the story of how Shockley recruited you
to go to work for him as well
so let me jump straight into when you're
at Shockley labs what specifically were
you doing in those first few months but
when I got the Shockley lab I didn't
know anything about something to note
there's really and that was very early
in the history of the industry there
wasn't an awful lot knowing when you
come right down to it I was a physical
chemist by training shocking new canvas
did some good things for him at Bell
Labs was what he needed one out here oh
my job turned out to be to set up some
of the diffusion technology and do
experiments to figure out how to make
the few silicon devices it was really a
learning experience what we were doing
was different than what have been tried
before we had to repeat some of the Bell
Labs experiments and then move on from
there it was really the interesting work
to do very exploratory in nature and
where did you get the equipment and the
materials to do this the equipment
materials generally weren't available
the stuff we bought for equipment with
standard laboratory kinds of things
laboratory furnaces generally heated by
glow bars we had to get up to high
temperatures you know 1200 1250 degree
centigrade in order to do the silicon
processing we wanted not many furnaces
were capable of operating those
temperature ranges but the standard
laboratory equipment that you could buy
didn't have temperature zones for
example typically these were tube
furnaces and we're big enough to put a
small piece of silicon in materials were
a problem in fact one of Shockley's
first major projects there was a new way
of growing silicon that would avoid the
contamination that generally came out of
the crucible that was a big project
although it never ended up quite being
functional other equipment we could buy
standard
bell jar evaporators for example which
were useful for putting down thin films
but we had to build a lot of ourselves I
remember building a a water system that
involves several five-gallon jars of
water connected together so you can't
get distilled water to rinse the wafers
with it was the building
laboratory-scale equipment from what you
could buy out of the typical laboratory
supply houses I've also read that the
jungles for the diffusion furnace
they're all blown by you in the
glassblowing that was one of my job in
my education and subsequent work I'd
done a lot of technical glassblowing
making the old glass jungles and let you
manipulate gases and purify materials so
I took the same technology and used it
for the controls over the diffusion
furnaces initially quite simple things
and then they became increasingly
complicated as we figured more things we
wanted to do now what because you were
breaking new ground I'm sure you know a
lot of mistakes who made it any stories
about things that went drastically wrong
right we were doing new things and some
of us and succeeded in doing some pretty
dumb things we had one engineer who
sealed some silicon and some arsenic
into a quartz capsule and shoved it into
the furnace he forgot to look up the
vapor pressure of arsenic and the tube
exploded and arsenic vapors well around
the laboratory that was a case of a
fairly poor judgment but no we had some
accidental successes one problem we were
having was making silicon junctions that
had what we call hard breakdowns I
really showed the kind of characteristic
you wanted in a diode and I was
diffusing gallium into silicon and
controlling the gallium concentration by
water vapor and hydrogen to determine
how much gallium oxide evaporated and
one time I ran out of water and the net
result was a lot more gallium evaporated
it formed puddles on the silicon wafer
the wafer came out just looking terrible
those are the hardest junctions we ever
made in retrospect it turned out that
the liquid gallium metal get heard the
impurities that were in the silicon
clothing the diodes to be bad in the
first place and those were actually the
diodes who were used by Shockley saw and
noise in their study on space charge
recombination is they were ones that
behaves theoretically the way the diode
should and that was also the story about
you melting some long there's some
expensive material what was it one of
the furnaces that I tried to design
after deciding we needed a long flat
zone I used the platinum winding I
ordered a significant amount of platinum
wire since the melting point of platinum
was above where we had to be I put
double windings on the ends to
compensate for the heat losses and
actually got a fairly good flat tone in
the furnace unfortunately the furnace
only lasted for about two weeks before
the element burned out it turns out that
while platinum doesn't melt at these
temperatures somehow or other is
Sublime's we took the furnace apart
there were a little crystals of platinum
away from where the wire had been and we
had to send it off to a recovery company
to salvage this several thousand dollars
worth of platinum
furnace that did bill Shockley get
involved very much in what you were
doing you know sort of looking over your
shoulder
Shockley didn't get involved very much
in what I was doing you know he was the
physicist I was a chemist so he didn't
think he had to know everything that I
presumably was doing he was useful for
the broad concepts the one place he did
get involved where we disagreed fairly
strongly was when he wanted to change
his objective for making a silicon
transistor to making a four layer diode
he was going from a general purpose
device to one with at best very narrow
applications and one required
essentially the same technology and just
from a technical point of view did that
really change the equipment and no it
couldn't he'd change the equipment much
probably simplified some things because
they're only required contacts on the
top and the bottom didn't require any
thing to any interior layers but that
was mainly a device assembly
simplification the processing was pretty
much the same with using diffusions and
the evaporations of metal and a sort of
thing i'm just looking back how much
progress do you think you made in sort
of the 15 writing months that you were
there in perfecting the process what was
it Unite's leaps and bounds or it was
slow going but I don't think we moved
the state-of-the-art ahead very much
looking back at it it was a really a
dirty facility it was hardly more than a
Quonset hut no air conditioning no
cleaner of capability at all the net
result was we are very difficult time
making devices with good electrical
characteristics we learned a lot of
things not to do
and you know when we went off and
started Fairchild we could use that
knowledge of what not to do to start off
in a new direction with a much better
idea where we wanted to go eventually
okay well just moving on to Fairchild
when I interviewed Jay last a while back
you he said he just thought it was
amazing that you've got this transistor
factory up from you know a empty factory
to a production floor in like eight
months could you just talk about your
how you saw that and you know your
perspective on the first several months
at the Fairchild the challenges and well
the Virchow got started again with the
idea of making a double the few silicon
transistor and we thought we knew the
direction we wanted to go we divided up
the various elements that had to be in
place among the the senior staff there
and each set out to do it I took on
diffusion and metallization for example
J and Bob Noyce took on developing photo
lithography I worked in some of the
assembly technology Sheldon Roberts
worried about growing silicon crystals
essentially we divided up the job among
the people who were used to doing the
kind of equipment preparation were
necessary and we went out then to get
the equipment we thought would be
suitable for what we were tackling we
built furnaces that took advantage of an
element that was available from Sweden
that was capable of going to these high
temperatures and not burning out in a
couple of weeks all of the equipment for
the photo lithography had to be
developed from scratch photo lithography
had been used for printed circuit boards
but we wanted to really apply it to
production silicon technology and that
required everything new we had to
developed a matchmaking technology as
well as the techniques for coating
wafers with the photoresist material and
so forth so it was an extensive amount
of new technology that we were bringing
to bear on our first product the machine
we made for making masks was one that
was developed internally initially using
three lenses for 16 millimeter movie
cameras and its depth three masks at a
time for the three different patterns
and by having them all tied together any
error and one was repeated the others of
the masks would actually align with one
another whether any special challenges
in procuring materials for transition
getting pure enough chemicals was always
a problem we frankly didn't know how
pure we had to get them so we got the
best available and pushed the suppliers
to continue to improve the purity the
silicon itself initially we thought we
had to grow our own crystals but I guess
an epoch who had been with us a
chocolate set up a company at that time
to grow silicon crystals and supply them
commercially so while we made our own
crystals in the very beginning as soon
as we could buy them on the outside we
abandoned that particular part of the
business and still our materials did you
ever work on anything like gallium
arsenide during a time of failure not
during that time later on after
Fairchild was well established in the
silicon business in the R&D lab we did
work with gallium arsenide and looked at
other materials we did enough with
gallium arsenide to convince ourselves
it wasn't going to replace silicon
generally now there's also the story of
about lash and I believe that you know
you encouraged him to to go off and
the capillaries and then eventually he
started his own company - it was my
technician for a good part of the time
there he helped me build the furnaces
and then when we developed the gold ball
bonding technology where small gold wire
was put through a glass capillary that
could be used to squish it on to the
make the contacts we had a problem that
the capillaries kept getting plugged so
we had to have a significant supply of
these art became very good at making
these things so he was encouraged by our
production people and Jean kleiner in
particular who was in charge of that
essentially the moonlight and make glass
capillaries on the outside deliver him
to us well that business grew and art
next upgraded the design of the furnaces
we'd build it Fairchild has started
supplying furnaces also from this
company electric glass and that was
really the first company I know of we
specifically set up to deliver equipment
to the semiconductor industry and and
was there any I guess there were no IP
issues back then I his furnace was based
on your furnace but you didn't
particularly mind about it wasn't down
by to the the furnaces we designed used
commercially available elements you know
there was nothing that we saw it
especially patentable in them and art
picked it up and improved it and as so
often is the case in the semiconductor
industry it wasn't long before the
furnaces being supplied on the outside
were better than the ones we were
building internally so you started
buying from electric glass eventually
yes we had other people got into the
furnace business also but that's been
repeated over and over again
but the company dedicated to supplying
the equipment that has a broad market
ends up doing a better job than an
in-house equipment supply capability
canned when we set up Intel we decided
we do nothing on equipment internally we
would work with the vendors and even if
this resulted in the technology we
developed getting transferred to the
rest of the industry would be the most
effective way for us to continue to grow
okay well let's move on to Intel I'll
get on to the supply relationship later
but just first wanted to ask your very
first fed until what were the challenges
in getting that up and running and
working I didn't tell the telling to the
first fab was just getting it done in a
hurry we said a blue it was four goals
that we had to accomplish before we
could really make devices and set up a
wager between the people who had to do
it and the people that were watching
this to see if it could be done these
were pretty aggressive
it required getting these things done by
the end of that first year now we
started really the beginning of August
and we wanted to get them done by the
end of December so it was really a
challenge just to get it done in fact
the last goal was actually achieved I
believe in the 31st of December with a
little fudging in order to make that
happen to remember the specific goals
one of them was to make a stable MOS
device which requires getting everything
purified and the like and that was the
last one it was accomplished but it was
accomplished by putting a barrier layer
and rather than by cleaning things up so
much that we could do it directly but
there these involved the usual things of
being able to make good junctions and so
forth or relatively trivial but things
that took a time to set up and the
challenge of going from essentially an
empty building to being able to
accomplish these things in the span of
August September October November
December just five months was really a
challenge we gave each of the engineers
a book of purchase orders each of the
engineers responsible for a particular
area not requisitions that had to go
through a purchase as a department or
anything but the engineer would talk to
the salesman for the equipment handwrite
the purchase order and hand it to him as
soon as the equipment was specified just
to get everything going in a hurry it
shocked the salesman quite often they
didn't know what to do with this kind of
a purchasing procedure but it was very
effective and it started okay and just
as a follow-on to that I've read in
Leslie Berlin's book that Eugene flat
went to the West kancho and basically
was buying stuff off the floor that was
kind of saying I'm sure that's the case
west honcho came at the right time of
year for us to do that
it was here locally as I recall and we
needed the equipment pretty badly I
think an evaporator came right off the
floor I don't remember what else but I
know rather than have the company
shipped the equipment back to their
factories if we could get a ship Intel
at that time it helped us get started
Murray now so in building that first
family Intel you could get all the
equipment and off the shelf from outside
was there anything you had to build I
don't remember us really having to build
everything we had to adapt a few things
in particular we had to adapt an
epitaxial reactor to deposit
polycrystalline silicon we tried to do
the silicon gate MOS
but the only thing we would build would
be a few relatively simple jigs and
fixtures we just tried to work with the
equipment industry you've talked about
this a little bit before but you know
companies like IBM and Ti build around
equipment and they was sort of holdouts
that they resisted buying from
independent suppliers for a long time
because they thought that was their
competitive edge but you were completely
the opposite of Intel but what was your
thinking in terms of just not wanting to
have any proprietary in-house the
thinking of our approach at Intel
resulted from some of the problems we
got an inner spirit child the typical
situation being we would build a first
generation of equipment it would work
what we learned would be picked up by
the equipment vendors and pretty soon
the equipment available on the outside
was better than the stuff we did
internally I mentioned earlier when this
happened on the fusion furnaces probably
the strongest example had to do with
epitaxial reactors again in the
beginning we had to build our own there
was no equipment industry to supply them
but we build a couple of clued users
that worked after a fashion but the
commercial machines turned out to be a
lot better than what we were doing
internally so it wasn't long before we
had to abandon our internal efforts and
adopt what was available on the outside
and we began to see this as a pattern
that you just couldn't maintain state of
the art equipment internally because you
didn't have the customer base that
needed something new all the time let
you keep improving things she kind of
got locked into a generation for a long
period of time you would have to make a
big improvement which was a lot harder
to do so the equipment industry and the
semiconductor processing industry really
were very complementary
increasingly I think that split has been
recognized by everybody okay now in
talking about working closely with
supplies I believe you actually invested
in Applied Materials that's right I was
interested in at that time in doing some
venture capital kind of things Applied
Materials look like an interesting
possibility I guess I never expected me
there not being your biggest customer
in fact when Intel started doing much
with apply materials I sold my
investment in there they started to look
more like a conflict of interest okay so
if your investment wasn't so much to
support an equipment company but just a
VC time that's right I was looking at
her - the financial investment rather
than something to help us get equipment
later down the road and then I also
believe you're on the board of micro
master Joe Ross that's right I was on
the board of micro mask what a while
again I went on it early it was an
opportunity to get on the board of a
company and learn something about how
somebody else worked so it wasn't a
supplier like helping to get mass
Frontera it wasn't kind of it well that
was a case where we were buying quite a
bit of stuff from micro masks and I was
interested in making sure that we had a
good supply at that time Intel thought
occurred by its mass sunny outside also
we didn't have an internal mass waking
operation as the industry developed and
the mask demands became much greater
than they were in the beginning we just
had to start doing it in-house and about
the same time Intel set up a significant
math making operation in-house micro
math kind of disappeared
the timing worked out reasonably well
okay no were there any other supplies
that you worked really closely with in
those first few years lamb or Calais or
tank coral we worked out a variety of
them we certainly work with lamb quite a
bit and you know my involvement got less
and less in the details of these things
so my memory is increasingly fuzzy but
the idea was we would work with the
equipment vendors to get what we needed
now let's just talk about the Japanese
equipment vendors do you have any
recollection of when they sort of
appeared on your radar screen or when
you started buying from them all the the
place they really appeared was in photo
lithography the big steppers that were
coming out of Canon and Nikon there
wasn't a comparable piece of equipment
in the US and that was such a critical
part of the entire process we got very
concerned about where we're coming from
we had a major program in fact with the
Lichtenstein company to make a stepper
very sophisticated but also very
expensive than the development went too
slowly for them to really make an impact
on the market we ended up buying
Japanese equipment because it was the
best available there wasn't really an
alternative source for that I guess
that's still the case now with
lithography equipment yeah except for
ISO no European companies an alternative
the concern of course was that the
Japanese were going to expand from there
and take over the entire equipment
industry and then we got concerned that
we wouldn't have the access to it that
we had with other suppliers so that
became increasingly our paranoia as the
Japanese were made
increasing inroads into the whole
sonicate of your industry I understand
that Bob Noyce lobbied in support of the
lithography industry and there was a
particular sale of a company okay
and he tried to stop that from being
salted Japan do you have any
recollection I know uh Bob worried about
this a good deal and I'm sure he lobbied
to try to keep the the u.s. ahead there
was something that he thought was pretty
important and to a significant extent
that kind of thing was what drove the
industries were the summit tech
operation something were you know we
could do a lot of the equipment work in
one place well that's the next question
SEMATECH and some equipment suppliers
that I've talked to have said that
before SEMATECH they were frustrated
because the device makers wouldn't share
their you know their future roadmaps
with them therefore they couldn't design
equipment but after SEMATECH that
changed did you see that wall between
device and equipment companies in terms
of not sharing roadmaps and so forth I
hope that wasn't the case with Intel we
tried to make sure the equipment vendors
were there when we needed the equipment
but it's a complicated deal the
equipment vendors had to match the
schedules of the semiconductor suppliers
remember giving a talk at the semi a
meeting once trying to explain this
problem generally that you know the bus
leaves are a particular set of
technology at a particular time and if
they're not in that first bunch of
equipment they lose that whole
generation they can come in six months
later with a better machine but it
wouldn't be used by Intel the process
had already been
thought that the equipment was there so
they had to have the equipment ready to
match our schedule of new technology or
they had to wait typically three years
and get on the next load and this was
all it's a complicating feature because
it was a change in the way the industry
was operating
we wouldn't always buy a better
mousetrap it would only be on occasions
that we could get one qualified for use
in the next process okay
all right I just wanted to move on to
the wafer size transitions and by the
end you know fund of the ape the 18 20
millimeter and I was I'm told that Intel
pretty much funded the 6-inch transition
why did you feel that you had to do that
wafer size changes turn out to be pretty
tough but the advantages after you've
successfully moved to a larger wafer
they're pretty great we were setting up
a new plant that was the first one in
Albuquerque really first big one and
thought that six inch was the way we got
to go but requires debugging an entire
generation of the equipment to go to the
next level and that was quite expensive
and we weren't ready to take it on again
at the 8 inch which was not much later
in time but fortunately other people did
we move to the 8 inch and or no Marilee
doing 12 inch I continually am amazed
how big the wafers have gotten I don't
believe that I was convinced we go
beyond about 6 inches or
time okay you okay you don't need to
change the tape so so you never
considered putting up the money for the
200 millimeter transition you wanted
somebody else to do that yeah we we were
not ready to do it it was probably
something at that time where the memory
manufacturers would benefit more than we
would yeah we would have done it if
nobody else had but fortunately somebody
else stepped up to do it okay
just another question that I came up
with it was about the silicon cycles I
mean how did how did you did you have a
strategy to survive those at Intel the
silicon silicon cycles that you hold
down the thing you learn in this
industry fairly early is it tends to
have cycles we certainly did develop the
strategy philosophy was you never get
well in the old products these cycles
for the device suppliers were generally
price driven not volume driven in fact
if you plot the volume of devices you've
seen very very few dips and very mild
ones you plot the dollars and you see
very wide fluctuations cases though I
know one case for example it kind of
itch tin my mind where Intel's
most profitable product price fell
ninety percent in nine months while the
industry's good at decreasing cost they
can't follow that kind of a curve so
these cause fairly abrupt dislocations
but that price never comes back up you
only get the increased revenue by moving
on to the next generation of products so
it's very important that you continue
the R&D investment across the the bottom
of these cyclical recessions
you always have to have the new things
coming out the other end and this is
something that tends to be
counterintuitive to people used to
operating in other industries where you
cut your costs which means often cutting
development in one thing another during
the recessionary periods and build them
up again during the others here you
can't do that you have to keep
developing the new stuff in fact do you
even have to accelerate the development
of the new stuff across these negative
periods is there any opportunity to work
with equipment supplies during those
down Page do you know because there's an
opportunity to work with them the
problem is that those are periods when
you're typically not putting in new
capacity at least not in any quantity
you're developing new products you're
developing new technology so the
equipment supplier suffers even worse
than the device manufacturer their order
book often turns negative during that
time there's people start canceling
orders faster the new ones are coming in
it makes it reflects the problems that
this semiconductor device manufacturers
have much more strongly in equivalent
manufacturers and it can even be worse
than out on some of the material
suppliers you know if you look at
something that includes the desire to
decrease inventories during these
periods for example the silicon
suppliers may find you don't get any
orders at all for a while it's the
nature of this kind of a industry where
we depend on somebody further back in
the line as a poor guy at the end of the
chain gets really whipped during these
recessions
you try to do something to make it at
least so nobody dies during the period
that the companies are there oh and you
need them to come back but it's pretty
traumatic for every but
now did these cycles exist going back
like the Fairchild days for example that
was I think these cycles have existed
about as long as the industry as I
remember them in the early 60s we
weren't doing an awful lot of business
back in the 50s but they they come no
two of them are exactly alike but the
one characteristic they seemed to share
is a price collapse so Gordon did you
often visit the SEMICON shows and if you
did you know where they was that useful
having all that under the under the one
roof I didn't often visit my I did
certainly a few times again I was
getting farther away from making the
decisions than this kind of stuff so it
wasn't so important that I looked at the
equipment Oh certainly Intel had large
gangs of people crawling all over the
shows looking at all the equipment was
coming out they were very important to
we kept track of what the industry was
going to supply us with okay all right
um okay well I just moved to the museum
soundbites just you know talking about
Moore's law and how speculative were
your early predictions that later became
known as the original paper which
Moore's law got its name made a
prediction for ten years that the most
complex integrated circuits would go
from about 60 components to something
like 60,000 a thousandfold increase in
complexity that was a wild extrapolation
of very little data I was just trying to
get across the idea that integrated
circuits were going to be the route to
cheap electronics
something that was not clear at the time
and amazingly enough that 10 doublings
and complexity that I predicted turned
out to be nine doublings actually pretty
close
much closer had any basis to be but
they've got the name Moore's law which
is stuck there everything that changes
exponentially ever since okay all right
okay the next one I've got here to what
extent was it apparent to you that this
almost infinite doubling was physically
possible or put another way when did you
become aware of the durability the first
prediction for ten years was all I was
willing to state 1975 I redid it changed
the slope and again expected a decade or
so to be all who are looking at and in
fact we stayed on that amazingly closely
ever since in fact if anything we've
done better than my revised prediction
in seventy-five
but someday all Exponential's and
physical quantities predicted disaster
and we're getting pretty close to
molecular dimensions and the devices
were making now and that's going to
become a fundamental limit now we can
continue to shrink things so it's going
to change after another two or three
process generations I don't know exactly
when I don't know where this is this is
a repetitive one that they've gotten
here were you surprised by the success
or the accuracy of the early predictions
I was surprised there was no reason
really to believe quantitatively that
was going to be that close down we're at
the point where people in the industry
recognize they have to move that faster
they fall behind it's a funny industry
the next generation of technology gives
you performance improvements reliability
improvements and cost improvements
simultaneously if you fall behind the
leading edge
and the kind of products that need it
you fall behind on all fronts so it's
very important for participants to stay
on that leading edge okay in that
similar vein how extraordinary do you
think semiconductor price price
performance is compared with other
technologies and is it accidental or a
forced outcome as a result of this
investment to keep up the price
performance improvement supplied by the
semiconductor industry have driven most
of modern electronics you can look at
other places where you get the same kind
of thing for example this storage which
is nicely complementary to the
semiconductor devices but over a long
period of time it's hard to see any
technology that has remotely given the
same kind of cost reduction the only one
that I can point to perhaps is printing
where the the first the Gutenberg press
kinds of letters must have cost the
equivalent of a few dollars a character
and now you get the New York Times on
Sunday with lots of characters for a few
dollars but the semiconductor industry
has made bigger changes in a few decades
then printing has over a few centuries
it's a marvelous technology where the
characteristics are driven by the
physics of the devices no the old
statement that if the auto industry had
proved had improved at this rate you'd
be getting a million miles a gallon and
so forth today somebody once pointed out
to me from the audience Oh with yeah the
car only be two inches long and a half
an inch high and that's very good for
your morning commute
all right well connect topic integrated
circuit um again when I talk to Jay Jay
last he's he recalled that most people
at Fairchild at the time viewed the IC
as a research curiosity when did it
become apparent to you that it was going
to be something big
is most people must address forgiver
population in mind I don't think we
considered a research curiosity we
considered it a product and when we did
the first integrated circuits and move
them on into the engineering and
production
I remember assembling a group in the
laboratory and saying okay we've done
integrated circuits and now what will we
do next we started looking at other
physical phenomena and the like but we
still had work going on and integrated
circuits at that time I don't think I
had the vision to see how far this could
go but it was only a couple of years
after that that I published the Moore
law Moore's law paper so we were
beginning to appreciate that this could
be a really a major change and
particularly the cost but in the nature
electronics industry were there any
early applications of the IC that
surprised you the early ICS were
expensive and could only go in
applications where weight or volume was
extremely important he's tend to be
military NASA aerospace applications in
general so the early applications there
didn't surprise me now if you change the
question to early applications of the
microprocessor then my answer is
completely different the first micro
processors after the calculators went to
a variety of funny applications there's
the one that stands out my memory was
somebody automated a henhouse taking
advantage of fact here was a computer
you could program to do the things you
wanted I don't know what you do when you
automate a henhouse but I remember that
that was a peculiar application in fact
I remember board meeting one of the
board members asked when we were looking
at applications of the early
microprocessor
what are you going to get a customer
that I've heard of the the people buying
these were startup companies or skewer
little operations they weren't the the
fortune 500 felting today okay the next
question kind of touches on what what
you just said but so at fairchild did
you don't design i sees that would have
wide appeal or applicability or they
were designed for a very narrow purpose
like defense or nasa or whatever no the
the integrated circuit redesignated
fairchild initially were general-purpose
logic circuits we expected people to use
to build computers and computer like
systems then we started doing linear
circuits that were fairly broadly
applicable it was only when we got
specifically into a major program like
Minuteman 2 that the circuits were
designed very specifically for a
particular application but that was a
one program we were still doing the
general-purpose processors
general-purpose circuits with most of
our development capability okay let's
just two more questions though this is a
what if had they been better theoretical
understanding could the technology have
skipped over vacuum tubes completely and
moved directly from the early solid
state research of the 1930s to
transistors
sure if if vacuum tube hadn't been
invented then the transistor had been
that would be a completely acceptable
path for most of the things we want to
do there are still places were vacuum
tubes new things that we can't do with
solid-state these tend to be high power
some very high frequency applications
but otherwise if electronics had grown
up around the transistor rather than
initially around the vacuum tube he
probably would have been simpler a lot
of respect
just that getting the first solid-state
device it could be an amplifier that
took a lot longer than people expect it
took a lot more material science the
actual idea of an MOS transistor was
patented in the mid 20s
you just couldn't make it practically at
that time all right and just just one
last question something completely
different
did you have any idols or heroes when
you were growing up you know not
especially that I recall I had a couple
of teachers in high school I was quite
fond of who I thought were very good
particularly my math teacher
I thought gave me a you know a good
start there I guess I can't really point
to any one in particular they say
somebody I really want to emulate all
right all right thank you very much