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Biographic Note
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Mr. Elmer Wolff Jr was involved
with the Texas Instruments semiconductor program almost from the very
beginning. TI had been eager to enter the newly emerging semiconductor
business, and, in 1951, the company paid $25,000 to Western Electric for a
transistor license and soon thereafter established the TI Semiconductor
Division. Mr. Wolff became the fifth employee of the TI Semiconductor
Division, joining in August, 1953, and reporting directly to Mark Sheperd.
Prior to joining TI, Elmer had received a BSEE degree for SMU in 1952 and
stayed on as a grad student, teaching lab courses until receiving his MSEE
in 1953. During his 33 year career with TI, he received 15 U.S. patents
related to semiconductor devices and processes, wrote the first TI device
data sheets, did extensive device development for the first commercial
transistor radio (the Regency TR1), presented a paper at the Wescon show in
1957 on the first diffused silicon power device he had developed, and was
the TI representative to the EIA group. From the late 1950s, Mr. Wolff
held engineering management positions for TI in Europe, and managed
operations in Canada and Central America. He retired in 1986 from corporate
engineering, after a 33 year career at TI. He currently resides in the Dallas area, and remains active in semiconductor engineering.
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Oral History – Elmer Wolff Jr
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This Oral History was developed from material supplied
by Mr. Elmer Wolff Jr
In August 2001.
It was the policy of Texas
Instruments in 1953 to introduce each new engineering employee by exposing
him to a complete orientation of the area of business or project to which
he would be assigned. I was extremely fortunate to be teamed with Boyd
Cornelison, one of the original TI technical people to attend the Western
Electric Transistor Symposium in 1952 (the other TI attendees were Mark
Shepherd, Pat Haggerty and Bob Olson). The location of the semiconductor
project was in one corner of the mechanical machine shop that was part of
the Texas Instruments military equipment group. The Semiconductor Activity
at TI started as a project and the project engineer was Mark Shepherd.
After my orientation training, Boyd and I became very close friends and
bonded together so well that we were almost viewed as “Siamese twins” by
our fellow workers. It was unusual to see either one of us without the
other, even at lunch or coffee break. At that time, we were both reporting
directly to Mark Shepherd, and as I remember it, the entire Semiconductor
Group consisted of a total of five professional employees. This group was
small enough that we would all be able to fit into Mark’s office every
Saturday morning to review the results from the past week and plan for the
next week’s activities.
Wolff
Oral History, Page 2
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