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Oral History – Mary Anne Potter
(Continued)
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production people during shift
change and report to the rest of the engineers and the task force leader at
about 8. By about 10 AM, I'd go to my apartment, take a short swim, and
sleep till about 1. I'd be back at work by 2:30 PM for the 1st
shift to 2nd shift transition and would work with the QC
inspector on 1st shift's work until about 8 PM. Then I'd go to
the nurse's station, just below the production area, and nap till about
10:30 PM, get up for the shift change meetings and the early part of 3rd
shift, go downstairs and nap, to be back for the shift change meeting and
then the engineering meeting. Frequently I'd be called from my naps in the
health center to go upstairs to look at anomalies or to resolve process
related questions. This schedule lasted several months.
My understanding of the
processes, the problems, and the use of problem solving techniques
involving inputs from the people who were directly involved significantly
influenced the way in which I successfully managed efforts for the rest of
my career.
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Oral History – Mary Anne Potter
(Continued)
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Technical
Observations Regarding the Manufacture of Early TI
Integrated
Circuits.
Sometimes I now inter-mix the
TI language and the west coast IC language because I worked both places. As
I recall, however, at TI the silicon substrates that were used as the
semiconductor starting point were called slices even when they were
completely through all the processing steps. On the west coast they were
called “wafers.” The production areas where all processing took place prior
to the IC’s being separated into individual units were called “front ends”
at TI. They were called “wafer fabs” on the west coast. The first slices I
worked with at TI were ¾ inch in diameter. Today 8-inch is very common and
12-inch is in some production areas. For the quadruple-diffused Minuteman
designs, there were four separate deposition/diffusion processes to dope
the silicon in such a way that both NPN and PNP transistors were formed
along with various types of capacitors, resistors, and diodes. This
required an intricate set of steps going back and forth from the diffusion
area to the photoresist area and finally to the metalization area back to
the photoresist area. It also required achieving more precise doping levels
than the processes were capable of delivering routinely. When I first
started, the initial oxidation was done in an oxygen-rich environment
where steam was introduced from boiling water in quartz bubblers.
Potter
Oral History, Page 5
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