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

To: Praveen Johal who wrote (25941)	11/14/1997 12:30:00 AM
From: Time Traveler	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583371

Praveen, Ashok Kumar and the analysts: These analysts probably read SI posts, especially Ashok Kumar himself. The 25th anniversary issue of the EE-Times magazine had a small featured blip on Jerry Sanders: "Jerry Sanders, another horseman came to Fairchild through Motorola, but not with Hogan. With a BSEE from the University of Illinois in 1958, Jerry Sanders went to work for Douglas Aircraft, where he had to design a regulated power supply that wouldn't drive magnetic amplifiers crazy every time there was a surge on a plane's 28-V line. He started designing in Motorola's zener diodes, which led him to join Motorola in Phoenix in 1959 as an application engineer. "He moved to Chicago as an inside sales engineer and soon became district sales manager. Motorola had developed a fantastic switch, Sanders recalls, the 2N834, a silicon planar epitaxial transistor. It had the specifications of dreams ---- low Vsat, high beta, high breakdown voltage, high switching speed. The transistor had one significant limitation: Motorola couldn't make it. Sanders says he "sold the hell out of it," but Motorola couldn't deliver. Then he "sold the hell out of" a 2N834 with relaxed specifications. "Sanders' selling prowess came to the attention of Fairchild, which he joined as a salesman in the spring of 1961. Fairchild figured that if Sanders could sell a myth, he could probably do well selling something real. He could. He moved up to the positions of district sales manager, regional sales manager, area sales manager, entertainment sales manager, consumer-products sales manager and, in 1967, director of marketing. "In November 1968, three months after Hogan's arrival, Sanders was invited to leave Fairchild with a generous severance package. With initial funding from a group led by The Capital Group, he assumed leadership of two groups planning a new linear-IC company. One May 1, 1969, Advanced Micro Devices was officially incorporated, with Sanders as chairman and chief executive officer." Jerry is obviously a very brilliant salesman despite being an engineer very early in his career. He is very good at selling the hell out of a product that it is not what cracked up to be. He got lucky once in the dawn of the semiconductor industry but blundered in the present matured semiconductor industry (K6 of today). Remember nowadays it takes three to tango --- engineering, manufacturing, and marketing. AMD was founded to produce linear ICs, in which I had used quite a few of their linear devices myself in my very early career to great satisfaction, but in the mid-80's, this company dumped its linear lineage and concentrated on digital. Does anybody know why? John.