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Oral History – Rob Kleppinger (Continued)
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At some point the Somerville
plant eased out of the manufacturing business and was used only for
research and development. That
plant has since been demolished. In
the late 1970s, RCA expanded the semiconductor manufacturing activities
again by setting up yet another plant in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. I think this had originally been a
manufacturing facility for the RCA computer business. I went down to this plant in 1980 and
stayed until it closed in 1986. I
started in a small development group there and then moved over to
production, and then to Special Projects (such as particle contamination
and diffusion measurements in silicon).
When the Palm Beach Gardens plant closed in 1986, I returned to
Somerville and was involved in a variety of special projects for Harris,
until I retired in 1991.
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Oral History – Rob Kleppinger (Continued)
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These two photos document some of the early
germanium diodes and small signal transistors which Mr. Rob Kleppinger
worked with during the very early days of RCA transistor development at the
Advanced Development Group in the Harrison NJ Tube Division. In the lower photo, the two green units
on the left are NPN types (green color was used to quickly identify NPN
transistors). The TA191 was the
developmental type that was the basis for the production 2N35 type.
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To Kleppinger Oral History, Page 4
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