world is, I just didn't see that as an exciting thing whereas I was more interested in the digital world where you could build more and more complex things.” Sanders was CEO and Gifford was chief financial officer. Sanders was not popular with the engineers and Gifford had to tell Sanders to change his tyrannical ways. Sanders threatened that any staff members supporting Gifford would be let go. Gifford was asked to leave in 1971. Gifford says only that he had a "falling out" with Sanders. Don Valentine speculated that the company simply wasn't big enough for two such strong personalities. "The diameter of a spotlight only fits so many people," says Valentine. "And Jerry was an individual who always liked to be in the spotlight."

Meanwhile, Fullagar had gone to Intersil as the first analog designer working for Jean Hoerni. “I think Intersil lured me, but it wasn't financial. I didn’t really know what a stock option was and couldn’t have distinguished between an IPO and a UFO. Intersil offered a chance to create my own analog-design group with a clean slate and to work with Dr. Hoerni, one of the true giants of the semiconductor industry.” He added, “Intersil was primarily a discrete transistor and FET company prior to my joining. FETs were Jean Hoerni's first love. I was the first analog IC designer and about employee #50. I worked initially for John Hall, who later founded Micropower Systems (and Linear Integrated Systems). I brought Bill O’Neil into the group; he had designed the µA733 at Fairchild.”

Fullagar knew Gifford from Fairchild. “I met Jack shortly after joining Fairchild in early 1966. He was in charge of Linear Marketing and had recruited a team of young engineers including Mike Markkula, Mike Scott (both of whom became Apple CEO at different times), Len Brown, Jerry Zis, and others. We were all in our mid twenties at the time and used to socialize together at the Wagon Wheel and other places after work. At that time I did not see any of the hard-driving potential CEO material in Jack; we were just a bunch of kids having a good time.”

For a while, Gifford turned to farming, building a small fruit orchard near Sacramento into a successful 2,000-acre tomato producer. Fullagar was unsatisfied, “When I went to Intersil, it was frustrating to be designing products that I felt weren’t selling because of inept marketing.” In 1971, Jean Hoerni, head of Intersil, recruited Gifford to help them enter the analog data-acquisition business. In exchange, he would help Gifford raise money to start his own business. For several years he worked there part time, while continuing his farming and other business interests. Eventually it became full-time. After a succession of somewhat inept CEOs, Orie Hoch (ex-Litton CEO) was brought in by the Intersil board and did a great job of straightening out the company then sold it to GE. Once the sale was completed, Hoch made Gifford CEO and returned to Litton.

Gifford agreed but only if he was given stock options and if Intersil could be an independent GE subsidiary. Jack Welch agreed and bragged about his latest acquisition. Contrary to stories at the time, Gifford and Welch were kindred spirits and got along well together. However Intersil was put in the light bulb division of GE under a sector VP called Jim Baker. He and Gifford did not get along. There was a big showdown between the two of them over employee compensation (Baker didn't think stock options were necessary since his people in Schenectady didn't have them).

According to Gifford, this is what happened:

“Well, finally after about six months of this, he starts to hear from his other general managers. Hey, this isn't fair. I mean, I've worked for GE all my life. I don't have stock. What's going on, I mean, how could he do this? And he had a mutiny on his hands. And so Jack (Welch) started talking to me, you know, and every once in a while he'd say, you know, ‘God, you know, boy the stock options are causing me a problem, you know.’ Then it got, ‘Do you really need those? Can't we do something else?’ ‘Jack, that was the deal,’ I says, and ‘I don't need them. I mean, but Intersil needs them. I can't, by the way, that was your idea.’ He says, ‘I know. I know.’ So anyway, then we're back at one of these parties again; about a year later. I'm standing around talking to ten or fifteen of these guys and Jack comes across the room and he's got ten or fifteen guys following him. I get there late. So he's already had a couple of drinks, and he comes swaggering into my group and, you know, how the hell are you. We start talking. No sooner does the greetings stop and he says, ‘God damn it. Why the fuck do you guys have to have those stock options? They’re, you know, jeez.’ And he goes on and on and on in front of fifteen guys. And all of a sudden he's now, you know, coming like it's my fault, like I'm the problem, right? And he's, say he's had a couple of drinks. And finally he starts, ‘Well, what do you think?’ And I said, and I was going to react and I says, I was so mad and I just said, ‘Fuck you.’ And I just turned around and walked out. And man, I heard that rippled throughout the company. I mean, you told that to Jack? Yeah, but, you know, yeah, I did. So about a week and a half later I get a call from him to come back to Fairfield, and he says, ‘Well, I gotta talk to you.’ What are you gonna do? He says, ‘Well, I gotta fire you.’ So he fired me.”

“Yeah, and what happened is that's what caused Maxim. So when he changed it (the stock options), those guys came to me and said, you know, Jack, you gotta do something, you know. Our careers, he's destroyed our careers, you know. And I was forced to do Maxim. I was, I mean, I caused the problem, so...”

The idea Jack had about Maxim was to build the best analog company in the world that was owned by employees. He felt that analog had always been secondary; generating profit to fund digital. He felt he was the best in the world. But he says “I was not motivated to do it. Frankly, what motivated me was this responsibility to these other guys.”

Photo of the original Maxim founders, taken at Gifford's house the day most of them quit Intersil after funding was secured. From left to right: Bev Fuller, Rich Hood, Dave Fullagar, Fred Beck, Roger Fuller, Sam Ochi, Dave Bingham, Lee Evans, Jack Gifford, Steve Combs.

According to Pirooz Parvarandeh, “The first person to come out of the company was Jack, followed by Fred (Beck) and Dave (Fullagar) and a few other people. Their concept was to start a business around what they were doing at Intersil — analog semiconductors. So their first priority was really to secure some venture capital. To do this, they created a business plan. The business plan, a three-page business plan, is actually framed and posted at our headquarters.”

“The story goes that Jack, Fred, and Dave worked on this plan on a napkin. There was a debate as to whether a three-page business plan was long enough. Or should it be 20 pages or 50 pages? They were debating whether they needed to be much more sophisticated about the business plan. As it turns out, Jack convinced his colleagues that three pages was enough. It is a very high-level view of what they wanted to do.”

“Obviously, it didn't have a lot of detail. It had some calculations of what the market size would be and what the opportunity would be. It needs to be said that Jack was a very dynamic and energetic individual. They were able to raise $10 million from a number of venture capital firms.”

Wikipedia says the business plan was two pages and the capital was $9 million. The founding team included Gifford; Fred Beck, an IC sales and distribution pioneer; Dave Bingham, General Electric’s Scientist of the Year in 1982; Steve Combs, a pioneer in wafer technologies and manufacturing; Lee Evans, also a pioneer in CMOS analog microchip design and General Electric’s Scientist of the Year in 1982; Dave Fullagar, inventor of the first internally compensated operational amplifier circuit; Roger Fuller, yet another pioneer in CMOS microchip design; Rich Hood, development director for some of the first microprocessor-controlled semiconductor test systems; and Dick Wilenken, who is acknowledged as the father of key analog switch and multiplexer technologies. In the first year, the company developed 24 second source products before turning to predominantly proprietary products.

Fullagar mentioned another founder, Sam Ochi. “We hired Sam from Teledyne so no one could accuse us of being an entirely Intersil spinoff, but that didn't prevent GE from suing us.”

Dave Fullagar said, “In the early days, five or six of us (including Jack) would meet every Tuesday morning for a product planning meeting at the Peppermill restaurant on De Anza Blvd. Sometimes Jack would forget that we were in a public place and the four letter words would start flying: the restaurant manager moved us into the far back corner! Most of the ideas came from designers (especially Dave Bingham) and Charlie Allen (applications). All the early successes (RS-232 circuits, microprocessor supervisors, etc) evolved from these meetings. Eventually we outgrew this modus operandi and the process became more formalized (but not as much fun!).”

“The really novel products come about in one of two ways. One is when an engineer figures out a totally radical approach to meet a functional need. For example, Widlar's bandgap reference was sheer genius. We all knew that VBE had a negative temperature coefficient and delta VBE had a positive temperature coefficient, but Widlar figured out how to put the two together to produce a temperature-stable reference.”

“The other way is when a good applications engineer works hand in hand with a talented designer. Maxim’s RS-232 products came about in this manner. Charlie Allen, the best applications engineer I have ever encountered, recognized that lots of digital equipment had ±12V supplies whose sole purpose was to power RS-232 drivers. RS-232 drivers didn't fit into any of Maxim’s analog-product lines, but he persisted. He corralled Dave Bingham, one of Maxim’s most creative design engineers, into taking a look at it. Bingham felt sure he could put charge pumps on the same IC as the RS-232 drivers — no mean feat — thereby eliminating the need for the ±12V supply. Thus was born one of the company’s most successful product lines.”

Parvarandeh recalled, “When they started the company, there were some well-known names in the industry. Analog Devices, for one, has a much longer history than us. They were in the market well ahead of us, as well as Texas Instruments and other players. One of the first priorities of the new company was to make sure that they generated some revenue. Also, there was a spirit of inventiveness in the company. You know, you try to come up with innovations that are really world class. It was clearly part of the DNA of the company to try to distinguish itself.

Fullagar echoed the same idea, “The original business plan called for the speedy introduction of 14 second-source parts to generate quick cash flow, followed by proprietary parts. Generating positive cash flow in a start-up is key: If you have to go back to the venture capitalists for an unscheduled round of financing, you get taken to the cleaners.”

Again from Parvarandeh: “To the extent that we could come up with enhancements that we could make, we would make them. In fact, I remember — I joined the company in 1987 — that one of the things I was striving for was, ‘Okay, if I’m doing a second source of a product, is there something else that I could do that would benefit our customers?’”

“So, the first order of business was, ‘Let’s try to make sure that we capture some existing sockets, but also let’s see if we can provide additional benefits.’ That was the strategy and, of course, for a startup company to try to create or to leverage existing business was the right strategy. But as I said, the company had in its DNA this notion that we don’t want to be just a second source company. We want to be a company that creates valuable product differentiation.”

Maxim has always been an aggressive company. Most of their growth was organic, but some resulted from acquisitions. Key acquisitions include (or at least the ones that I think are key):

1994: Tektronix Semiconductor Division, for its high-speed bipolar processes, wireless RF and fiber-optic products
2001: Dallas Semiconductor
2007: Vitesse Semiconductor’s Storage Products Division
2010: Teridian Semiconductor Corporation, supplying systems on a chip (SoC) for the smart meter market
2010: Phyworks, a supplier of optical transceiver chips for broadband communications
2011: SensorDynamics, for proprietary sensor and microelectromechanical (MEMS) solutions
2012: Genasic Design Systems Ltd., a fabless RF chip company that makes chips for LTE applications
2013: Volterra Semiconductor

I enjoyed creating this particular post. I’m thankful for the interview transcripts that helped my research. And I am very thankful to Dave Fullagar for contributing to this and clearing up some things. In college, I was taught about operational amplifiers using the 741. It’s surreal to be able to simply contact him and ask a few questions. Fullagar is famous for the 741, of course, but that was only one of many things he accomplished in his career. In another article, Fullagar reflected on his career, “I thrive in a small-company atmosphere, so I would have to say the early days at both Intersil and Maxim were the most enjoyable. The lab work was always especially rewarding. Checking out a new breadboard with a cup of coffee warming on top of a big Tektronix 545 oscilloscope — that was real engineering! Sitting in front of a screen running simulations just isn’t the same. I feel proudest of the design team I recruited. They were — and still are — some of the finest people in the industry, having designed an incredible number of innovative products, as well as serving in senior-management positions, including current President and Chief Executive Officer Tunc Doluca and several of the vice presidents.”

In closing, I’d like to leave you with this opening from Maxim application note, AN1795:

It's a jungle out there.

A small tribe, in the dense wilderness, is much sought after by head hunters from the surrounding plains. Known throughout the land for their esoteric expertise, this is the tribe of the Analog Engineers, who live in the farthest regions of the left half Plains, past the jungles of Laplace.

The guru of analog engineers is the Analog Filter Designer, who sits on the throne of his kingdom and imparts wisdom. You never get to see him, even with an appointment, and you call him "Sir."

The countless pages of equations found in most books on filter design can frighten small dogs, and digital designers. This article clears a path through the brush for the practical engineer and unravels the mystery of filter design, enabling you to design continuous-time analog filters quickly and with a minimum of mathematics.

Analog electronics has two distinct sides: the theory taught by academic institutions (equations of stability, phase-shift calculations, etc.), and the practical side familiar to most engineers (avoid oscillation by tweaking the gain with a capacitor, etc.).

Yes, filter design may be closer to mystery than mathematics, but that whole passage applies well to most disciplines of analog design.

NOTES

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Jean_Hoerni

Wikipedia

Fairchild Oral History – Fullagar, Gifford, Wilson

http://www.edn.com/electronics-news/4326905/Voices-Dave-Fullagar-analog-IC-designer-and-entrepreneur

“Jack Gifford: Baseball’s Loss Was The World’s Gain”, Doris Kilbane, Electronic Design, Dec. 7, 2009

Silicon Genesis – interview with Jack Gifford

Interview: Maxim Integrated CTO Pirooz Parvarandeh Discusses Analog/Digital Integration, Joe Desposito, Electronic Design Aug 12, 2013 http://electronicdesign.com/analog/interview-maxim-integrated-cto-pirooz-parvarandeh-discusses-analogdigital-integration

Motorola: How did it get here, where did it go?

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 19:42:00 +0000

Last week I saw a blog post from Rick Merritt of EETimes, “Motorola People, Products Remembered.” For many of us, Motorola was a company that made all sorts of electronic widgets. The “batwing” logo was ubiquitous and trusted. Aside from the things normal people knew of – like phones and old radios – those of us in the semiconductor world always had a bunch of Motorola IC data books on the shelf. That is, those of us who are also of the data book era. First to mind, for me, was ECL and then MC1488 and MC1489 (RS-232). I’m aware of a strong presence in consumer analog, but I have no first-hand experience there.

The triggers for Merritt’s post were the events of the recent past that could be categorized as “Motorola – Where Has It Gone?” But I choose to look at “Where did it come from?”

Trusty Wikipedia says that Motorola started in Chicago as Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928. Paul Galvin introduced a radio for automobiles, a radio designed by Bill Lear and Howard Gates of Zenith. This was just at the beginning of the Depression. The product was called "Motorola" which was a blend of "motor" and the then popular suffix -ola used with audio equipment of the time (for example "Victrola"). The product was such a success that Galvin changed the name of the company to Motorola.

I remember a story about Henry Ford: he had a mining operation in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where he dug iron ore, shipped it down to the River Rouge plant in Detroit where they processed it into steel and put it right on the assembly line. So Henry owned the process from the ground to the finished vehicle. That was common in mid-century American business. Motorola didn’t dig up the sand, but they made semiconductors for their radios and televisions; made terrestrial base stations to support their radios; and eventually put satellites into orbit, too.

I will get back to Motorola Semiconductors in a bit; but first, an interesting story that Lester Hogan told about FM radio. Dan Noble was a professor at the University of Connecticut and was a very unusual guy. In the early 1930s, he read a paper from RCA Laboratories that basically said that Armstrong was wrong and that there was nothing you could do with FM that you couldn’t do better with AM. And they made a mistake; there were two major mathematical errors. As Hogan said, “Now you'd think with five people writing the damn thing, that one of them would've read it before they published it, you know! And it turned everybody off, except Dan Noble. Dan Noble thought ‘My gut tells me those guys are wrong.’ So he got the paper and read it carefully and found the errors and didn't tell anybody.”

“And he started building FM transmitters and receivers while he was a professor at the University of Connecticut. And the kids were listening to music on FM. That went over so powerfully, that the police people at Connecticut came to him and said: ‘Is it possible with FM that you can build a box that we can put in the back seat of our cars and that we can talk to any of our police cars, no matter where they are in the state of Connecticut?’ He said: ‘Yes, I can do that, but I can do something better. It can be two-way. They can talk back to you.’ And they were the first police department in any state that had two-way radio. And that became a staple of Motorola.”

In 1955, at its research and development laboratory in Phoenix, Arizona, Motorola introduced the world's first commercial high-power germanium-based transistor. This facility grew to become the semiconductor division of Motorola under Dan Noble. Dan eventually hired Les Hogan to run the semiconductor operation. The avid reader already knows that Hogan would eventually go to Fairchild and help it implode after Robert Noyce left. But the avid reader might enjoy a bit of background on Hogan.

Clarence Lester Hogan got his bachelor's degree at Montana State University in chemical engineering in 1942. He considered MIT but his father couldn't afford it. He said his father “couldn't afford to even pay my way to get over to MIT.” After graduation, he decided to join the US Navy rather than go out into industry. He “had four months of training to learn how to be an officer and then they sent me down to Chesapeake Bay where the Bell Telephone Laboratory was doing the job of building the acoustic torpedo.” He made a very good impression on the Bell Labs folks. He went on to Lehigh University after the Navy and got a Ph.D. in Physics. With his contacts, he was able to get a job at Bell Labs and started in early 1950.

“The fellow I reported to said, ‘Look, you're young, I think you ought to spend the first two weeks just wandering around the laboratory and getting acquainted with everybody. Find out what we're doing.’” So he met a mathematician who was playing around with Maxwell's theories and came up with an idea for a device that should theoretically be feasible, but no one had yet invented. So Hogan invented the microwave gyrator, isolator and circulator. "Hell, I can build that damn thing that that guy said should exist... I can put ferrite devices in a microwave system and the crazy thing will be non-reciprocal. It was stunning and people were just absolutely stunned by the existence of the thing. But, I was lucky I guess...”

Hogan worked right around the corner from Bill Shockley. Apparently, they only had minimal interaction. Hogan then left to be a professor at Harvard University. “I had job offers once a month for all of my period at Harvard, turned every one of them down except Dan Noble ...he was an executive vice-president of Motorola and he wouldn't take "no" for an answer. That was 1958. For the next decade he helped move Motorola from a predominantly captive semiconductor manufacturer to #2 behind Texas Instruments.

Then Hogan was contacted directly from Bob Noyce. Noyce and Moore were getting ready to leave Fairchild and start Intel and Noyce went out to look for a successor. When word got out that Hogan was leaving for Fairchild, many of his Motorola colleagues wanted to come with him. The group that came along was nicknamed “Hogan’s Heroes.” One of the heroes was Wilf Corrigan – eventual president of Fairchild and later founder of LSI Logic. Noyce and crew were replaced by a group of young men with terrific suntans moving into the executive office cubicles. The Fairchild people would always remember what terrific suntans they had. There was plenty of sunshine in the Santa Clara Valley, but apparently nobody there had suntans like this bunch from Phoenix. Fairchild had offered Hogan an absolute fortune in money and stock. Hogan received so much, the crowd at the Wagon Wheel started using monetary units called “Hogans” for executive compensation – oh, he’s only worth half a Hogan or a quarter-Hogan, etc. I think I’m worth a micro-Hogan.

Wilf Corrigan was another character. His father worked on the docks in Liverpool England. He was born in wartime, so his early childhood memories were of the bombings. He went to the Imperial College of Science, coincidentally to take chemistry, but then changed to chemical engineering. Upon graduation in 1960, he had three job opportunities: a gunpowder factory in Australia, another offer in Germany and the third one was a company called Transitron in Boston – the job in Boston paid twice as much as the other two. “I was told that I was now the production engineer for the 2N338 transistor line. And so being logical I said do we have a library here. So I went downstairs, found the library, checked out Transistors 1 and I got the book and I was on about page three of the book when a big guy came bursting into the room and he said, ‘Are you the goddamn new production engineer?’ And I said, yeah, I was twenty-two years old at this time, and he said ‘Well I've got two hundred women outside here on the line sitting on their asses with their hands folded, this line’s shut down and you're sitting here reading a book? Get your ass out on the line and go get that line started again.’ So that was my introduction to the semiconductor business.”

“An ad came in the newspaper from Motorola in Phoenix and they were going to be in town interviewing and they wanted people that knew something about epitaxy. And I said well gee I know something about that. So, to me, you know, I just arrived, you know, a few months, now suddenly I'm going from fifty-five hundred dollars a year to eighty-five hundred dollars a year, which was a big jump. And so I said okay, I'll do it. Now meanwhile my wife-to-be was back in Norway waiting to get her visa. Motorola would not pay in those days for girlfriends to travel. So I said, hey you've got to be there by this day and so one way or another I persuaded her to come by this date, which was right at the end of December. And so we got married one day and then we flew to Phoenix Arizona the next day.”
“So, it was a very exciting time and then through that, because we had the epitaxy process, we were then able to make transistors that were literally a quarter of the size of the competitor transistors. So then in, I guess in '62, I was suddenly given the job of why don't you run the whole transistor line? And part of the reason for that was because Charlie Sporck offered me a job to come work for him at Fairchild, this was in '62. And so I was going to go take this job and they (Motorola) said well, don't do that, why don't you come and run the transistor line because up till then I was the epitaxy guy...” Corrigan had only been out of college two years. In 1968 he left to join Fairchild with Hogan – after Noyce had left for Intel and Sporck had left for National.

But this is a story about Motorola, not Fairchild or National.

I included these two stories about men from Motorola because the Fairchild legend is that the stodgy old-school managers from Motorola came in after Noyce left and there was a total clash of cultures. I believe this was true. But I also get the impression that Hogan and Corrigan were not exactly stodgy in today’s terms. They were stodgy compared to the chaos at Fairchild at the time, but dynamic and aggressive nonetheless.

Regardless of who was running Motorola Semiconductor, they were always a force to be reckoned with. My own first-hand knowledge is limited to a slew of interface parts like MC1488 and MC1489, commodities by the time I entered the industry. Motorola was strong in logic families and also strong in consumer analog.

Although Phoenix is far away, Motorola contributed some important names to Silicon Valley. Tom Fredericksen of “Intuitive IC Op Amps” fame left Motorola for National in the early 1970s. He was followed by Jim Soloman, who became the leader of National’s standard linear group (SLIC) and later founded Cadence Design Systems. Bill Jett was an important op amp designer and Milt Wilcox was an important regulator designer; both left Motorola for National in the 1970s. They were all pretty low-profile characters; they just cranked out good parts. Bill Jett joined George Erdi at Linear Technology a decade later. Milt Wilcox joined Carl Nelson at Linear Technology, also. Once you start reading the bylines of application notes, you start to realize that these two guys quietly made some very significant product families there. And that “quietness” reinforces the image of the culture clash at post-Noyce Fairchild.

Today, there is no “Motorola Semiconductor” left. In 1999, Motorola's Semiconductor Components Group (discrete, standard analog and standard logic) was spun-off as an independent company named ON Semiconductor. Then in 2004, Motorola spin off its Semiconductor Products Sector (communications, processors, etc. including specific analog and mixed signal devices) into a separate company called Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.
In a reverse of the Silicon Valley “spin-off” model, ON Semiconductor grew substantially with several acquisitions: Cherry Semiconductor, the CPU Voltage and PC Thermal Monitoring Business from Analog Devices, AMI Semiconductor, Catalyst Semiconductor, PulseCore, California Micro Devices, Sound Design Technologies, SANYO Semiconductor, and the CMOS Image Sensor Business Unit from Cypress Semiconductor. I may have missed one or two.

Some of those acquisitions had roots in Silicon Valley. American Microsystems, Inc. (AMI) was founded in 1966 in Santa Clara, CA. It quickly established its manufacturing facility in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1970. In the early 1970′s, it had 50% share of the MOSFET IC market. Eventually it was bought by Gould in 1982 which was later bought by Japan Energy Corporation in 1988 and then in 2000, AMI was bought Francisco Partners and CVC and renamed AMI Semiconductor.
In a different manner, Freescale integrated itself into the “spin-off” web by naming Rich Beyer as CEO in 2008. Beyer became CEO of Intersil in 2002 when it acquired Elantec Semiconductor Inc, where he was CEO. Prior to Elantec, Beyer was president and COO of VLSI Technology and earlier VP and COO of National Semiconductor where I briefly worked in his group (but so far down the organization that he certainly didn’t know me). After Beyer left Intersil, he was replaced by Dave Bell who had been president of Linear Technology (where I worked for him, too).

As long as we have drifted away from the Motorola story, I’ll add that Jim Diller was on the Board of Directors when Beyer was at Elantec. Diller (senior) was a founder of PMC-Sierra. He briefly was interim CEO of Intersil after Dave Bell left. Not to be confused with Jim Diller, Jr. The younger currently manages an investment fund doing angel investing in start-up companies. But prior to his venture capital role, Jim, Jr. was CEO of Altos Semiconductor, which was later sold to Micrel. He has also held various positions at National Semiconductor (where I did not actually work for him …but saw him in the hallways). Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Now that I’ve finished, I see that this was as much about tangled roots and people who left Motorola as it was about where Motorola came from. So it really was a story of “Motorola – Where Has It Gone?” – as in what path did the footsteps take?

NOTES

Wikipedia

http://www.antiquetech.com/?page_id=817

Dirk Hanson, The New Alchemists, Boston: Little Brown, 1982

Silicon Genesis oral history

http://www.edn.com/electronics-news/4327106/Freescale-names-Intersil-s-Beyer-as-CEO-in-analog-push

Arnold Beckman

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:30:00 +0000

I write "Analog Footsteps" seeking common paths, literally, that key figures in analog took. I sit near an analog design guy who graduated from MIT and now lives in Mountain View. There are sidewalks that he walked that so many others have walked before him. But of course, not everyone did. Some branches of analog history are solo trips to nowhere in particular; some people were just at the right place at the right time. I noticed that April 10th would have been Arnold Beckman's birthday so I decided to follow that branch.

I could easily mistake a photo of Sherman Fairchild in the late 1950s for a photo of Arnold Beckman in the same decade. So the photo here is one from the 1930s, which doesn't remind me of Fairchild. Unfairly, I associate the same traits to both men - men with money and numerous businesses who happened to be associated with the origins of Silicon Valley. Arnold Beckman and Beckman Instruments bankrolled Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and Sherman Fairchild and Fairchild Camera and Instrument bankrolled the ex-Shockley eight who started Fairchild Semiconductor. What little I knew about Beckman made me thing this would be a dead-end branch with no interesting analog footsteps. But lets have a look, anyway. So on the anniversary of his birth, I present to you a better picture of Arnold Beckman.

Arnold Orville Beckman was born in rural Illinois in 1900. His father, George Beckman, was a blacksmith and he converted his old tool shed into a laboratory for his curious, youngest son. (No silver spoon or old money, here.) Arnold had discovered a chemistry book when he was nine and began performing experiments in his home lab. He ran centrifuge tests for a local store as a kid and while still in high school, started his own business, "Bloomington Research Laboratories", doing analytic chemistry for the local gas company. He excelled in high school and was allowed to take university level classes; graduating as valedictorian.

He went on to receive a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois in 1922 and his master's degree in physical chemistry in 1923. Chemistry. Gordon Moore was a chemist; maybe there is hope for analog footsteps. Beckman decided to go to Caltech for his doctorate (as did Moore). He stayed there for a year, before returning to New York to be near his fiancée, Mabel. He found a job with Western Electric's engineering department. Beckman developed quality control programs for the manufacture of vacuum tubes and learned about circuit design. Excellent! Beckman discovered his interest in circuits.

In 1926, Arnold and Mabel - now married - moved back to California and Beckman resumed his studies at Caltech. No analog footsteps, however. He received a Ph.D. in photochemistry. He stayed on as a professor. He shared his expertise in glass-blowing by teaching classes in the machine shop and also taught classes in the design and use of research instruments. Beckman dealt with instrumentation as manager of the chemistry department's instrument shop. Now we're back on track; this sounds like Jim Williams.

Beckman Vacuum Tube used in pH Meter

With the school's blessing, Beckman began accepting outside work as a consultant. A former classmate of his from the University of Illinois had the job of measuring the acidity of lemon juice and asked Beckman to devise an electrical instrument for the task. Beckman, familiar with glassblowing, electricity, and chemistry, suggested a design for a vacuum-tube amplifier and ended up building a working apparatus. The glass electrode used to measure pH was placed in a grid circuit in the vacuum tube, producing an amplified signal that could then be read by an electronic meter. Beckman saw an opportunity, and rethinking the project, decided to create a complete chemical instrument that could be easily transported. With that, he started National Technical Laboratories. Among its other early products were an ultraviolet spectrophotometer (1940) and an infrared and visible spectrophotometer (1942). Beckman was asked to secretly produce a hundred infrared spectrophotometers to be used by authorized government scientists during the war. He did some work for MIT's Radiation Laboratory. The Manhattan Project also used Beckman instruments.

John J. Murdock held substantial stock in National Technical Laboratories. When Murdock died in 1948, Beckman was able to gain a controlling interest in the company. In 1950, National Technical Laboratories was renamed Beckman Instruments.

William Shockley had been one of Beckman's students at Caltech. In 1955, Shockley contacted Beckman about starting a new company to make semiconductors. “We propose to engage promptly and vigorously in activities related to semiconductors. The initial project contemplated is the development of automatic means for production of diffused-base-transistors.” Because Shockley's aging mother lived in Palo Alto, Shockley wanted to establish the laboratory in nearby Mountain View, California. Frederick Terman, provost at Stanford University, offered the firm space in Stanford's new industrial park. To build the company Shockley tried to raid Bell Labs for talent, but was unsuccessful, as no one wanted to uproot their families to move across the U.S. (or work for Shockley, whose reputation had been tarnished by that time at Bell Labs). He did succeed at recruiting talent from Motorola, Philco, Raytheon and Sylvania as well as from top schools such as Berkeley, Caltech and MIT.

Probably the most significant recruit was Robert Noyce, who later recalled the first contact from Shockley “It was like picking up the phone and talking to God. He was absolutely the most important person in semiconductor electronics”. Noyce had a fascination for the west coast and said “All ions wind up in California, if they meet their dream.” I love that line! Of course, you know the Shockley-Fairchild-Silicon Valley history.

Beckman companies live on today in many forms including instrumentation. Beckman himself went on to be a significant philanthropist. In retrospect, he was quite an inventor and is quoted as saying, "The fun, the heart of the thing, is in the technical aspects".

Fun.

NOTES

Most of this is from Wikipedia.

Chemical Heritage Foundation:
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/online-resources/chemistry-in-history/themes/electrochemistry/beckman.aspx
A History of Semiconductors from the Archaic to the Monolithic Compiled by David Laude

Guru #6, Nello Sevastopoulos

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 22:58:00 +0000

The original “guru” advertisement from Linear Technology only promoted the designers since they had not released any products by that time. The ad ended with “…watch this space in the near future for the first in a series of new product announcements.” Several months later, the second “gurus” ad appeared. And this time it introduced a dozen new ICs. And it also added a new “guru”, Nello Sevastopoulos.

Sevastopoulos joined Linear Technology in August of 1983 to bolster the CMOS design effort with Tom Redfern. He was friends with Redfern and Jim Williams back at National Semiconductor and they were the ones who convinced him to join LTC. Employee number 138 overall, he was the fifth IC designer. But how did he become a linear IC design “guru”? His footsteps didn't go through Stanford or MIT or Fairchild and he didn't take apart tube radios as a child prodigy. Surprisingly, it almost didn't happen at all; at several points in his life fate conscripted to point him in that direction.

Born in Athens, Greece, in 1945, the Sevastopoulos family was relatively well off in the context of post-war Europe. Other countries in Europe were worse off, of course. But he recalls the Sixth Fleet of the U.S. Navy being anchored off-shore and he looked at them like gods. They were wearing blue jeans, smoking Pall Malls and had Zippo lighters – luxuries for his family. In his youth, Nello was good at sports. Unlike the United States where most organized sports fell under the control of the schools, in Europe sports were organized by neighborhood clubs. There were stadiums within walking distance for soccer and gymnasiums for basketball. The coaches were community volunteers and there were club leagues. Sevastopoulos excelled, particularly in track and field. By the age of 17 he was relatively famous, traveling throughout Europe competing in the high jump at world-class tournaments and being interviewed for newspapers, TV and radio. Nello was part of the Greek National team in 1964 – the year of the Tokyo Olympics. To this day he’s quite athletic and in exceptional shape.

Times were different back then and there were no prospects for a professional career in track and field. His father was a textile engineer, but Nello had no interest in engineering. He was good with his hands and considered being an architect – but with Europe in turmoil after World War II, those didn't seem like good career prospects. As fate would have it, the King of Greece had also been a high jumper and knew of Nello Sevastopoulos. The King sent telegrams and offered him a scholarship to college. Sevastopoulos chose to attend a technical school associated with the University of Brussels in French-speaking Belgium. He was good at math and physics, but struggled with electrical engineering. Although he says he took a plurality of electrical courses, he majored in nuclear engineering. The electrical courses were based on vacuum tube circuits in those days.

Sevastopoulos did some post-graduate work in audio, working on speaker systems with electrical feedback for about six months. In 1969, our future linear circuit design guru, Olympian, who spoke Greek and French, returned to Greece for his military service. He finished his service as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1971.

Even in those days, a bachelor’s degree was not always sufficient and Sevastopoulos felt he needed to go to graduate school. Since he spoke French, he wanted to attend McGill University in Montreal, Canada (McGill in those days had a French-speaking section). But without much money it was going to be difficult, so he decided to go to California where is brother worked at H-P, in Palo Alto. Prior to leaving Greece, Sevastopoulos took the GRE and an English proficiency test – which he failed due to his poor knowledge of English. So he came to the United States on a tourist visa and had two months to improve his English, retake the tests and get accepted to a University. The day he arrived was September 4, 1971. He spent 15 hours a day studying English and watching “Dialing for Dollars” on television with a dictionary. This time, he easily passed the tests.

So now you are probably expecting our nuclear engineer and future linear IC design guru to go to Stanford and study under Fred Terman. No, be patient my friend.

Sevastopoulos liked math and had a little bit of feedback experience and wanted to study control systems. He had applied and been accepted to several big schools in the area but he went to Santa Clara University.

Santa Clara had been a key research institution for NASA during the Apollo moon missions, supporting the control systems. Professor Dragoslav Šiljak’s methods were used at NASA Marshall Space Center in control design of Saturn V rocket which powered Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Coincidentally, Šiljak made the 1952 Yugoslavian national team for water polo and traveled to the Olympics in Helsinki. The final match was against Hungary for the gold. The match ended in a draw; with the winner determined by cumulative goal ratio, the Yugoslav team was awarded the silver. The following year the team won the World Cup in the Netherlands, beating Hungary in the finals, avenging the loss of the gold medal. He missed the 1956 Olympics due to injury, but he was back for the 1960 Olympics in Rome – but finished fourth; no medal.

At the University of Belgrade, Šiljak sought out books by Russian mathematicians like Lyapunov, Pontryagin, and Krasovskii. And, in a country where the supply of basic goods and services sometimes made it difficult just to make multiple copies of an article, Šiljak managed to get papers published in the top U.S. journals in control engineering. He published a paper in 1962 with co-author R. Petrović, which is credited for the beginning of stochastic computing. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara in 1964, where he taught courses in control theory and applications. After hearing Šiljak lecture on new control methods for larger booster rockets, an attending NASA scientist invited him to the Marshall Space Center in Alabama, where he soon began work on control design for the Saturn rockets. In the early 1970’s, Dr. Šiljak initiated research in mathematical theory of large complex dynamic systems and applied his analysis to a wide variety of models in areas as diverse as control of electric power systems, population biology, large space structures, competitive equilibrium in mathematical economics, and the arms race. Although he had some electronics courses, Sevastopoulos wrote his thesis on the stability of larger power machines.

This time around, Sevastopoulos excelled academically – graduating in 1973 with about a 3.9 grade point average. But some of his friends did even better. He recalls Slobodan Ćuk, another Serbian from the University of Belgrade. “He was an animal in how hard he worked and studied,” said Sevastopoulos. He finished with perfect grades, and went on for his PhD at Santa Clara University. If you recall the infamous Apollo training accident where a fire occurred during a test and the door would not open – we believe Ćuk predicted the failure from his own analysis. Ćuk then went on to teach at Caltech. Perhaps you are more familiar with the Ćuk Converter – the two-inductor, switched-mode power supply topology where the output can be lower than or higher than the input. Yes, that’s him.

Other classmates were Volkmar Shaldach who eventually ran Analog Devices in Europe, and Evan Moustakas who went on to get his doctorate at Santa Clara University and he became the EE department chairman of San Jose State University. At this time Marvin Vanderkooi was the Linear Applications Manager at National Semiconductor. Moustakas convinced Vanderkooi to get Sevastopoulos an interview at National – even though he had only taken a few electronics courses and had no other relevant experience. Sevastopoulos’ roommate happened to work at Ampex and knew a lot about semiconductor ICs. He pulled Sevastopoulos aside for a couple hours before the interview and said, “This is what you need to know.” He taught him about op amps, linear voltage regulators, current sources, comparators and voltage references. And that was exactly what the interviewers at National asked him – and amazingly, he got the job. Sevastopoulos was assigned to the applications department in the standard linear IC (SLIC) group. At first, this was a huge struggle for Sevastopoulos since, in his own words, he didn't know much.

At the time, there were three linear design groups within National: standard linear (SLIC, run by Jim Solomon – founder of what became Cadence), advanced linear (ALIC, run by Bob Dobkin) and consumer linear (CLIC, run by Tom Isbell). Sevastopoulos worked in standard linear applications and occasionally needed to ask questions of Dobkin and Carl Nelson. The ALIC guys certainly looked down on the SLIC guys and, even more so, on a new applications engineer who had to learn everything on the fly. He also saw Bob Widlar a couple of times (since Widlar had retired to Mexico by then). Widlar left an impression because of how well he promoted his products: great application notes, presenting at seminars around the world, very thorough.

Sevastopoulos survived the layoffs and rose to be the applications manager for SLIC. They had just invented the BiFET process and brought out the LF156 and, later on, the quad “741”: LM148/149. Quad op amps lent themselves to sophisticated active RC filter topologies, then in fashion. Sevastopoulos got interested in filter topologies. He still didn't know how to design an IC or know much about semiconductor processes; after all he was an applications engineer. He, however, traveled the world presenting on how to use these new amplifiers. The uncompensated variant, LM149, was particularly well suited to making higher frequency filters. And for a control systems guy with a penchant for transforms, this was fun. The timing was perfect for the rise of PCM in telephony applications.

About the same time, needing extra cash, Sevastopoulos decided to design a graduate course in op amps and teach at Santa Clara University. This was an applications class – how to use op amps – not a design class. That went well and he did that for a few years. Tom Odell, then a product engineer and later president of National Semiconductor (standard products group, including linear), was one of his students. The course was successful and continued to be taught by Professor Sergio Franco of San Francisco State who also wrote a textbook.

When National decided to build CODECs for the PCM telephony market they hired two consultants, David Allstot and Bill Black who graduated from UC Berkeley. The consultants needed help with noise analysis of CMOS transistors and Sevastopoulos volunteered for the task. The monolithic CODECs would use the new switched-capacitor topology for their filters, and this excited him. To his knowledge, it was the first of its kind and started studying all the newly written papers mainly published by UC Berkeley.

At the same time, he got a call from San Jose State University, asking him to teach a graduate IC design course in place of a professor who was leaving for his sabbatical. They knew of his previous teaching work at Santa Clara University so they chose him for the task. Of course, he was a bit uncertain about it since he had never actually designed an IC before. His friend and mentor, Tom Frederiksen (author of "Intuitive IC Op Amps") encouraged him to do it. So he agreed. This forced him to learn how it was done. It was a lot of work, studying evenings and weekends to prepare the lectures, but again the teaching experience was a good one and he was even voted best instructor. Circuit design then seemed easy enough while he was teaching, that he decided to do it for real. He managed to convince his boss to let him quit his Linear Applications Manager job and move over to design engineering. He also hired a young graduate from Berkeley, Sammy Lum, presently at Linear, to form a small design group.

This is not your typical “linear IC design guru” path to IC design. For what he was interested in, the key was the topology more than the analog aspects of the amplifiers. So he didn't need to push the envelope on op amp design. To make a successful product, it needed to be a building block so that one part could be sold to many customers. What he came up with for his first design was the MF10, “MF” standing for Monolithic Filter and the number 10 from the film “10”. This type of proprietary dual 2nd order switched-capacitor filter device had never been done before, so Sevastopoulos had to convince management to let him do it. That meant proposing it in front of Charlie Sporck and all the senior managers and IC designers in their big National Semiconductor amphitheater. First silicon worked, Sevastopoulos hit the road to start doing seminars and promote the part and it turned into a big success. His training represented his view of the part – here’s how it works, here’s why and here are all the types of filter responses you can create with it. But he clearly recalls one seminar in England, where an engineer said “Great, now tell us which mode we should use for our product.” Sevastopoulos thought to himself, “Don’t you want to figure that out?” That’s when he started to realize that many engineers want less theoretical information and more cookbook style guidance.

The MF10 and all of the subsequent promotion made him a famous name in the analog arena. There were other chips, but the MF10 vaulted Sevastopoulos to “guru” status. The product was used widely and eventually second sourced by many major semiconductor companies.

And now we can rejoin our story in August of 1983 when Redfern and Williams asked him to join Linear Technology. As a footnote, he was also lured by Maxim which was founded two years after Linear Technology. He could have been employee #18 at Maxim instead of #138 at LTC. Since Maxim was just starting up, they placed a priority on doing quick second-source products to generate revenue. “We want you to do this part and then this part – copy these industry standards” they said. Linear was looking more long-term and that’s where his friends were.

At LTC, he and Redfern were working in CMOS while most others were working in bipolar. The bipolar designers bread-boarded everything with kit parts – transistors wired up in three-dimensional fashion to prototype each new chip. That wasn't really practical for CMOS since there were so many variations possible for transistor length and width. In those days, simulation was still rather basic – level 1, maybe level 2. There was one computer terminal (no actual computer, but a service that was contracted for computing). They didn't get accurate models until the late 1980s. They really busted their butts in those first few years to make the company grow. It was hard. There was a lot of pressure. They did their own layout if the scarce resources were being used elsewhere. The first chip he did was the switched-capacitor building block, LTC1043, which Williams used extensively and creatively in many application notes. To avoid getting sued by National Semiconductor, Redfern didn't make data converters and Sevastopoulos didn't make filters until later.

From the Linear Technology Annual Report in 1986; L-R, Nelson, Dobkin, Erdi, Redfern and Sevastopoulos

The MF10 and the following family of monolithic switched capacitor filters qualified Sevastopoulos as a guru, and it served its marketing purpose by helping the name-recognition of the company in the early years. He said, “We were it, man, we were the state of the art!” Sevastopoulos said it actually surprised all of them that customers didn't immediately buy their parts. Even with all these big names, customers would ask about a second source. He credits George Erdi because his parts immediately generated revenue. In most cases, they were standard pinout op amps with greatly improved specifications. His parts were beautifully crafted. By “crafted” Sevastopoulos meant that Erdi would thoroughly measure everything and study the parameters’ distributions and make fine tweaks, over and over until the part was as good as it could be. “No one else had the patience or the passion.”

The MF10 wasn't his favorite chip, nor the LTC1060 which improved upon it. “The problem with the switched-cap topology was that it wasn't DC-accurate.” That was okay for “AC” telephony, but you couldn't really use it in data acquisition systems. With the LTC1062, he created a DC-accurate low-pass filter (LPF) – the first of its kind. He said this was an expansion of an idea that Jim Williams showed him from an H-P DVM. His favorite chip was the LTC1063, the next DC-accurate LPF that was very easy to use. It happened to be used by a company called PKI (German division of Philips) which he believed made an early portable phone. But it was the LTC1064 that made a lot of money for the company – hitting the market at the right time for rapid growth in base stations and in data acquisition systems. The LTC1064, quad filter building block, incorporated a very space efficient proprietary thin filter resistor network. The product with a simple metal mask change could be configured as a complete monolithic 8th order filter or dual 4th order filter, giving it tremendous flexibility and speed to market. Give him time and he’ll talk about all his chips. He’s clearly passionate about them.

Sevastopoulos was never really in love with transistor-level circuit design. Instead, he used circuit design to create complex products. An Olympic-caliber athlete, a nuclear engineer, an appreciator of an elegant filter topology, he created some masterful circuits nonetheless.

The world “guru” in Sanskrit means “teacher”. A real guru not only has students but he divulges his knowledge and wisdom. Sevastopoulos’ real legacy, beside all the products he designed, is the creative IC design group he formed, led and taught. Together, they expanded the product line beyond filters. They designed monolithic chopper stabilized op amps, monolithic chopper stabilized instrumentation amplifiers, programmable gain amplifiers, continuous time (not switched capacitor) high frequency filters, high precision sense amplifiers, precision CMOS amplifiers (not choppers), differential amplifiers, a new RC oscillator family, even a couple of “system on a chip” products commissioned for a prestigious instrument company. Many IC analog designers stuck to their “knitting”, albeit crafting beautiful designs. Instead, Sevastopoulos loved creating new functions, and he loved adding, often to the dismay of management, new process steps to benefit product topologies. He left behind talented and creative engineers, the future gurus.

Pranking the Prankster, Jim Williams and the LT1088

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 19:54:00 +0000

I had asked Carl Nelson about a particular photo with a circuit layout on a light table, and he told me this story:

The circular structure looks a little like Repus Renez. That was Jim Williams' high frequency RMS voltmeter chip. He took my Super Zener chip, reversed the name, punted the Zener, then used the diodes and heater resistors to make the voltmeter.

Jim presented a paper on the circuit at ISSCC, and I think the Repus Renez name could be seen on the chip in one of the slides. The product, LT1088 is now obsolete, but you can read about it in AN22.

We pulled one of the best pranks on Jim while he was testing the first parts. He kept getting higher and higher bandwidth as he cleaned up the test jig, and we got tired of his bragging every day about some new number. So I waited until he left for the day, unsoldered the test socket, and wired a tiny inductor in series with the input signal, hiding the inductor under the socket. That dropped his bandwidth from 100MHz down to 50MHz or so. He spent the next day tearing his hair out (he literally used to twist his hair constantly) and cursing a lot. I finally took pity on him and suggested that maybe he had picked up a parasitic, but he ignored me. After several more hints, just before quitting time, I suggested in rather strong language that he double check the test socket very carefully. I think he was pissed, but he maintained his composure in keeping with his title of master prankster of them all…

NOTES:
That's not the LT1088 in the photo.
Photo credit goes to BusinessWeek magazine (Paul Margolies)
L-R - Bob Swanson, Bob Dobkin, Carl Nelson, Tom Redfern

When 50 Was Young

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 22:17:00 +0000

I turned 50 this past year. It doesn’t feel old like I imagined when I was half this age. There are a lot of people older than me in the analog world. Most will tell you that it takes many years to really get good at analog (despite what I wrote earlier) and the skills don’t become obsolete. So 50 is not necessarily old in this business. And it’s certainly too young to die.
Bob Widlar died at age 53. His life was always run at a different speed than most people. He “retired” at age 33 but didn’t really stay retired – he continued to work his entire life. Many will say that his lifestyle led to his early death. But I’ve looked into his ancestry and think that he was lucky to live as long as he did – not because of his lifestyle but because of hereditary heart trouble.

His father, Walter Widlar died at 45.
His grandfather, Walter Widlar, Sr. lived to the ripe old age of 84, but Walter, Sr’s brother Leonard Widlar, Jr. died at age 24.
Leonard Widlar, Sr. died at age 36.
A generation before that, Jacob Widlar (born in Germany) died at age 45.
Bob’s maternal grandmother, Marie (Zak) Vithous died of a stroke at age 53.

Bob’s siblings are still around. They don’t seem as “prickly” – to use Carl Nelson’s description – as Bob. I’ve communicated with one of his brothers and his sister. And with their gracious help (and the thorough research of Bo Lojek), I was able to see that Bob Widlar was just carrying on an old family tradition.

As the decades pass, we look back at Bob Widlar as a larger-than-life character – almost as if he arrived spontaneously and fully formed with his brilliance and shall we say “unique” personality. But everyone is the child of two people who pass on certain traits and teach certain values. Bob Widlar’s Bohemian ancestor’s came from his mother’s side. His maternal grandfather, Frantisek (Frank) Vithous was born in Bohemia, which was once part of Austria and is now in the Czech Republic. Frank came to America in 1902 and settled in an area known as “Little Bohemia” around the Clark-Fulton area of the West Side of Cleveland. Frank and his wife Marie lived on W. 50th Street in a house which had been owned by the Zaks, Marie’s family. The house stayed in the Vithous family for almost 100 years.

Marie died in 1934, as mentioned above, at the young age of 53. Because Frank was not a regular churchgoer and was behind on his tithes, the local Catholic Church refused to conduct the funeral ceremony or to allow Marie to be buried in the Catholic Cemetery. Frank’s Bohemian temper flared and he and his sons left the Catholic Church. Frank’s daughter, Mary, eventually returned to the Catholic Church in her adulthood, primarily because she had married into a very devout Catholic family – the Widlar’s.

Frank then moved out to the country, purchased five acres of property on Abbey Road in Strongsville, Ohio where he grew and sold crops and cultivated grapes for his homemade wine. He also made dandelion wine in his bathtub, even during prohibition. See what I mean about the family tradition? Frank believed that an inside toilet was unsanitary and in poor taste, so even though the farmhouse on Abbey Road had a bathroom, Frank refused to use the inside toilet and relied on the outhouse for all of his life. Frank refused to learn to speak English and in order to communicate with him; his children had to speak Bohemian. Mary said that the only English phrase he ever spoke clearly was: “This country for shit.”

That was the wild side, the Bohemian. But Bob Widlar was brilliant and incomparably hard working. That came from the other side, the Widlar side.

Walter Widlar, Jr.

Mary went to work as a stenographer for Eddie Binkowski’s furniture business where she first met Walter Widlar, who had a second (or maybe a third?) job repairing radios for Eddie. Walter was handsome and charming. Mary shot rubber bands out the window at Walt to get his attention. After a whirlwind romance that lasted all of one month, they were married on August 24, 1935.

Mary and the boys, 1947

Mary and Walt started their family with three little rambunctious boys: Tom, Bob and Jim. The world of electronics surrounded Bob since birth: he became the first baby monitored by wireless radio. Jim Widlar remembered a 19” black-and-white TV at Eddie Binkowski’s store that no one could fix. So Bob brought it home, took it apart and replaced everything with the circuits from their 7” TV and then they had a perfectly new 19”model!

They moved several times in the 1940’s as Walt’s jobs took him from Lakewood, Ohio to New London, Connecticut; back to Lakewood, then to McAllen, Texas and finally, in 1948, to Parma, Ohio. The move to New London occurred during the build-up to World War II. Walt worked for a few years at the Underwater Sound Laboratory before returning to Ohio. According to Bo Lojek, the lab was managed by William Shockley.

A self-taught radio engineer, Walter Widlar worked for the WGAR (1220 AM) radio station and designed pioneering ultra high frequency transmitters. The 1951 West Park Roster lists Walt Widlar as member No. 99 with an address in Parma, Ohio. The same roster lists Bob Widlar, no call number, as member 104. Walt Widlar, W8ERI, was a Cleveland ham operator and worked for WGAR on their mobile unit with an FCC license of Radio Telephone operator license First Class. He also worked for Bird Electronics in Cleveland and two of his developments were the sonobouy and the Bird Model 43 trueline wattmeter.

When Walter died, Bob Widlar was only 15. They didn’t have life insurance, so there was very little money. Ray Bird, owner of Bird Electronics where Walt worked, paid Walt’s salary for several years after he died. (As you may recall, Bob Noyce paid Bob Widlar’s salary for several months “for reasons unknown” after he left Fairchild.) That’s as much a testament to the character of Ray Bird as it is to the character of Walter Widlar.

By that time, Bob Widlar’s interest in electronics was firmly in place and he had many hours of quality experience by then. But 15 is a critical age in a young man’s life and losing that fatherly influence certainly affected him. Without that check and balance, the Bohemian side came to life. Bob had some issues as a teenager, according to his brother. It was probably a good thing to join the service.

I imagine that Bob Widlar’s ancestors on both sides would have been proud of the way he lived his life. Half for the strong-willed independence (consequences be damned) and half for the hard work and brilliant inventions. And even though a great many of his ancestors died before the young age of 50, it was still too young.

Guru #2, Bob Dobkin

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 05:31:00 +0000

Of the five men on the original “gurus” advertisement from Linear Technology, Bob Dobkin is the only one still living the dream, doing what he loves for a living. As co-founder and CTO of Linear Technology, his fingerprints are on almost every circuit, every document, and even every advertisement from the company – although he credits Bob Swanson for the idea behind the “gurus” ad. Financially, he could have retired long ago but he says “if I retired from Linear I’d want to go and make circuits.” “Doing analog ICs is like a hobby to a lot of people. It’s a creative outlet. It’s like painting on the canvas but the canvas is silicon.”

Dobkin was born in 1943 and grew up back on the East Coast in Philadelphia. He said he started playing with electronics when he was about six. It was all about making lights blink or buzzers go off. So it goes back well before learning anything in school. He said he thinks “…that many of the people who have good, intuitive feel for analog circuits started well before they got into school as well, building things, doing projects, and then for some of us, it ended up being a profession.”

“Nobody else in my family had any inkling to do any electronics. My parents were business people and my mother was a housewife. My brother, one brother's a doctor. The other brother's in advertising and they don't know which end of a screwdriver to pick up, much less a soldering iron. So I picked it up all on my own.”

From a 2006 interview together with Jim Williams, Dobkin talked about taking things apart. “I was nine. It was 1952. We just got our new nineteen inch black and white TV set which costs as much as a car. And it's in the living room. And I got my screwdriver and I took it apart. And my mom walks into the living room and I didn't just open the back, I had all the chassis out on the floor. I had all the tubes out of it and I'm looking at every different piece. And she just looked in and left... didn't say anything. And I made diagrams when I took it apart. I put it back together again and it worked. And I didn't think anything about it till fifteen years later when I heard her telling the story to some friends – ‘…and I walked into the living room and it was all apart on the floor. What was I going to tell my husband?’”

To which, Jim Williams added, “That's why he's my boss. He put his back together and it worked. Mine never worked again.”

At age 10, he created a contraption that electrified the family's outdoor garbage bins, so that neighborhood dogs couldn't prowl for scraps. At age 14, he made a one-transistor FM transmitter that took over a local diner's background music system, so that he could boom out comments to the cooks and waitresses. "You can always learn more equations as an adult," he said. "We can teach that. But you can't learn to be an inventor if it isn’t in your blood."

In an interview with Electronic Design, he recalled submitting circuits for Ideas for Design. “I remember one I wrote when I was a kid. It was a current source that you could pulse on or off. I don’t know how many letters I got from that,” he said. “It had just two or three transistors in it, but it was really effective in terms of people coming back to me after reading it, which means there were a lot of people out there who couldn’t do that,” he added. “Also, of course, it was useful. There weren’t many couple-transistor circuits that provided a current source you could turn on and off.”

He read hobby magazines, trade magazines or anything with a schematic. Before he went to college he had probably built more circuits than most people have when they finish. Dobkin went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early sixties. He admits that he wasn’t a good student. There were stacks of circuits in the library and he found them more interesting than what they were teaching in class. He left before completing his degree and joined GE Re-entry Systems back in Philadelphia, working in their test instrumentation group. They had a huge calibration lab and it was full of manuals, so Dobkin would go there and read any schematic that looked interesting. In those days every piece of test instrumentation had a full set of schematics. He said he went back to visit 10 years later and many of his systems were still in use. It was a great place to learn, but he wanted to make circuits.

So he left to join Philbrick. He told me he had called Philbrick to ask questions, but the questions were too detailed so they forwarded him directly to Bob Pease. “I was working at GE Re-entry Systems at the time. And Widlar had started at National and was doing the best analog circuits at the time. I had written him some letters and he had asked if I wanted to come out and talk to him. And at the time I had also written some letters to a company up in Boston called Philbrick-Nexus. They made op amps as well. And these op amps were little modules. And they really hadn't gotten into ICs. And I'd written them some letters as well. And I got a job offer to move up there and make some IC op amps, be their chief integrated circuit design engineer. And that's where I met Bob Pease. At the time, I decided I'd probably be better off going to Philbrick. And I started off there. When I got to Philbrick, they were part of Teledyne. There were all kinds of corporate problems between one section and another making the products. I found that you couldn't get anything done and I called up Bob Widlar and I said, ‘You ready for me to come out?’And he said, ‘Come out.’ So I got packed up and I moved west to work for Bob Widlar at National. And that's how I got out west.” "The best part of being part of Teledyne was meeting Carl Nelson who I worked with ever since."

He said that not completing his degree made it difficult for him. He was lucky to run into Bob Pease. Pease didn’t care about your degree; he only cared about what you knew about circuits. And he was lucky to work with Bob Widlar. Widlar didn’t care about your degree, either, just what you knew about circuits.

Widlar was the director of analog circuit design at National, doing all the circuits himself. He had Mineo Yamatake and Ken Craft working for him. Widlar wanted to retire, so he wanted to hire someone to replace himself and that was Dobkin. Dobkin joined National in January of 1970. “Well Bob was one of the few people I considered to be a genius. He was also paranoid, very hard to get along with and drank incessantly. My interview with him was before dinner drinks, two bottles of wine with dinner and after dinner drinks. And I was still standing so I was hired. Of course, I went home and threw up a lot! And he was very egotistical. He didn't think anybody could invent things, at least back in the old days. I think he changed his mind after a while. But he was very good at what he did, made sure that things worked very, very properly. He promoted them properly. I learned a lot in terms of how to be in the analog semiconductor business from Bob.”

“We all did our own app notes. I wrote my own app notes. And he wrote his own app notes. He wrote his own data sheets. He set up the format for them. He gave his own lectures out to the customers. And, at times, he answered the customer phone calls. And that's where we learned about a technique which we call ‘design for minimum phone calls’ because when you make a million ICs; you get half a million phone calls if they don't work right.”

In the words of Thomas Lee, engineers are also congenital speed freaks. Dobkin’s first task at National was to make a faster op amp. According to Lee, “Improvements in process technology help, of course, but often the greatest speed gains are the result of clever topological choices. The LM318, designed by Dobkin, proves this assertion. Built in a process technology not much different from that used to make the LM101A, the LM318 achieved 15MHz unity gain bandwidths and 50V/µs slew rates. Compared against the best op amps of the day, the bandwidth was improved by an order of magnitude and the slew rate by two orders of magnitude.”

He also did the LM319, LM313 and LM395. (Remember, in early National Semiconductor part numbering, LM1xx was a full military temperature range part and the LM3xx was the commercial temperature version.)

The LM317 three-terminal adjustable regulator came about at National in 1976. Dobkin says, "It kind of got started because, at the time, you could make a fixed voltage regulator with three terminals—input, output, and ground," he explains. "But everyone wanted a regulator that they could adjust to whatever they wanted, and there weren't very many good packages with four leads to add an adjustment pin. That's when I came up with the three-terminal adjustable regulator."

I asked Dobkin what his favorite circuit was. His answer was the most recent of his, the LT3080. The LT3080 LDO is a descendant of the classic LM317. Dobkin was directly involved in designing both. "My solution was to substitute a current reference for the voltage reference. That allows use of a very small ballast resistance, on the order of 10 mΩ, which can be achieved simply with a few inches of pcboard trace," Dobkin said. "Using a current source means there is no attenuation of amplifier gain, which helps keep output regulation constant." It was something he wanted to do way back at National, but the technology wasn’t there. It needed low TC resistors and a lot of circuit tricks that he’s learned along the way. “That’ll still be in use years from now,” Dobkin said. “As a building block, it’s not an end in itself all the time. It can be used as many things besides just a power supply. It can be used as a power control. It can be used as a battery charger. You don’t have to put too much around it to change its overall function,” he said.

There are lots of stories about pranks. Dobkin had his fair share. He was the unindicted coconspirator in the infamous Widlar sheep story. The stories about messing with the clocks, making them run slow or fast were all his doing. It wasn’t “the golden age of pranking” so much as some hostility toward National’s management at the time. Of course, these weren’t trivial pranks. These were so well done that the sabotage was imperceptible. Along with the fun, there was a certain amount of professional pride in the pranks. Among peers, the creativity was appreciated – even by the victims.

Rob Walker asked Dobkin what inspired him to break out of National and start Linear Technology? “Too comfortable. National was really getting big. National had the idea that they wanted to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, IC maker. And the fabs — a lot of pieces that don't necessarily work well when they're homogenized. And contributor type of development. It takes smart people to do it. It takes processes that are tuned for analog circuits and it takes just handling the analog circuits the right way to get out a product that's a good analog circuit. It was getting harder and harder to do that at National. The chains of command were getting longer. The bureaucracy was getting bigger and we ended up talking over the partitions—wouldn't it be nice if we could do this, if we didn't have to use all the profits to fund microprocessors. And finally we went out and did something.”

As Bob Swanson told it, a few guys would come over to his house to drink beer, shoot pool and talk. And finally one of the guys said “look, are we going to drink beer and shoot pool or are we going to start a company?” That was Swanson, Dobkin, Brent Welling and Brian Hollins. In the few weeks between the time they quit National and founded LTC, they added Bob Widlar and George Erdi to the team. Obviously, these were the most talented and experienced analog designers in the business. In the first month they added Carl Nelson and later Tom Redfern. Linear Technology had an aggressive business strategy and, like any start-up, they needed to make money quickly. It would be many years before they would start hiring engineers right out of college. But now they do, pairing them up with experienced engineers to accelerate the learning curve.

“It takes a long time for somebody to become an analog engineer. I kind of think about the process of becoming an analog engineer like learning a language. There's all these pieces of analog circuits that you get familiar with and you know how they work and that's like the words. And when you first see a circuit if you don't have any experience, you can compute what each of the transistors is doing and what each of the currents are doing and finally figure out how it's working. And that's kind of like translating a page by having a dictionary and looking up each word in a dictionary until you finally figure out what that page says. But once you have familiarity with the circuit pieces and how they interact, you get an intuitive feel for where a circuit goes. And it's only until you get that intuitive feel you'll be able to start writing in that language or designing. You can take a big, complicated schematic and you can have an analog designer's experience and he can look at it for minute, two minutes and know what it does because he knows all the pieces and puts it together in his head.”

Along with many new designs and devices, Dobkin has also developed a strong sense of how the design process has evolved, and about creativity. "We have simulation tools, but the tools only let you test the circuits that you come up with on a computer," he says. "They don't actually do a design for you. So the design is only as good as the designer. The tools just make it easier to get that design out."

Modern IC’s are tremendously complex. According to Dobkin, when operating at very high frequencies without the tools, it would be virtually impossible to get them up and running. At some point, however, the engineers need to create something new to solve problems. "They can be more creative," he asserts. "Creativity is the generation of new and useful products. A lot of engineers like their jobs because they're outlets for creativity. Put engineers in an environment where they can be creative, and you end up with a lot of good products."

What strikes me about these “gurus” and most analog people I’ve met is the sense of fun and enjoyment. Even the curmudgeon types have a great sense of humor once they let you get to know them. It’s not just funny pranks, but they really enjoy the process of making circuits. There’s a great sense of pride in building something that customers want to buy and that competitors have a difficult time duplicating. You can see the sparkle in Dobkin’s eyes when he talks about circuits. He still takes things apart. He still studies schematics simply because it’s fun. He enjoys working among the many brilliant engineers he’s hired over the years, sharing circuit tricks. It’s just fun.

“I’ve spent my working life doing what I like,” says Dobkin.

NOTES

“Bob Dobkin: Creativity Is The Key To Design”, Ron Schneiderman, Electronic Design, Oct. 20, 2002

A review of the book, “The Rare Find”, by George Anders, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/the-rare-find-george-anders_n_1022311.html

“IC Op Amps Through the Ages”, Thomas Lee

“The IFD Culture—An Interview With Hall Of Famer Bob Dobkin”, Don Tuite, Electronic Design, Oct. 1, 2008

“Why we're different, by Bob Dobkin”, http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/components/analogue-and-discretes/why-were-diferent-by-bob-dobkin-2012-10/#sthash.1iLis9bd.dpuf

“Interview with Bob Dobkin and Jim Williams”, April 19, 2006, Milpitas, CA http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/dobkinwilliams.htm

“Inventor Updates A Classic 30 Years Later”, Don Tuite, Electronic Design, Aug. 31, 2007 http://electronicdesign.com/boards/inventor-updates-classic-30-years-later

Guru #1, Bob Widlar

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 06:24:00 +0000

In my arbitrary counting system, I’ve tagged Bob Widlar as guru #1. Of the five people in the advertisement, his life is probably the best documented. I recommend two excellent sources: Bo Lojek’s “History of Semiconductor Engineering” who devotes an entire chapter to Bob Widlar’s life, and Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page is quickly digestible (and free) and offers a reasonably technical discussion of Widlar’s early works. And the Wikipedia page references Lojek’s book (not free) extensively.

I won’t attempt to write a better story than either of those two sources. Instead, I will offer my reaction to both of them and put a little spin (or anti-spin, as it were) on them.

“History of Semiconductor Engineering”, Chapter 8: Robert J. Widlar – The Genius, The Legend, The Bohemian. Lojek says, “Bob was a fiercely independent individual, very happy to be by himself, and he did everything in a stunning way, which was absolutely natural to him, but completely weird to so-called “normal people.” I completely agree with that! He also said, “…the personality of Bob Widlar is a clear manifestation of unhealthy changes which occurs in our society.” By that, I believe he meant that today’s “political correctness” stifles what engineers say, do and how they pursue their ideas; and therefore, we won’t see someone like Bob Widlar again. I don’t completely agree with that – partially, but not completely. Then again, I never met Widlar. But I look around and I see a lot of character, a lot of people being true to who they are and an acceptance of eccentricity. And I think that Widlar deserves a great deal of credit for that acceptance surviving till today. Simply because he existed and accomplished what he did in the manner that he did, we integrate that into what is acceptable – at least in analog.

Wikipedia concisely covers Widlar’s childhood, education, stint in the Air Force, work at Ball Brothers, segue to Fairchild and then National and Linear Technology where his face appeared on this ad. I gave my own version of these events in my post attempting to account for 10,000 hours. Wikipedia doesn’t clarify how Widlar got his degree in the same three years that he served in the Air Force – and at the same time he wrote the textbooks for the Air Force’s instruction in semiconductors (when no suitable text existed). Wikipedia discusses the µA702 and µA709. But you don’t get a mental picture of Widlar and Talbert working nights and weekends to make the process and product concurrently, without management approval – they had other jobs. The µA702 was introduced a year after Widlar joined Fairchild – probably only a few months after management found out about it. Widlar locked himself away for 170 hours and came out with the µA709 – that’s a week (without much sleep).

On a technicality, Wikipedia makes mention of a patent dispute between Widlar and Linear Technology regarding parts LT1 through LT20. Those are not correct part numbers. In Lojek’s book, the part numbers are LT1-10, -15, -16, -17, -18 and 20. I suspect those are simple typographic errors. I know Widlar designed the LT1010. So it’s possible that LT1015, LT1016, LT1017, LT1018 and LT1020 were also his designs – I’ll check on that.

My real issue with the Wikipedia page is the personality section. The image of him as a heavy drinker seems to grow with time while the image of him as a hard-working, brilliant, prodigious engineer fades as time goes on. And that has to do with context, in my opinion. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the semiconductor industry was the “wild west.” The local watering holes (Walker’s Wagon Wheel, Marchetti’s, etc.) were packed – during lunch and all night. They were crazy times. True, even in those days Widlar stood out. But against the backdrop of today’s sensibilities, Widlar looks even wilder. His hard-working side, his genius, his many contributions fade against the backdrop of technology today. We are spoiled by the accumulated knowledge of circuits at our fingertips. It’s impossible for us to imagine a time before the bandgap reference, before matched transistor pairs and temperature compensation. Widlar worked with a slide rule. He studied the process and drove the process with Dave Talbert to create what was necessary and he invented the rest out of sheer genius.

Accepting that, I’m astonished by the amazing speed with which it all happened. Remember, Widlar worked in the applications group – not R&D or circuit design. Talbert was a process engineer for the microLogic group. They did everything after hours! Widlar joined Fairchild in 1963, released the µA702 in 1964 and µA709 in 1965. Along with “inventing the IC op amp”, he laid the blueprint for how all analog ICs data sheets are written. He wrote his own applications section. He traveled the world giving seminars – he gave a seminar in Madison Square Garden and packed the house! By the end of 1965 he left Fairchild and went to Molectro. His mere presence there was enough to convince National Semiconductor to abandon their east coast roots and build a company around it. In 1966 Widlar made the LM100 and, in 1967, the still legendary LM101. A career’s worth of products in consecutive years, bang, bang, bang. Amazing.

So forgive my soap-box speech, but I think Wikipedia needs to be changed. I’d like to see our community come up with better language than “…lived the life of an alcoholic loner.” Wikipedia can be changed. Yes, he drank (a lot) and preferred to be alone. But I can’t reconcile the image of an alcoholic loner with the technical accomplishments of Bob Widlar, with the obsessive amount of work he poured into every circuit, with the charm and humor or with the business savvy. Sorry, had to put that out there.

Think about the next analog circuit you work with. So much of that circuit exists because of Bob Widlar.

Guru #1.

Bob Widlar, center, at National Semiconductor in 1967

Guru #3, George Erdi

noreply@blogger.com (Todd Nelson) — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 18:27:00 +0000

George Erdi is one of the five “gurus” in the early Linear Technology advertisement. His colleagues poked fun at him for being called an “elegant” precision amplifier designer. But he certainly was the pioneer in precision (“Mr. Precision” according to the Wall Street Journal). He was able to make a precision amplifier on a process that wasn’t built for it at Fairchild. Then he built an entire company around the concept, Precision Monolithics Inc. And then he joined Linear Technology as a founder and got his face on this advertisement.

George Erdi was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1939. In 1956, in a brief period before the Soviets crushed the revolution in Hungary, he and his mother escaped to Canada (his father had died in WWII). In much the same way as his childhood friend, Andy Grove, they walked across the border at night in the snow. In those few weeks when the revolution was succeeding, the border control was loose and 200,000 Hungarians fled the country. His aunt lived in Toronto, so that was the destination.

George had completed high school in Hungary and did not need further secondary school in Canada. In his own words, he was not a “born engineer.” Coming from Soviet-controlled Hungary, he did not speak English. “After a couple of years, I enrolled in the Engineering Department of McGill University, assuming that command of the language was not a necessity in a scientific field. In my freshmen year, however, the first course I had to take was English Literature. Fortunately, the first topic we covered was Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in middle English. None of my classmates understood a word of it either. Thus, I became an electronics engineer almost by default.” McGill University, in Montreal, is one of only three English-speaking universities in Quebec. (Not to be a name-dropper, but Les Vadasz was also Hungarian and also attended McGill – although George didn’t know him. Vadasz worked at Transitron, then the digital side of Fairchild before joining Intel.)

He left Montreal and went on to pursue a Master’s Degree at the University of California in Berkeley in 1965. He had been accepted at both Stanford and Berkeley, but had a scholarship to Berkeley. In those early years of the semiconductor industry, Berkeley had a small fab. He took some IC classes, but wrote his thesis in statistical communications because the IC route would have taken much longer. That is essentially where he started in analog. Andy Grove was the key process engineer at Fairchild R&D and made the recommendation for Fairchild to hire George. He says when he joined Fairchild he was basically a novice, “To quote an old joke, I did not know an integrated circuit from a segregated one. But neither did anybody else, the situation being strikingly similar to my first English class at McGill.”

Dave Fullagar joined Fairchild a week after Bob Widlar and Dave Talbert left; George joined a month later. Fullagar was George’s office mate and was intended to work on a precision amplifier, the µA725, but it didn’t work quite right. Then Widlar’s LM101 came out from National. The two office mates asked themselves why the compensation capacitor wasn’t integrated. Perhaps National’s process couldn’t accommodate a cap, but theirs could. Fullagar then did the µA741 (integrating the comp cap) and George picked up the µA725. He essentially started over and created the first precision monolithic op amp. He wrote a paper on the part, but left Fairchild before it was published – so Fairchild removed his name from it. Paul Gray, a professor at Berkeley, did give George credit, however (you probably studied from his Gray and Meyer textbook). George is also credited in various sources with the first monolithic D/A converter. The µA722 was started by Tom O’Day, who left in the middle of the project to join H-P. George made some significant changes and accepts credit as the co-designer. Not bad for a kid not even 30 years old on his first two circuits. By the way, Mike Markkula was responsible for the marketing – legendary investor and second CEO of Apple Computer.

Fairchild µA722
10-bit current source
for D to A converters
(Credit: Fairchild
Camera & Instrument
Corporation)

“In those early years of ICs in the mid-1960s, experienced design engineers had great difficulty abandoning the well-established design concepts of discrete or even vacuum tube circuits. The idea that a transistor was cheaper than a resistor was revolutionary. Everything depended on matching between resistors and transistors, not on absolute tolerances. Inductors and capacitors were unavailable.”

“I, as a beginner, did not have any preconceived notions. IC design was just as easy, or as difficult, as discrete design. My timing was right,” recalled George.

Bob Pease was one of those designers who were raised in vacuum tube and discrete amplifier design. He devoted one of his columns to his reaction to Erdi’s first op amp.

“When monolithic op amps came along, there were some influences to ‘keep it simple, stupid’. I designed a T52AH – also labelled as Amelco's 809BE – with just 10 transistors, which worked pretty well. But op amps with 20 or 30 transistors soon had just as good a yield. And they offered more features. So, we kept learning how to add more transistors for better performance.”

“But when the Fairchild μA725 came along, we designers were really puzzled. Why would anybody use FOUR input transistors? What the heck was George Erdi smoking? If you set up a diff amp with two transistors in parallel at the plus input and two transistors paralleled on the minus input, why would that give an advantage? But the specs showed real superiority – low offset voltages, good bias currents, and low offset current. Hey, this was about 1971. Not many engineers were climbing inside their suppliers' ICs and studying the layouts. If you didn't, though, you could be stuck with a lousy layout. I know.”

“The basic feature of the μA725 was the common-centroid layout of the input transistor "pair."

“If you took those four input transistors and laid them out in an X pattern, it would be denoted by:

AB

BA

Connecting them properly in parallel, you can get the linear gradients of Vos, to cancel. And the gradients in beta to cancel. Gradients caused by heating from the output stage – and even from other asymmetrical sources of heat -- tend to cancel. Any linear gradients caused by imperfect die attach tend to cancel. (Nonlinear gradients do NOT get cancelled, of course, but these are usually small.) And these cancellations all happen thanks to a common-centroid layout, which is just another way to say that the ‘Center of Gravity’ (CG) of one input "transistor" is at the same place as the CG of the other transistor.”

Dave Fullagar responded to the Pease column:

“…I had designed the prototype µA725 in 1966 and presented a paper on it at the International Telemetry Conference in Washington in 1967. This early version was quite crude and did not contain a cross-coupled input pair."

"When I proposed, and was given the go-ahead to work on, the µA741, the µA725 project was assigned to my officemate, George Erdi. I remember several brainstorming sessions in which we discussed ways to improve on its performance, including the use of a cross-coupled input stage —we didn't have a fancy name like "common-centroid" for it in those days! The sketch we ended up with on the blackboard was very similar to Fig. 2 of your article. George vastly improved on my earlier design, and the product was announced by Fairchild sometime around 1971 …”

George said it seemed like every Friday was a going-away party at Fairchild. In 1969, Marv Rudin (manager of linear circuit R&D in Palo Alto) and Garth Wilson (circuit design manager under him) left Fairchild to found Precision Monolithics. PMI was founded with financing from Bourns, Inc. Immediately after financing and incorporation, they hired George Erdi who had worked for Wilson at Fairchild, and then Dan Dooley from TRW Microelectronics; both were offered founder stock. They hired a brilliant process engineer, Jerry Bresee, from Techtronix, who developed a semiconductor process far superior to Fairchild. Semiconductor and materials engineer Wadie Khadder was hired with founder stock from Fairchild to support Bresee in both semiconductor process engineering and also the critical precision thin film technology.

Dooley left after about 4-5 years and joined National. With Bresee's and Khadder’s superior process, Erdi was able to design and achieve breakthrough advances in precision and low power for amplifiers, voltage references and data conversion. In 1975, Erdi reported on an offset trim technique that used 300mA over-current pulses, to progressively short zener diodes in a string. This so called “zener zapping” could be used to trim the offset of an op amp on the wafer. The first op amp to utilize this new trim technique was the OP07. (I was always a big fan of their part number prefixes: OP, REF, DAC, etc.)

The OP07 and DAC100 were huge successes. Even though Bourns had repurchased all the shares to make PMI a wholly-owned subsidiary, George felt well compensated. But eventually, George looked around and thought that if 60% of the sales were coming from his designs, then they weren’t going to grow very fast. He needed more contributors. George and Wadie Khadder left PMI in 1981 and eventually, PMI was finally bought by Analog Devices in August 1990.

George knew Bob Dobkin from conferences and called him when he read about him leaving National to start a new company. Linear Technology had not yet been formed, so George joined as a founder. He was employee number five. The other four founders had all quit National at the same time. It was hoped that hiring George from PMI might reduce the legal action from National. But no. George said the legal action with National went on until the same day as the big earthquake in 1989. The settlement came in at 3pm and the earthquake hit at 5pm. As with Fairchild and PMI, he was immediately successful at Linear Technology developing many families of op amps. He retired in 1993 at age 54 but continued to come in once a week or so to support his products.

2012 Analog Aficionados Party
Photo credit: Fran Hoffart

I asked George about the Wall Street Journal article citing Linear’s first new product as the LT1013. He said it wasn’t the first product. Earlier parts were improved versions of existing parts from competitors, like his LT1001 as an improved version of his own OP07. The LT1013 was the first proprietary new design released. I also asked about Bob Widlar. As mentioned, George joined Fairchild a month after he left. George’s first task was to look over Widlar’s projects and see there was anything to salvage. But he said there was nothing left behind. George actually met Widlar a few times at the ISSCC when it was held in Philadelphia – always with a drink in his hand. They worked together at Linear Technology, of course, while Widlar was living in Mexico. Widlar would come in to town for a few weeks and Dobkin would drive him since he didn’t have a license. He said Widlar would never admit that there were things he didn’t know about. Yet he always managed to find his way into George’s office to ask question.

For a man who wasn’t a “born engineer”, having designed some legendary op amps, having Bob Dobkin hire you as his company’s first engineer and also having Bob Widlar ask you about op amp design – that’s pretty impressive.

NOTES

“In a Tech Backwater, A Profit Fortress Rises; Maker of Arcane Chips Earns Better Margins Than Google, Microsoft”, Wall Street Journal, George Anders, Updated July 10, 2007

Computer History Museum - The Silicon Engine | People www.computerhistory.org, 30 June 2011

“Analog Circuit Design – Art, Science, and Personalities”, edited by Jim Williams, 1991 (Chapter 18. Starting to Like Electronics in Your Twenties)

http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/timeline/1968-Data.html
Bob Pease: “What’s all this common-centroid stuff, anyhow?”, Electronic Design, Sep. 30, 1996

Oral History – Dave Fullagar, Jack Gifford, Garth Wilson, Computer History Museum, http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Fairchild_at_50/102658281.05.01.acc.pdf

IC Op Amps Through the Ages, Thomas H. Lee, rev. October 31, 2003

Precision Monolithics, Inc., Wikipedia

Walt Jung’s Op Amp History, http://www.analog.com/library/analogDialogue/archives/39-05/Web_ChH_final.pdf