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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (544704)	1/18/2010 3:12:11 PM
From: Taro	Respond to of 1574096

Jean Hoerni's patent of the 'planar process' (at Fairchild) was crucial to making true monolithic ICs. The T.I. concurrent effort was a hybrid 'chip-and-wire' solution only. Quite primitive and with no LSI futures while not scalable. I knew Jean well. Coming to age he had an expensive (not as expensive as Bob Noyce though) divorce and married a young, sleek and quite attractive Mexican girl. Juvenated by her he went mountain climbing in South America and similar stuff. Jean was a (south) Swiss national with a great French accent and founded a couple of companies like Amelco, Intersil among others. /Taro A footnote for CJ: feel free to use any of this for your Wiki entries :)

To: i-node who wrote (544704)	1/18/2010 4:42:46 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574096

"What is your point?" That the government was part of the whole process. Without its involvement, the industry would have grown a lot slower. Most technology has, in its very beginnings, some sort of government influence. The semiconductor industry was very reliant for research that was done in universities characterizing materials and developing the theoretical basis behind their products. Where would chip design be without Conway and Mead? Their work was fundamental for the development of the techniques by which chips are designed. "There were certainly consumer electronics on the market before '69 having ICs, one of which was the aforementioned hearing aid application which was mid-60s." Well, duh. Yeah, the end of the '60s saw commercial applications. But from 1960 through about 1963, the government bought all of the chips. Every last one. After that, the cost of production had dropped enough to actually build them into consumer electronics. "The point is that the government did not hand anyone a sackfull of money and say, "Go create an integrated circuit" " No, they didn't. But ICs were the result of years of basic research that was primarily funded by the government. The other part was done by Bell Labs, often in conjunction with the government.

To: i-node who wrote (544704)	1/18/2010 4:52:49 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574096

"In fact, it was because of government programs like the Apollo program and the Minuteman program that ICs became commercially viable. They were the only market for $1000 ICs in the early 1960s and consumed all of the production in the early years." The Apollo program at least through Apollo 11 (the moon lander) had onboard computers built by IBM using SLT, ie Solid Logic Technology). SLT was single transistors sealed in quartz and mounted on ceramic substrates using flip chip attachment. Apollo 11 landed in July,1969. The Apollo craft used SLT, past 1970 since the hybrid circuits had already been designed into them years earlier.. IBM, however, used SLT circuits its commercial System 360 machines in 1964. I believe IBM began building Monolithic System Technology chips, ie all on one silicon chip, around 1963 including a 16 bit bipolar SRAM. Other chip companies were building monolithic IC's about that time. Around 1970, PMOS devices were prominent...IBM, for it's own use, introduced NMOS devices about that time also. UNIVAC computers was built with contained vacuum tubes... "The central complex of the UNIVAC was about the size of a one-car garage: fourteen feet by eight feet by eight feet high. It held the mercury memory unit and all the C.P.U. circuitry. The exterior of the unit was composed of hinged gray metal doors that could be opened to access the circuitry racks. In the middle of one of the long sides of the unit, there was a clear Plexiglas door to allow access to the heart of the system: it was a walk-in computer. The vacuum tubes produced an enormous amount of heat, so a high capacity cooled water and blower air conditioner system was necessary to cool the unit. In addition to the central complex, there were eight UNISERVO tape drives, an operator cabinet, and a console typewriter/printing machine. In the beginning printing was done offline by the UNIPRINTER, which resembled an overgrown typewriter with an attached tape drive. A much-needed 600 line per minute printer (at 130 characters per line) was added in 1954. The full system had 5200 vacuum tubes, weighed 29,000 pounds, and exhausted 125 kilowatts of electrical power." velocityguide.com