Category Silicon Valley

A Personal History of Silicon Valley This title may be a bit overstated as to what this blog will cover, but since I did start in Silicon Valley in 1965, my work experience here does cover a lot of time…

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…

Advanced Micro Devices 1976 – We tried to sell the ideas and patent applications we had developed to several semiconductor companies, including AMD.  That was not successful, but as we were leaving the AMD conference room one of my ex-coworkers…

You may know that for the past 2 years, my co-author Luc Olivier Bauer and I have been working on a book. It is about the history of Semiconductor Technology. It starts in the late 1950’s and goes through the…

Fairchild Semiconductor My first job as a graduate Electrical Engineer was with Honeywell in Minneapolis.  Not exactly Silicon Valley.  I took the Honeywell job after a good on-campus interview as I was about to graduate with a BSEE from the…

Global Locate 2005 – Global Locate was a very cool startup making Global Positioning System (GPS) integrated circuits.  I was hired to be Vice President of Quality and Reliability, but I was soon promoted to VP Operations.  I have already…

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…

High speed rail in California   Gary Richards, AKA Mr. Roadshow in the San Jose Mercury newspaper asked readers to weigh in on whether the State of California should continue with the High Speed Train from Northern California to Southern California…

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…

Tropian 2000 – Tropian was a startup, working on developing a transceiver chip for the cell phone market.  I was the Vice President of Operations with responsibilities for all aspects of order fulfillment including manufacturing partner relationships for wafer fab,…