Transistor Museum Oral History Ralph Greenburg Page 9

EARLY TRANSISTOR HISTORY AT MOTOROLA

An Interview with Ralph Greenburg

Historic Semiconductor Devices and Applications

Oral History – Ralph Greenburg

(Continued)

One day Bill Roehr decided to chat with John Finch one of the silicon transistor product managers. John soon came up with the Epi-Base process and the power devices were as rugged as RCA’s single diffused but with higher frequency cutoff and could be produced in PNP and NPN versions. We had a very marketable product. This eventually doomed the sales of Germanium power and in the early 70’s we sold this product line to Lansdale one of the “Trailing Edge” companies. It is interesting that Motorola’s CEO learned about abandoning our cornerstone product by reading about it in Electronic News. No one in marketing or the product group had informed the higher ups. Needless to say there were a few harsh words bandied about.

Motorola lagged the industry in getting into Integrated Circuits at first we called them Molecular Electronics. Finally we developed some simple computer chips and in the mid 60’s an analog group was formed. At that time our sales force was getting inquires from stereo and TV companies as to whether Motorola had any ICs for their equipment. The answer was no, but the Applications Department started an effort to get the Analog group to develop such circuits as IF amplifiers, audio amplifiers and even chroma demodulators. However it wasn’t until corporate put some pressure to develop parts for the Quasar program that the group got the message. By the early 70’s, there was a fairly complete line of consumer ICs.

Oral History – Ralph Greenburg

(Continued)

My exposure to all product groups occurred during my tenure in Market Research where my boss and I would sit down with each group at least once a year to discuss product and market trends. This included trips to locations in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. At that time Motorola really was a super market where one could buy almost any kind of semiconductor. This broad line approach was good in that we could discuss sales with almost every electronic equipment manufacture but because of production limitations we sometimes could not always meet large volume needs. One wag at Intel said Motorola was a mile wide and an inch deep. I suppose that made Intel, which only produced Micro Processors and Memory devices, an inch wide and a mile deep.

Although I worked with many different products, in all my 40 years it seemed as though I had a TO-3 stamped on my forehead. When I joined Strategic Marketing the General Manager had me compose a five year plan for Power Transistors independent of the one that the product group developed. Needless to say this somewhat hindered my relationship with that group. And even when I was in Market Research, guess who always headed the Power Transistor Forecast session at the WSTS meetings? Yours truly, that’s who!

Thanks very much, Ralph. This interview has been very informative and is an important historical contribution to the Transistor Museum.

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