Hubris
1975 – No worries about getting fired though, my ex-boss, Ken Moyle had quit Intersil a year earlier and started a consulting company called Hubris. I joined him in this company and
spent a year or so teaching companies how to make MOS Dynamic Random Access Memories (DRAM). Our main customer was ITT in England. I got to spend the better part of one summer living in the Charring Cross Hotel on Trafalgar Square, and commuting
by train to Foots Cray in the south of greater London. I also did work for Signetics in Sunnyvale, CA, but when the next big consulting opportunity came up it was in Japan. It became apparent that to be successful and stay busy as a consultant
you have to be willing to travel and be away from home a lot. I decided that it was time to settle down to a more permanent position.
Mnemonics
More permanent didn’t work out.
Mnemonics was a startup company that intended to make a Charged Coupled Memory (CCD) device and memory system using the CCD chips we would develop. I was in charge of device fabrication. The company failed within a year, although we did get
the 64,000 bit serial / parallel / serial chip working. The problem was that Intel was at the same time developing a similar device, and they discovered and published a paper about a new failure mechanism called alpha particle induced soft errors to
which CCD memories are especially sensitive. We actually were not especially worried about the induced failures because we intended to use error detection and correction in our memory system, but potentially investors were concerned and the money ran
out. We closed the office, used the last of the money to pay one month’s rent on a self-storage locker, put all of the lab equipment in the locker and mailed the key to the few remaining investors. There is an interesting side light on this
job: One of the key technical engineers I worked with, a PhD named Amr Mohsen, who from the time he was in 5th grade in Egypt until he came to the U.S. to get his PhD at Cal Tech, was certified as the smartest person in Egypt. He was
truly smart, but several years after our year at Mnemonics he went off the deep end and is now in prison. Read a summary of the story here: http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285369