Intersil
1970 – I left Fairchild to join a startup – sort of. I was recruited by Ken Moyle, a former colleague from Fairchild to join Intersil Memory Corporation. Intersil,
in Cupertino, CA was an already established company making mostly discrete specialty transistors, but they wanted to get into the integrated circuit, and especially the budding integrated circuit Random Access Memory (RAM) business. The president
of Intersil was Jean Hoerni, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JeanHoerni who had also been at Shockley Semiconductor with Noyce and Moore. So Intersil recruited a team of engineers to begin a memory
company under the umbrella of Intersil but with separate stock to make it potentially worthwhile for the newcomers. Our goal was to develop static RAM products, but Intersil had also agreed to develop a chip set for an Omron calculator. This
was a very advanced calculator (for the time), consisting of six different IC’s. It also had a printer. We struggled getting the process correct, but finally did and delivered many thousands of these chip sets. While working with Omron,
I visited their calculator assembly and test facility. Final test consisted of a room full of young women running by hand a simple program. Try this on your calculator: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 x 72 = then divide by 8. You have now used every
number key and have seen every segment of the display.
We also did develop a line of static RAMs (SRAM), with the most notable being, in hind sight, a 1024 bit SRAM which we made for NASA for the Viking Mars Lander program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program.
These chips had to be Class S qualified, that means the highest level of reliability possible. I led that successful activity, and as a result I can say that I made the memory for the first Mars lander, and they are still there.
I
also ran the Low Power IC group at Intersil. This consisted of the first Complimentary MOS (CMOS) chips we sold. The market for these very small low power IC’s was the watch market. Jean Hoerni was Swiss, and had very good contacts
in the Swiss watch industry. Without going into detail, this responsibility gave me many trips to Switzerland and Germany. We even started a spinoff company in Munich called Eurosil. After all of these successes, I am sorry to
say that I was fired from the job after 5 years. We were having yield problems, and it took me too long to figure out that a contaminant was being deposited on the wafers in the fabrication process which resulted in a high level of random defects.
Also I got into a disagreement with Hoerni about what my job consisted of, and he had the power.