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At that
time Motorola had several other divisions – one was called Automotive,
another was Military/Government Electronics; they had a Consumer Products
Division that made televisions, but their biggest and most important
division was their Communications Division, which made two-way radios for
entities like police and taxi. They were, and I believe still are, the
world leader in that business.
Dan Noble
had been hired by Motorola years prior; he was a professor at a college
back east, I believe in Connecticut, in electronics. He invented, among
other things, the squelch circuit, for radio. He came in and spear-headed
that whole Communications Division operation, and got them to a world
leadership position. They were making equipment with vacuum tubes at that
time, and of course they wanted to switch to solid state devices – so, that
was the genesis of the Semiconductor Division – to supply parts to other
divisions of Motorola. As time progressed, the Semiconductor Operation
became almost as large as the Communications Division, and we became
suppliers to companies worldwide, including government entities.
4) Where had you been
before Motorola?
That was my first job. I
worked briefly at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ, so I had a great interest in
semiconductors. In school, I had studied semiconductors and microwaves.
Go
To Haenichen Oral History, Page 4
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