Synergy Semiconductor
1986 – I negotiated a 6 month severance package from AMD and began to look for another job.
What I found was George Brown and Tom Wong, associates from AMD, who were starting a design consultancy. George was a Product Engineer/ Test Engineer and Tom was an excellent Design Engineer. They were working out of a room above Tom’s garage.
I thought that what we should do is start a real company. We were also talking with Larry Pollock and Ralph Cognac, both from AMD but at that time working at IDT. Larry was a brilliant Technology Development Engineer, and Ralph was a charismatic
Marketing Engineer. They were both unhappy at IDT and agreed to join us if we could get venture capital funding. I hit the road of the VC groups on Sand Hill Road with a foil slide deck showing our idea of making extremely fast bipolar Random Access
Memories (RAM). I made a presentation at Mayfield Fund, and shortly thereafter got a call from one of the partners at Sequoia fund wanting to know why I didn’t show the material to them first as one of the partners was an ex AMD associate.
I didn’t know he was a VC at Sequoia, but it turned out to be a good thing as Sequoia and Mayfield both funded us. The final presentation to the partnership at Sequoia was very cool. I made the pitch, and Don Valentine asked how
much money we thought we would need? (We didn’t have a real business plan, just ideas.) I said I didn’t know but threw out a number. Don said he thought we would need more than that, I said probably so. He asked when we
wanted the money. I said by the end of the year. (This was in early December.) He said that would not be a problem. We had Funding!
Sequoia gave us an office in their
suite on Sandhill Road and we started the process of designing and developing a technology. Larry was a genius at this, and with only a few suggestions from the rest of this, in a few months we had the paper design of what turned out to be a world class
bipolar integrated circuit technology. The VC’s wanted us to do three things in the short term: write a business plan, develop a mutually beneficial strategic alliance with an established company, and hire a president. They did
not think any of us five had the experience or reputation to fill that role. We also needed access to a wafer fabrication facility in order to develop the process and fabricate our first designs.
George
had a very good relationship with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and he was able to set up and conclude the strategic alliance. They wanted access to our potential very high speed RAM parts, and in return gave us a guaranteed line of credit at their
low interest rate. We wrote a business plan with the help of Todd Hagen, a finance MBA who had been my financial analyst at AMD. And we hired an experienced senior manager from a big semiconductor company as our first President.
I found a wafer fabrication facility in Santa Clara that Zoran was trying to unload, since their products were basic MOS devices and they could use conventionally available foundry services to manufacture them. We got the
facility for very little money and in fact essentially paid for it by making Zoran’s products for them while they were transitioning to an Asian foundry.
Our first product was a 1K bit
2ns (nanosecond) access time RAM. There was nothing like it on the market. This was followed by a 4K bit 5ns access time RAM; again, unique in the extremely fast access time. A family of logic devices followed that were also unique in their
very high speed operation. Many of these parts had the datasheet timing specifications in pico seconds. Note that most integrated circuits at this time had specifications written in microseconds; a microsecond is one millionth of a second.
A nano second is one billionth of a second, and a pico second is one trillionth of a second. For reference, light goes about 4 inches in a nanosecond.
In my opinion our first president was
not a very good manager. His management style was to praise in private and criticize in public. This led to a company culture where it was OK to second guess and criticize other’s actions, which led to much defensive posturing, which was
a hindrance to creative thinking. In the second year of his presidency I got a call from one of our Venture Capitalist investors and board member who was writing the president’s review. I unloaded my frustrations concerning him which
led to a two day offsite with the founders and him with a management expert facilitator which led to him being fired. He was replaced by another experienced manager from another semiconductor company, who wasn’t much better, he just had different
management issues, like thinking he was so smart that he did not need to prepare for meetings, presentations, etc. He was smart, but preparation is critical when trying to develop business.
Synergy
was successful, just not successful enough to ever go public through an Initial Public Offering, (IPO). We almost did twice, but each time the semiconductor market hit a down turn and we had to put the IPO on hold. We built a new wafer fabrication
facility with better equipment, and more capability, although it is questionable in hindsight if we needed it, and it was very expensive for a small struggling company. We licensed our high speed technology to several companies, including Toshiba.
The license deal included having them make our products for us in their Kawasaki Japan facility. Their manufacturing expertise was much better than we had in our small facility in Santa Clara, and their yields were much better. I think we could
have gone totally fabless and been more successful. But that is in hindsight. The license agreement with Toshiba allowed (required) me to go to Japan many times, which I did enjoy. We also licensed the technology to a company in the former
East Germany. This was a very interesting deal.
The Berlin wall had just come down and Germany was in the process of reunification. The German Government wanted to bring modern technology
to the former Eastern Germany to create useful jobs and to develop their own modern manufacturing capability. We applied and were picked to be the provider of bipolar technology to a company in Frankfort Oder. Several of us were intimately
involved in the technology transfer process, which meant flying to Berlin and driving the fifty or so miles to Frankfort Oder. Frankfort Oder was stuck in a time warp. It was inside of the former East Germany communist sector, and had been subject
to the restrictions of the iron curtain which did not allow any Western technology equipment to be sent in. The company’s equipment was antiquated and much of it was home brew. They were running an obsolete TTL bipolar technology that
they had reversed engineered from Texas Instruments IC’s they had removed from a DEC computer they had somehow acquired. In fact the entire operation was directed at making copies of this PDP 11 computer that was at least 10 years behind
the state of the art. We accomplished the technology transfer, which involved reequipping the wafer fabrication facility with new modern equipment and setting up and running our ultrafast bipolar technology. George Brown actually moved to Frankfort
O to manage this transfer.
There were several interesting sidelights, at least interesting to me during my time in Frankfort O and Berlin. The hotel we stayed in in Frankfort O, was the
best in the city. From my perspective it was very backward. Each room had its own bathroom, so that was good, but the bathroom was a very small closet in which you did everything, including taking a shower in one spot. No shower curtain,
everything just got wet.
One afternoon Larry Pollock and I had some spare time and decided to explore the Eastern part of Berlin. I was the driver and he was the navigator.
We knew that the maps were bad because the communists did not want to make it easy for invading armies to get around, and on top of this the new unified German Government was replacing communist road signs with the old street names from before the war.
We got hopelessly lost. As I was backing out after going down a one way road the wrong way, I said to Larry “we are really lost, what are we going to do?” He said “what do you mean we? I’m going to get out and say
A.M.F. yoyo and get a cab back to our hotel.” I of course asked “what did A.M.F. yoyo mean?” Larry: “It means adios mother f#*ker, you’re on your own”. I was laughing so hard I almost drove into a
post.
We had a German to English translator who was a marathon runner, ranked #100 in the world. I was a runner at the time, not on his level but we shared stories. One that
stands out concerns shopping with our wives. He said that he could run 26 miles in a little over two hours, but when he went shopping with his wife after 20 minutes his back hurts, his legs hurt, this feet hurt. His wife is just fine. I have
the same problem shopping with my wife. They are the stronger species for sure.
Synergy was ultimately bought by Micrel Inc. for not much money, most of which went to our VC backers, although
they lost money on their investment. Micrel laid off all of us Synergy founders except for Tom Wong, who they wanted for his design expertise. Ralph Cognac had left Synergy several years before this so he was not directly affected. Larry
retired, George eventually went to work for Micrel as a Product Engineer, and I was left looking for another job.