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Oral History – Jack Haenichen
(Continued)
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In
fact, the general manager at Motorola at the time I decided to go there was
a man named Les Hogan. Dr. Hogan was a “microwave guy” and he liked my
background because I had studied both microwaves and semiconductors. He
said that someday they will merge and he was very prophetic there, because
they have. At that time the devices being made were real low frequency
stuff. In fact, the first really fast transistors were made by Philco –
they were called MADT transistors, “Micro Alloy Diffused”, and it was a
very awkward, but very clever system for making devices that had very thin
base regions, so they had very high speed. The problem with it was that it
was a “one-sy two-sy” process; in other words, you only fabricated one
device at a time.
And,
Bell Labs, right at that same time, had been working on this mesa
transistor idea. Harry Knowles was instrumental in that, and the mesa
transistor was the precursor to the planar transistor. Like planar, photo-lithographic
techniques allowed you made thousands of devices at one crack, instead of
one at a time like the Philco MADT, even though they weren’t as good
initially.
Here’s
where I’m going to give Dan Noble total full credit, because although he
was not a semiconductor guy at all, he looked at that and said, “I don’t
care if they aren’t as good right now, this will win out, because its more
producible”.
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Oral History – Jack Haenichen
(Continued)
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It was a
major decision he made that influenced everything that Motorola did. They
had a small group trying to emulate the Philco work, and he squelched it.
He said that we had a limited amount of resources and engineering talent,
and we are going to put them all to work on this mesa idea. This was
before the planar came up.
5) How many people were
working on semiconductors at Motorola when you started?
There
were probably 50 professionals, and a group of technicians and assemblers.
When I got there, Al Philips was there, and I was going to work for him.
He had been working on silicon at GE, and we had an OEM sales force at that
time, as well as a distributor network for the limited products we were
making. I remember vividly, there was a thing called the Green Sheet that
would come from the field guys, every month, and I remember this one that
came in from the field, moaning about the fact that we weren’t competitive
and at the end he said, “We must have silicon, silicon, silicon transistors
now!!!!” He really kicked us in the butt and it was a good thing.
Go
To Haenichen Oral History, Page 5
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