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To act as an industry “pump
priming” function for the expanded use of transistors, TI added some
applications engineers to the Semiconductor team. At first, this
applications group consisted of two people – Jim Nygaard and Ed Millis (if
my memory is correct). TI had to develop the application, take it to a
potential customer, and work with the customer’s engineers to explain the
circuits and how to use the devices.
In the early manufacturing
stages, we did not have enough production controls to produce all the
transistors with the same electrical characteristics, such as noise levels
low enough to become the input device in a hearing aid amplifier. As a
result, we had to select devices from a manufactured batch that met a
combination of gain and low noise sufficient to support the hearing aid
business. We used a color code to identify the performance level of
specific devices. Can you imagine using colored paint (yellow, green and
red) to identify transistors that could be used to make a complete set for
a hearing aid? Well, that’s how we did it in the beginning, and we didn’t
think it was such a bad idea at the time.
All of the engineering types at
TI back then built circuits, like amplifiers and oscillators, using these
early transistors, and they kept these things in their desks and would do
experiments on this stuff. I suspect that Mark Shepherd knew all about
this, and I think that some of these experiments ended up on Pat Haggerty’s
desk.
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