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Oral History – Wilf Corrigan
(Continued)
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What types of work
assignments did you perform and do you recall any of the Transitron
employees you interacted with?
My job
was to fix any real-time problems on the line. Improve process, increase
yield, lower costs - no big breakthroughs, mainly evolutionary
changes. I interfaced mainly with production management and
development. George Wells [9] , who I have maintained a long relationship
with. (Transitron, Fairchild, LSI Logic). Production control - Bob
Swanson CEO of Linear technology). Engineers of other product lines,
Jim Diller CEO of several Silicon Valley startups, John Royan CEO Cinergy
3, San Diego. Martin Ouderwald, John Van derAa, Equipment. Nick de
Woolf, Test equipment. (Later started Teradyne).
Transitron
had probably peaked in 1960. Grown junction was one of the major
product lines, and was essentially obsolete. Fairchild had announced Planar
technology, and even mesa tech was ahead of bar tech. The revenues
at that time were around $100 million. They made a range of devices, power
transistors as well. John Royan (John and I started another company) was
involved in the power transistors. He started in 1959. Another source
(for you) would be Pierre LeMond. He was the top engineer. I doubt whether
they used the term “VP” at that time, but we was the chief technologist and
all of engineering reported to him. I doubt if Pierre was more than 27 at
the time.
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Oral History – Wilf Corrigan
(Continued)
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Most the guys were a
generation or half a generation older than I was at the time. So, I just
happened to come in at the particular point in the industry where it was
very easy for younger people to get senior jobs. I knew, for example, Bob
Noyce, and he was running Fairchild Semiconductor well before he was 30.
The crystal technology at
that time would be considered crude by today’s standards?
Oh yeah. The crystals,
for example, looked like an onion, not all at what we think of as a
crystal. The actual crystal, as it came out of the crystal grower, was
almost spherical. When you think of a (modern) silicon crystal, whatever
the diameter, you think of a (cylinder) salami. And what we used for the
junctions was like a small tennis ball. And really, the device was made in
the materials dept. By the time you had grown the crystal, you have really
made the device, and all the slicing into the bars was simply mechanical.
You had no control of the device characteristics at that point – that was
all determined.
Go
To Corrigan Oral History, Page 4
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