Transistor Museum Oral History Ralph Greenburg Page 3

EARLY TRANSISTOR HISTORY AT MOTOROLA

An Interview with Ralph Greenburg

Historic Semiconductor Devices and Applications

Oral History – Ralph Greenburg

(Continued)

I put together a resume emphasizing my training as a Electronic Technician in the Navy, my work at Boeing on the electronic equipment used in the RB47 project and my additional familiarity with Naval equipment with my Philco experience.

Motorola then invited me for an interview at their Head Quarters on Augusta Blvd in Chicago. The technical part of the interview lasted about five minutes since they accepted the fact that I as familiar with Military equipment. Then they donned their Chamber of Commerce hats and told me all the virtues of living in Phoenix. The cost of living was low and they showed me brochures of ranch styled homes selling for $9000 to $12000. The next phase was a written test that was a couple levels above Ohm’s law. About a week later my job application was accepted and I resigned from Philco. We hired a Moving Van to transport what small amount of furniture we owned, bought a small trailer to haul the crib, playpen and smaller household items and off we went to Phoenix. First we stopped in Kaysville, Utah to drop of the kids with my wife’s family. I arrived at the research facility on May 24, 1954 and after checking in I sat in the lobby for a while wondering what was in store for me. Then Andy Jacobsen came out and told me I could join a semiconductor research group instead of the Military engineering department if I so desired.

Oral History – Ralph Greenburg

(Continued)

Fortunately while at Philco I received a monthly Tech-Rep Bulletin and once they included articles about the basics of semiconductors for three months running. The articles were very well written in terms that an electrical engineer could understand. I was fascinated by what could be accomplished with this embryonic technology. So by a twist of fate I joined Andy’s small Applications group.

What was going on in Motorola regarding transistor development at this time Types of transistors, size of groups?

At this time Motorola had abandoned work on point contact devices and was developing small junction Germanium transistors. As I recall there were five women on the production line, about ten engineers and physicists doing the design efforts, one packaging guy and six of us in applications. The whole group reported to Dr. Virgil Bottom whose field of study had been on rare earths.

Within a month or so Dr. William Taylor was hired from the University of Nebraska where he had developed large junction Germanium transistors. And so we had taken the first step to developing Power transistors.

Go To Greenburg Oral History, Page 4

PAGE 3