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Oral History – Norm Ditrick (Continued)
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RCA did relatively well with
integrated circuits. We made quite
a few and had a ready market.
Because I was in development, not manufacturing, I moved on about
this time to other development projects, such as high frequency bipolar
devices – the initial work was for the military and then later for TV when
all-solid-state TVs were developed.
Some of these circuits we developed would perform up to 1.4 GHZ, and
ultimately were used as pre-scalers in the electronic tuners on all RCA
TVs. This was so successful that we
had set up two assembly lines, with the primary line at the Findlay plant
and a backup line at the Somerville plant. This backup was necessary to support
large scale TV production – we couldn’t afford to interrupt the high volume
production and so established the backup line.
The next project I was assigned
to involved the use of Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) as comb filters for
TVs. The comb filter was a special
device that could be used to eliminate interference (such as “herring bone
patterns”) on a TV set. This
project was a great success technically and the process was transferred to
the production plant located in West Palm Beach, Florida, and I made a
number of trips down there to assist in setting up production. In the end,
unfortunately, RCA decided to buy these parts from another source and we
never got into production.
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Oral History – Norm Ditrick (Continued)
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My next project was developing
“rad-hardened” integrated circuits.
These were made using Silicon on Sapphire technology, which used a
thin film of silicon grown on a sapphire substrate. We did complementary MOS, and the object
of this program was to make devices that were radiation hard. The primary technique in this process
was to etch away the silicon substrate between the devices, which would
provide electrical isolation. This
would eliminate any effect of radiation traveling through the substrate to
adjoining devices. We also
developed quite a few other techniques that would contribute to radiation
hardening. These were never sold
commercially, and went directly to the military. In fact, this was a classified project, so we could not have
sold these commercially in any case.
I think that much of the semiconductor development work that was
done at RCA in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was quite pioneering and we were
frequently ahead of the competition technically – unfortunately, we
couldn’t seem to take advantage commercially of these developments. In the end, RCA was bought out be
General Electric. There was quite a
bit of overlap at that point with the GE development groups and the RCA
facility was closed – we were all laid off. Technically, I was retired because I was over 55.
Here are a few more comments
about the early work with transistors.
I think I have mentioned the names of some of the engineers that I
first worked with :
Go
To Ditrick Oral History, Page 6
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