Oral History of Panel on the Development andPromotion of Fairchild Micrologic Integrated Circuits
A chronology of major events referred to in this session
plus information provided in later correspondence with theparticipants is provided as an addendum to this transcript.

Participants:
Isy Haas
Jay Last
Lionel Kattner
Bob Norman
Moderator:
David Laws
Recorded: October 6, 2007
Mountain View, California[Note: text in square brackets was added by the participants during the editing process]

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Micrologic Oral History
David Laws: We’re here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's October 6th,
2007, 50 years after the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor, and we have put together a team of key
contributors to the Micrologic integrated circuit development project, the first monolithic integrated circuit
developed by the industry. We're going to spend a couple of hours trying to recall as much of that history
as possible. To get it down on tape, so in a couple of hundred years researchers can come back and findout what really happened in those early days of the integrated circuit business. I'm going to ask each ofyou gentlemen, starting with Jay Last, to give us a brief summary of your background, education and how
and when you came to join Fairchild. Jay?

Jay Last: I grew up in western Pennsylvania and went to the University of Rochester and got abachelor's degree in optics, then went to MIT and got a doctorate in solid state physics, which was a
relatively new field at the time. I then went to work for Shockley, and the story has been told many times.
A group of eight of us left and started Fairchild in the fall of '57. Our first efforts, of course, were to build
our first saleable product. After a couple of years, the technology and the timing seemed right to startworking on integrated circuits. I set up a group and directed it for the next year and a half, at which time
we had our first successful product.

Laws: Thank you. Lionel.

Lionel Kattner: Yes, I graduated from Southwestern University in Texas, with a degree in chemistry,
physics and math. Shortly thereafter, upon graduation, I went to work for the Hanford Atomic Products
Operation plant in the state of Washington on the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. After fourand a half years there, I joined the navy to get the military service over with. I was in charge of thenuclear components, as a nuclear officer there, for three years. Upon my release, I was looking forsomething else to do. I did not want to go back to Hanford, because the nuclear business then was kindof in a downward spiral. It was very unpopular. I accepted a position with Texas Instruments; I think thatwas in 1958, as a chemist on one of their product lines, for point contact germanium mesa type devices.
Shortly after I solved some of the problems and then became a product engineer on that line. Afteralmost two years there, Jay came to Dallas, interviewing some people, and I happened to luck onto him, I
guess because at TI, in my opinion, I really wasn't learning anything. They were not very technologicallyadvanced, and so I decided to join Fairchild. Then at Fairchild, I was part of the original microelectronics
group under Jay.

Laws: Isy?

Isy Haas: My name's Isy Haas. I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, and graduated from RobertCollege, an American college in Istanbul. I came to Princeton for graduate work in 1955. I got mymaster's in engineering and solid state physics in '57. I completed the class work for the PhD program,but quit without doing the required thesis, and went to work for a company in Philadelphia called
Remington Rand Univac as a circuit engineer. Where I designed “tape read/write circuits”. Univac was
the company founded by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly who built the Univac computer for the
University of Pennsylvania. I worked there for a year, and decided to leave the east coast, because ourpersonalities didn't quite agree with each other. I wanted to get to the west coast. I applied for a job at
Fairchild, and interviewed them in Columbus, Ohio. Bob Noyce asked me if I would be interested inminiaturization, and I said yes, even though I didn't know what it was. I started working for Fairchild in
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July '58 for Vic Grinich in device evaluation. Vic hired Bob [Norman] to head device evaluation; I was told
to report to him but transferred to Jay's group in 1959 to work on the development of the integrated
circuit. I left Fairchild in '61.

Laws: Bob.

Bob Norman: My name is Bob Norman. I graduated from Oklahoma A&M with a BS in Electronics
Engineering and Math. I went to work in my undergraduate year for Sperry Gyroscope Company in the
Advanced Weapons System Development Department. They had set up a section to study and build adigital computer and give them knowledge in that area. I was the transistor person in my undergraduate
time there. Thereafter, I rejoined them and the net result was, in '57, we shipped four different computers
to the military, two Polaris computers and a Sergeant coordinate conversion computer, and a Puffs
underwater sound system computer, all using transistor-resistor AND logic, which was a Sperry patent,
and some DCTL for high performance stuff. One used core memory, and the others used drum memory.
We started using Fairchild transistors, the 2N696, for write amplifiers on both the core and drum memory.
That was an excellent transistor but it had the most excellent attribute, which was, when we ordered
them, they were delivered. That was very unusual for the industry at that time. Howard Bobb was thesalesman. He recruited Don Farina who was working for me at the time. He brought him out to Fairchild,and then Don talked Vic Grinich into going after me for the microelectronics. So they came and asked
me to come out, [for an interview] which I did. I spent time with Bob Noyce and Vic [Grinich and Ed
Baldwin] and many people, talking about what they were doing with planar technology, and putting metalinterconnects on the surface of the device, which all were very attractive to me. I talked about myprejudices on what kind of logic would get the most reliable computers and be the most compatible with
their technology. I came out here [to work] in August of '59, and Vic asked me to head up the device
evaluation section, and as part of that, to do the engineering side of the development of Fairchild's
integrated circuits.

Laws: Thank you, Bob. As I understand it, there were two key groups involved. Jay, you ran the
product development group, and Vic Grinich, another founder, headed an applications group. Would thatbe right?

[Note from Bob Norman: Vic Grinich was Vice-president of Engineering and ran Device Evaluation,
Integrated Circuit Engineering, Applications Engineering and Test Engineering]

Last: That's right, yes.

Laws: Members from both teams worked together?

Last: Yes.

Laws: Could you describe a little more about your team? What were the skills of the people? How
many did you have? How did you relate to Vic Grinich's group?

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Last: The problems we had to solve were diffusion problems, and work with steadily improving themasking processes and the photo resist. So we had people working in all these areas. Lionel was the
key person working on device fabrication, doing the diffusion work. Isy was working both from theapplications point of view, and the fabrication point of view. There were other people, including Sam Fok
who was doing chemistry work and working on photo resist. Gary Tripp was working on device
fabrication. Jim Nall joined us and was working on making mockup devices, individual devices, andworking on mask making and photo resist. Later on, near the end of the program, Jim Campbell, who
was from MIT was doing work on long time diffusions. There were a number of other people who cameand went in the group. Essentially, it was under a dozen people.

Laws: Lionel, did you get a lot of direction in the task you were supposed to accomplish?

Kattner: Well yes, in the beginning, I think so. I spent a lot of time talking to Jay, because I knew
absolutely zero about silicon devices at the time, since my past was all in the germanium mesa work, so I
had a lot to learn. But then I spent a lot of time just with people in the lab, learning the processes. I
started in July of 1959, and probably for the next three months, basically, and almost the fourth month,just spent most of the time learning diffusion, photo masking, all of which was previously very foreign tome. During that time was when Jay started directing some of the efforts to what he wanted to see
accomplished. One of the first things was to try to put together a crude but early integrated circuit using
the available technology that they had at the time, planar technology. At the time, the pure monolithic
type technology was not available to us, so we kind of did some work of doing physical isolation ofdevices, rather than the junction type isolation. So that was that period of time.

Laws: Isy, you worked in Vic Grinich's group, and then you transferred to Jay's group. What was yourrole in those tasks?

Haas: When I joined FSC, I was hired to work for Vic Grinich in device evaluation. [Initially I worked onavalanche switching and pnpn four layer devices; my work consisted of understanding and defining how
the devices operated, the physical phenomena involved and conceiving applications and studying theirperformance. I also designed and built test equipment to test the devices. I published and presented
several papers on these subjects. In the fall of 1960 I taught a Transistor Physics course for the UC
Berkeley Graduate extension program.] I started working with Lionel and Jay, under Vic Grinich, on theelectronics of integrated circuits, testing and evaluating, but primarily doing different studies relating to
how transistors work in the integrated circuit environment. [The challenge was to study how one might
expect a multitude of transistors (more than one) to perform as a circuit to a given set of electricalparameters when they are picked at random and/or when they are neighbors on a silicon wafer! ]. As
Jerry Sanders was saying yesterday, we were all young, and “full of piss and vinegar”. [During the initial
phases of the Micrologic Program, Lionel was building the physically isolated flip-flops. In this program
the components were separated from each other by chemically etching them apart] I was testing them,[We were getting good results with operating flip-flops but the life expectancy of these units was very
poor; this was due to thermal expansion and contraction. In the fall of 1960] I got this bug: “Why don't wejust make the integrated circuits with diffused isolation?” I recorded this concept on page 127 of mypatent engineering notebook, on September 29, describing the process. I note this, "This sounds to me
like somebody else talked about it before, but I don’t know who." I think I was not familiar with Bob
Noyce's patent, but somehow, it rang a bell. [Somehow I was under the impression that the concept was
not my original creation but I was determined to seriously explore the possibility] Lionel and Dr. Sam Fok
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witnessed this patent note book entry, and that was September 29. [This event is the beginning ofdiffused isolated integrated circuit and I immediately spearheaded the effort to build a flip-flop with Jay’s
knowledge. Lionel was very helpful and we] started working very close. I did the diffusion calculations
which came out to 45 microns in 18 hours [to isolate a 75 micron wafer within our existing furnace
setups.] It took about three weeks to get a working flip-flop. The first entry in my notebook was, "We havetransistor action." And the next entry was, "We metallized the transistors and all we got was shorts." The
next entry, October 10, I was testing the first integrated circuit. After that, Lionel would build the circuits
and I would figure out what was wrong, tell him what I thought was wrong with it and he'd fix the process.
A couple of months or so later, things started coming out again. [It was a key factor that I was there andable to correlate device physics, electronics and process. Otherwise we would have had the blind leading
the blind]

Laws: So there was a lot of iteration backwards and forwards to get there.

Haas: Yeah, a lot.

Laws: Bob, in the meantime, you were in Vic Grinich's group. Your role was to help define the circuitthat would be implemented in the IC.
Norman: Yes. I had recommended the logic form and type of circuitry to use while I was being
interviewed. Like Isy, I was unaware of any of the patent stuff that I really learned about over the lastyear, I think. At that time, we were not focused on patents, unfortunately, Somebody was, people like
Roger {Borovoy] kept everybody honest. We were just focused on getting things done. Again, Vic kind of
supported what I had proposed doing from a circuit standpoint, and it then became -- to me, it was
simple. What did I know about three dimensional devices? So I did derive what resistors to use and soforth from a circuit standpoint. There turned out to be problems with things like overlap diodes and soforth. But the amazing thing was that everything was so quick. We'd find the problem and one side or
the other, or both, would solve it, instantly. It was amazing to me how quickly we were able to get things
done. One of the fundamentally important attributes from an electrical point of view of the planar process
is that the transistors that we made fit very well with Ebers and Moll equations for transistors. The earlier
alloy junction [devices] and so forth had enough problems with them from a mathematical standpoint, that
it was an approximate fit. But Don Farina did all this testing that showed over many decades of current,[planar transistors] fit the Ebers and Moll model, which made doing the circuit design a lot easier. [Whilediffused transistors had a wide variation, their temperature coefficients were much more consistent thancomposition resistors] Up till then at Sperry, all the design I did was more statistical design, but in thiscase, we were able to start doing actual circuit design and could actually expect the parts coming out tolook something like the circuits we were designing for. That was a remarkable part of what we were
doing at Fairchild. Incidentally, part of my respect for Fairchild was that I was using Fairchild four layer
devices. I'd been given a job at Sperry cutting the power down in the Marine Corps PPS portable radar.
The radar was portable. You had to carry all these storage batteries around to run it. I was using the
Fairchild devices as the modulator on the transmitter, and also as a switch on the klystron which cut thepower substantially. So I'd had experience with the kind of work these people did when I wound up
talking to them. [When I arrived in August '59, we quickly established the circuit form (DCTL) and the logic
form (NOR) and the concept of a compatible family of devices to build military (including airborne) digitalcomputers. Our half-shift register, "S" Element, emulated the Philco Master-Slave approach to
implementing logic absent lumped constant delays to avoid race conditions. The early TI offering stillrequired many discrete components to implement ordinary logic functions. Our principal departure from
Philco was to avoid the use of series-transistor implementations of gates.]

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Laws: Thank you, Bob. So Jay, you were there, and the other gentlemen were pretty much hired to help
on the IC program. Could you give us a little insight into how the program got started at Fairchild? Were
you aware of what was going on at TI with Kilby? How did the whole project get kicked off?

Last: Well, this was in the 1959 era. There was an enormous effort, all over the country, an enormousinterest in micro-miniaturization for airborne devices, and every company that was involved in this had
some kind of a program. It usually involved taking individual devices and making them smaller andsmaller. It ran from that to the other end of the spectrum, where Westinghouse was going to have
Molecular Electronics. or some name like that. They were going to fabricate everything, every sort of adevice by building it up. None of these programs worked. In the summer of '59, I think in July, we had
started seeing what TI had been doing, some of the work of Kilby, and they were talking it up at great
length. Bob Noyce came to me just before WESCON [Western Electronic Show and Convention], which
was in August, and said, "We have to show the flag there. We have to have something there that shows
we're working on this stuff." We were very nervous about TI, because they had a record of getting
patents and establishing a patent pool, and then beating everybody else over the head with this patentpool. We didn't want that to happen to us. In about three days, I put together just a simple flip-flop, fourtransistors and resistors. I used a pencil to make the carbon resistors

Laws: A hybrid?

Last: The Ticonderoga process. So this got quite a bit of publicity.

Laws: You demonstrated this at WESCON.

Last: We demonstrated it. We didn't say much what was in it. We just said we had these fourtransistors and this little device. Bob and I talked, and he said, "The time is right now. I think we have thetechnology to go ahead and make a formal program on this, start doing this. Why don't you put together
a group and get it going?" As has been said, the technology for isolation [did not exist], [Note from Bob
Norman – Noyce’s patent contemplated diffusing collector tubs into an intrinsic silicon substrate] We
knew if we were doing it by diffusion, we were going to have to use a boron diffusion. We were having
trouble then with a 15 minute diffusion. This was going to need a 20 hour diffusion. So we said thetechnology's not ready for that. But the real point we wanted to demonstrate, which was the heart of theNoyce patent, was that you can interconnect devices on the surface of the silicon. We decided we'dmake a device where we would provide the isolation by turning the device over, etching away all thesilicon until we got down to the oxide on the other side, and then back fill with some appropriate plastic or
chemical. It sounds now like, why would you ever do something like that? But our aim was todemonstrate that we could indeed make a monolithic device this way.

Laws: So the original objective was really just to show the world that you could build something, andthen productize it later.

Last: Yeah, and see where it would lead to that. This was not a big effort ever, not a very big high on the
Fairchild list, what we were doing. It was a minor R&D thing. Fairchild was having extreme successmaking transistors and diodes at the time. All the focus of the company, rightly so, was on that. This was
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just a little side project. The way the company looked at it can be seen in Gordon's remark a couple ofyears later. "We made the integrated circuit. Now what do we do?" So we just started, and it was going
to be a brute force device. Later on, I had talked to Charlie Sporck and told him about this device. "Howwould you like to have this physical isolation device in production?" He came out with a very typical,
profane Sporckism. He told me what he thought of that process.

Laws: I can just imagine.

Last: Yeah. So we just started, and Lionel was instrumental in starting and making the thing.

Laws: Who set the schedule? Was it, "We've got to get it done in six months?"

Last: No, there was no schedule. It was an open ended thing. I was about the only one at Fairchild who
was working on things that were not related to our present product line. I worked for several months
before this device on parametric amplifier devices, where you etch a pit and make a little dot down thecenter, which never went any place, but that was the sort of things I was working on.

Laws: I was looking through a paper that Bob Noyce wrote about that time. He identified what hethought the most important product developments going on in the company were. He said integrated
circuits, parametric amplifiers, and tunnel diodes might be important. In spite of it being a relatively low
priority project in the company at the time, you were allowed to hire some very talented individuals.

Last: Yes.

Laws: Did you drive for this?

Last: Fairchild, at that time, was starting to make a lot of money, and money was not the object, or theconstraint. When we had a matched NPN and PNP device, we had the world. By that time, we had theplanar PNP device, which nobody else could figure out how to make. So that was a very big source ofincome. I never felt under any financial pressure. Nobody said, "You have to do this with less people." It
was just, "Go ahead and do it." It was sort of benign neglect. The money was there, but nobody caredmuch about it.

[Note from Bob Norman: The problems Jean had making planar PNP devices led to two major markets
for Fairchild. As part of our Device Evaluation work we observed anomalies in the collector
characteristics of these devices which turned out to be due to the emission of light from the junction. We
use this phenomenon to build silicon light emitting arrays which were incorporated into Fairchild satellite
cameras to add digital data to the film they were shooting. Gordon put Irv Solt in charge of electro-optical
R&D. Meanwhile, C. T. "Tom" Sah, investigating channeling on these transistors developed the Surface
Controlled Tetrode, which we evaluated. The device Tom developed to investigate drift in the gate input
voltage over time we now know as the MOS transistor.]

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Laws: Fascinating. I've never been in that situation.

Last: I never have since.

Laws: There are other people who either showed great interest, or contributed, or were responsible insome way. What were the roles of Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce during this time? Bob wrote the patent
and went off to run the company, basically?
Last: Bob, to my recollection, never set foot in the lab where we were working. He had nothing at all to
do with it. He was busy running the company. Bob's role was always the outside man. He was there, as
he was at Intel, and he wasn't always around that much. He'd be in Italy or someplace, and he was avery effective spokesman for the company, obviously. He was very good at identifying customers andbringing them to the fold.
[Note from Bob Norman: Bob Noyce was heavily involved in what we were doing. He ran R&D forsome time after Ed Baldwin left. He was interested in what we were doing with "his baby". They had afurther interest because we were spending a growing amount of money in development and particularly
test with no offsetting income. Vic, who reported to Bob was heavily involved in the project.]Laws: And Gordon Moore?

Last: Again, Gordon was running R&D was focusing completely on other projects. I mean, he was aware
what we were doing, but made very little comment on it.

Laws: Were you reporting to Gordon at this time -?

Last: When we started the program, Bob was running R&D, but when we left, he was running thecompany.

Laws: How about Jean Hoerni? What was his role?

Last: Jean had played his role in developing the planar device. So we were aware of improvements inthe planar process. We were all in one room, essentially, in one bay, so ideas from one section would go
to another one very quickly. He was never focused directly on the integrated circuit, but improvements inplanar transistors were also spread along.
[Note from Bob Norman: John Hoerni was heavily involved in the isolation issue, looking for ways toimprove the low manufacturing yield. When Motorola announced the epitaxial process, John was
immediately interested for his power transistors. Unfortunately the epi produced look like orange peel.
We promoted the use of epi for isolation since unlike power transistors we only needed a low-voltage epi.
For power transistors, John tried unsuccessfully to use backside diffusion to improve thermal conductivityof the collector.]
Laws: Now you were all in the 844 Charleston building at this time?
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Last: Yes.

Laws: All in the same building, on the same floor, and were bumping into each other all the time.

Last: Bumping is putting it mildly.

Laws: How many people were in that area at that time, and how well equipped were the labs?

Last: It's hard to say how many people were there. We had side buildings. The big contribution Ed
Baldwin had made is that, before we'd made our first device, he went to Fairchild management and said,"You have to put up a big building, fast." That was the Whisman Road building, production had moved
down there. This was all R&D stuff.

Laws: I think we've set the scene here in terms of who did what, and what the roles were, and we've
touched on some of the challenges, but I'd like to tunnel in a little bit more on some of those now. There
were many major technical challenges you had to resolve find work around, climb over, or whatever.
Electrical isolation was obviously a major issue. You all mentioned it in one context or another. Let'stake that one first. You mentioned the first approach was physical isolation.

Last: Yes.

Laws: And then Lionel and Isy both worked on an approach to doing a junction isolation?

Last: That was considerably later.

Laws: What was the timeframe of these? The first was the physical isolation.

Last: The first was the physical isolation. We'd started on that, really formalizing on a device about
December. We had the first one--Laws: This was December, '59?

Last: Fifty-nine. By May, we had made the first device. Then in the fall, Isy and Lionel made the first
diffused [isolation] device.

Laws: So that was fall of '60.

Last: Yes, so it was about a year. Lionel can talk about some of the problems with the physical isolation.

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Kattner: That was really the first approach. I did want to point out one thing that hasn't been mentioned
either, is that although TI had made a lot of noise about having what at the time they called Solid Circuits,
I think one of the key differences was the fact that Fairchild had the planar patent and the planar
technology. TI did not. So all of their devices had wired interconnects. But what made the physicalisolation feasible was the fact that, as Jay mentioned, we etched all the way down to the oxide layer on
top, and then back filled. We tried many different epoxies, materials called Sauereisen, which people
don't even know what it is any more. I'm not sure I do either. And then polycast with some of Corning's
materials that they'd come out with. The effort was to find something that had a coefficient of expansion
similar to silicon, because you didn't want, under different temperatures, stressing itself. In the beginning,that did occur, because of coefficient of expansion characteristics, the oxide layer was broken, andtherefore the leads, the interconnects, that were evaporated on the surface of the oxide, were broken as
well. Ultimately I became very discouraged with it, because I thought, "This is never going to really work."
But for demonstration purposes, we forged ahead, and ultimately, I think it was around March of 1960, we
had some semblance of a device that did work. It started with flip-flops, since it was the simplest. By
May of that year timeframe, then we had a sufficient number of devices to say that we had a product that
could be produced, but nobody ever felt it was going to be ultimately a production device, or method. I
know that in August, I think it was July and August of that same year was when I spent a lot of time with
Dave Allison, trying to learn more about the diffusion processes, and even spoke to him about doing acollector type diffusion rather than this isolation even. He said, well, he'd thought about that, it had beenbatted around a lot in the past, and that it was part of Noyce's patent. Then the other thing he said had
been talked about was this sort of electrical isolation of some form. I think even Jay had mentioned that
Gordon Moore or somebody had talked about that in the past, but never really considered it on a serious
level. So I think from that conversation with Dave Allison is when I first took it kind of serious, like maybe
this can be done. I know an entry I had in the notebook was August of that same year, August 27th, I
actually sat down and ran calculations trying to figure out how long it would take, but we never did
anything with it at that point in time. So in the meantime, we were making more more of the physicalisolation devices, but then most of my efforts then started focusing on the ultimate of doing some sort of ajunction type isolation of devices. That was when, in September, didn't really try any effort of trying todiffuse it, mainly because there was no diffusion capacity available in the lab. Most of it was consumedby other work. The furnaces were limited, and also, due to the fact the calculations showed it would be
18, 20, 24 hour type diffusion, that would have to be done at night and weekends. So that was the effort
that finally took place, and that was done largely in September. Then I think the end of September iswhen some of the first workable devices -- or it looked like they were workable. And then later in Octoberand on into November is when we made a few more. Most of them weren't any good, because we still
had a lot of problems. A long diffusion like that created a lot of surface destruction and pitting and soforth.

Last: And we were also limited by our masking ability. Things would be misaligned regularly.

Kattner: Almost daily.

Norman: The long diffusion made the wafers very brittle, so if you looked at them cross-eyed, they'dshatter.

Laws: Somebody last night described them as potato chips, I think.

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Kattner: You had to make the wafers very thin, and they were so thin, you could hardly handle them. So
that was the other problem, but we overcame those problems ultimately.

Laws: Isy, you mentioned you made notes in your notebook about junction isolation processes. Were
you aware of the work of Lehovec at Sprague at all during this time?

Haas: No, no.

Laws: He did get the first patent on that technology.

Haas: On what?

Laws: Junction isolation.

Haas: Oh, he did? [I was not aware of Lehovec’s work, but as I said above, I was under the impressionthat I had heard of the concept. My position at the time was: this concept is a good idea; it my not be a“slam dunk” but I want to give it a try]

Kattner: Yeah.

Last: Yes. It's very interesting that the three key things were:, How do you put two devices on one
substrate? That was the Kilby patent. How do you interconnect the devices? That was the Noyce
patent. How do you isolate the devices? That was the Lehovec patent. And these three guys had nevermet or had any contact with each other.

Kattner: Never heard of him [meaning Lehovec. I heard that a patent had been issued but did not knowwho] [Laws input - Lehovec, Kurt. “Multiple Semiconductor Assembly” U. S. Patent 3029366 (Filed April
22, 1959. Issued April 10, 1962)].
[Note from Bob Norman: People don't appreciate that workers in the field are busy working and areusually unaware of work going on elsewhere in the industry. We were unaware, which led to overlapping
inventions. It should be remembered that Kilby's patent described a transistor and the resistor on one
substrate, not towo transistors. Noyce' patent described more than one transistors diffused into an
intrinsic substrate as Lionel described. These were self-isolating.]
Last: Incidentally, Noyce had filed a patent for the diffused isolation. It ran interference with the Lehovec
patent and was thrown out. So Lehovec got the patent. And Sprague had so little interest in this that
Lehovec had to pay for the patent with his own money.

Laws: He had to pay for that. I believe he got a dollar commendation from the board of directors orsomething.

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Last: Yeah. He's still a little miffed at the way that they had treated him. But this is just an example.
The time was right. That's the history of most inventions, I think. The time is right and everybody puts
their little bit into it. The one that's looked on, the inventor, is the one that realized the time is right andthe world wants it.
[Note from Bob Norman: Inventions are solutions to problems. Disclosures usually include prior art.
Patents recognize and protect inventions. ]Laws: And/or has the best PR outfit.

Last: Yes. It's the sort of thing, if we hadn't done it, it certainly would have been done sometime within
the next couple of years, or five years or something.

Laws: Isy, there's a question that came up last night and someone answered it anyway, but do you
remember the kind of tolerances you were working with?

Haas: One mil.

Laws: In microns, what is that?

Haas: Twenty-five.

Last: Now you put half the world in 25 microns.

Laws: Absolutely. And the challenges of masking these kinds of tolerances, who would like to address
that?

Haas: Are you aware of how we used to mask things?

Laws: Please tell us.

Haas: Well, the glass mask was clamped between two square frames with a square hole in the middle;
the wafer [had one flat side and] was wedged up against the corner of the frame. That was the reference.
So one mil was just about the best you could do in realigning the subsequent masks.

Last: If you look at the early wafers, they always had a big, flat section on one side.

Laws: I have some upstairs. I didn't realize that's why it was -- I understand Sam Fok had a major role insome of the lithography, and there were some struggles with photo resists.

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Last: Yeah, and Jim Nall was involved. And of course, we had to line up the front with the back, and thesilicon, you couldn't see through it. But silicon became transparent in the near infrared, so we developed
an infrared alignment device, where we could use the infrared to look through the wafer and see what thepattern was on the other side. That was the brute force extent we were going to, to try and make thesethings. But Sam and Jim Nall -- Jim Nall was mainly working on that. But we developed a pretty
sophisticated way. But with these tolerances we're talking here, and a fairly large device, it needed anenormous amount of work. Developing the more sophisticated photo resist was a major activity in thecompany, throughout the company.

Laws: Was there somebody leading work on the photo resist problem?

Last: That was in my area. Of course, they were working in pre-production trying to improve theprocess, but for any new things, it was the group that I'd mentioned: Sam, and Art Engvall was involved inthat also. But it was a steady problem. Like all the other problems, we just sort of-- brute force. And thephoto resists gave problems too, starting with a resist that was used for making printed circuit boards,
and we had a lot of cooperation from Kodak. We'd feed information back and forth, and we finally got
much finer structure to them, so we could start making these tighter tolerance devices.

Laws: All these variances in what the device is going to look like, Bob, did that put a lot of constraints on
the kind of circuit that you were trying to design and optimize for?

Norman: I'd learned long before to try to use what I'm handed to work with. Actually, as I said earlier,the physical consistency of the electric parameters to the device structure was actually better than I wasused to working with in the past. That consistency made it easier to do circuit design. It was a lot morestraightforward, and again, because of the consistency with the Ebers and Moll equations, that helped
that. To me, it was really a novel thing, part of it because of my ignorance. I didn't know what these guys
had to go through to make these things happen, but they were a lot more consistent than stuff I had dealt
with, with discrete components before that. I wouldn't let on that.

Haas: I can add a little bit to that. Much of the work that I did before and after the diffused isolation
related to understanding whether or not you could get [a circuit to operate to a given set of specifications,
namely a given fan-I and fan-out) when a number of] devices picked at random were connected. Up tothat point, the customer would specify input voltage, output voltage, gain and all that. If the device waswithin those parameters, the circuit would work. [The question was:] when we use all the devices on thesame wafer next to each other, would they or wouldn't they fall within a desirable distribution of gain and
VBEs and V-sats etc. So most of my work, except when I was troubleshooting the process was doing
statistical analysis on randomly picked devices, adjacent devices, performance over temperature,
distributions, the effect of different power levels on speed. [Compliance with military temperature ranges
was a must. Jean was interested in the same statistics because of his interest in producing “matchedpairs” from adjacent transistors on the same wafer.] We packaged adjacent devices and tested them.
Those with matching VBEs were packaged as matched pairs. As it turned out adjacent devices on asilicon wafer would indeed be very similar. So we started spending a lot of time analyzing that to see if,
indeed, we would have the advantage of better distribution on a chip, on a small chip; a and that proved
to be, fortunately correct.

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Last: There was the tyranny of numbers remark that was made by somebody at Bell [Labs]. These
small yields and you multiply them, and nothing works. So Bell had proved mathematically that you could
never make integrated circuits. And the work Isy was doing was saying that adjacent devices and areasof what we wanted -- and the key thing, we weren't making a universal device. We knew the exact circuit
environment of this device. So it was discouraging. Nobody would even conceive of making a device
that had 100 transistors in it, but we thought four would be possible.

Laws: Isy, you've talked about all this statistical analysis work you had to do. Did you have any tools, aslide rule? Did you have a calculator in the company?

Haas: Oh God, I wish I had a calculator. I've thought about this a lot really; if I had only had a Radio
Shack TRS-80 at my disposal in those days, I could have done a hell of a lot more calculations [andsaved a lot of time]. It was frustrating. It's in some of those notes. To make one calculation at one
temperature range took a whole day, and then you had to do the next temperature range and the next
temperature range. Essentially, I think what was encouraging was the fact that using DCTL as we were,adding a resistor in the base solved a few problems. At first we built the resistor into the transistor base,but this accentuated the overlapping diode effect, which made me an expert in how transistors work anddon't work. Eventually, the distribution was close enough that it made it a saleable product, in spite of all
the customers' initial cynicism and disbelief.

Laws: That's certainly something I want to get to a little later on, because it's a very important part ofselling any new product. Are there other major things that come to mind about challenges you had to
overcome, equipment limitations, or testing devices? You mentioned the very long diffusions and the lackof equipment to do that.

Last: I think the key thing was the fact that a boron diffusion of this length of time, was just inconceivable
at the start. The boron, one breakthrough in the boron, was some work in pre-production, I believe on the
methyl triborite.

Kattner: Right. [All diffusion calculations were made using a slide rule or by hand]

Last: It was a pre-production idea that was brought back to R&D. That offered some hope.

Kattner: It was a big help, because most people that I talked to at the time said, "You just can't do it; 20
hours is not going to work." [I did oxidize the wafers longer to achieve a thicker oxide layer since the long
diffusions caused severe pitting of the surface. The thicker oxide layer provided better protection of thesilicon surface.]

Haas: The experts said it couldn’t be done.

Kattner: Yeah, they said it couldn't be done.

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Last: Moving a 15 minute, difficult diffusion to a 20 hour diffusion was what we were facing.

Laws: And presumably all these diffusion systems were hand-built by Fairchild?

Norman: Yes, most of them.

Laws: There was nothing commercial.

Last: Yeah, most of them. Art Lasch was at Fairchild and he went on and started a successful company[Electroglas] building this kind of stuff. But we had to build essentially everything in those early days.

Laws: What would a typical piece of equipment cost you to build? Under $10,000 do you think?

Last: Oh probably, yeah. I mean, we got the whole company in production for under $2 million, so wecertainly didn't have many million dollar devices or pieces of equipment.

Laws: How about reliability testing? How did you approach that?
Norman: I wanted to add something to what Isy had said. I had had the advantage, before coming in,that I was working with that circuit form for a couple of years before I got to Fairchild. The kinds of testingand data reduction that he was having trouble with, I'd already been doing. I had programmed our little
Sperry computer. I had three girls working rotary calculators to do the data reduction on the tests wewere running on the Philco and other transistors. I ran the first successful program on the Sperrycomputer and it was to do that data reduction. Of course, as Isy said, we didn't have anything like that,but I had this background of knowledge that helped me plunge forward when he was trying to get somedata. That was very helpful in getting the job done. [In Device Evaluation we used a simple transistor(1210 small geometry) and resistors from the pilot line. These were the prototypes of the devices wewere going to incorporate into Micrologic. We had an Olivetti printing calculator for data reduction.]
Laws: Were there any computers on the Peninsula at that time?

Norman: Philco Western Development Labs had a computer.

Laws: Which was just across the road from you in those days.

Norman: Walter LaBerge [was General Manager]. I guess we tried, a little later, to get computer
programmers, and all they knew was business programming. When I would say something to one ofthem about using machine language, their eyes would kind of cross and that would be the end of theconversation.

Laws: How did you test the devices?
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Haas: I used to test them, and first problem was, you had to build a jig and test equipment to test them.
Well, that was too complicated. Furthermore we didn't know what we wanted to define. I had tested somany transistors and so many ICs [with a two and three point probe and a Tektronix 575 curve-tracer]that I had learned how to tell a good circuit from a bad one [by observing the current/voltage curve
between two points on the circuit (usually between the power supply point and ground)] with a Tektronix
575 curve tracer. The good ones had a very characteristic signature. [This was the technique I used toseparate the good devices from the bad before packaging] I think I was the designated tester. Whentesting transistors, we used to test them on the wafer and ink-mark the bad ones. With the ICs, we'dsawed them apart and I would test all the chips and pick out the good ones. We would get a couple ofgood chips per wafer sometimes. That went on even with the more complicated circuits. It was a verypractical, effective way to test them.

Laws: How many wafers would you make in a run?

Haas: Ten.

Laws: Ten at a time. And how many potential devices were there on a wafer?

Haas: Zero.

Laws: Potential, not actual.

Haas: The first run, I think we got one, and we got so excited.

Laws: How many sites on the wafer?

Haas: About 70.

Laws: Out of which you might get one occasionally, as I'm understanding.

Last: Two percent yield was beyond our wildest dreams.

Kattner: The first one was a flip-flop. Okay, it did. It flipped and it flopped and that was a success. Isy
and I immediately ran up and told Jay, "We got a flip-flop."

Last: Instead of just flops.

Laws: That was when?

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Last: October 10.

Kattner: Yeah, October 1960.

Laws: Did you get a flop or a flip out of the physical isolation ones then?

Last: Oh yeah. They were all over the place.

Laws: How many is all over the place, Jay? Hundreds?

Kattner: May and June of 1960 is when they really started coming out on a regular basis. Then it
ramped up from there till the end of the year. At the end of the year, that was called Phase Two. Then at
the end of that year, it was decided, let's phase out Phase Two and concentrate on Phase Three, which
was the isolated junction -- I'd rather call them the junction type.

Laws: So let me clarify this. Phase One was the Ticonderoga. Phase Two was the physical isolation.
Phase Three was the junction isolation.

Last: And we made a lot of these Phase One devices. A whole family. Jim Nall was working on that.
Just to put them into a system environment and start to see how they worked. We were actuallydistributing some of these to potential customers. One thing about a memo that has always intrigued me
was one that Gordon Moore wrote in December of '60. He said, we have to make a decision which one
to push the most, the physical isolation or the diffused isolation. So in his mind, it was still not clear whichapproach we were going to take. So none of these things were obvious at the time.

Laws: Looking back, it's clear, isn't it.
[Note from Bob Norman: Using the definitions above, to my knowledge, the only devices to go tooutside customers were Phase Three. I shudder to think what the impact might have been of quick
failure of a part delivered to the customer. Gordon's comment would make more sense in December '59
rather than '60 and and would have taken into account the universal failures of the chemically isolated
circuits. I only know of a single Phase One (Ticonderoga) device being fabricated. Only Flip-Flops were
fabricated then Gates until the process was nailed down. Then (mid 60) the other devices in the family
were designed and fabricated.][Note from Laws; As the first diffused isolation devices were not produced until October 1960 it is most
likely that is that Moore’s note was written in late 1960, per Jay Last’s statement above.]

Last: Yes, it is.

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Laws: This is the second tape of the recording of the Fairchild Micrologic development panel. Just one
item I would like to try to clarify a little more. It seems to be a very important aspect of the whole programin making it successful; the different people who came up with the ideas for the diffusion or the junction
isolation. It was essentially expressed, I guess, in Noyce's original work, but was not allowed as part ofthe patent. We mentioned that Dave Allison had a major involvement in helping develop it. Isy, you had
some thoughts on it. Who made it happen?

Haas: Well, I started the ball rolling, but up to that stage, I had never done a diffusion calculation. Lionel
and I had a wafer etching girl in the lab who told us, "The limit is 75 microns." She can't etch anything
thinner than 75 microns. So okay, 75 microns became the norm. Jean taught me how to do diffusion
calculations, and everybody except Lionel and Jay said it's impossible. I'm young, inexperienced, naïve.
"It's not impossible. The calculations say it's possible."

Kattner: I've always said too that technically, if you do not know enough, then you do it anyway.

Laws: You don't know it can't be done.

Kattner: Yeah, that's right. That's kind of how all this went.

Norman: That was very important to the whole program.

Haas: I think what made it happen was the temperature cycling failures of the others [the physicallyisolated devices].
[Note from Bob Norman: Every device made on the pilot line was temperature cycled before going on
environmental and life test. All chemically isolated devices failed. All the environmental and life test
results were from Phase 3 devices made on the pilot line.]
Laws: You were able to accomplish it with physical isolation, but [they were not] reliable.

Haas: That was frustrating. That was very discouraging.

Last: Obviously Fairchild was building a massive amount of production capacity and improvements in
diffusion. So things that were impossible in '59 started to become feasible in '60.

Laws: Time solves many problems in development.

Last: And Fairchild was still very focused on--Norman: The motivation.

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Last: There was a very strong motivation. It was turning into a very successful company.

Laws: It was the Google of its era, there's no doubt about it, in terms of both the impact it had on theworld, and the excitement and the youth and everything that went with it.

Last: The first product came out in August [of 1958], and at that time, there were 60 people at Fairchild.
A year later, there were 600, so we grew. And after that, it just kept growing and growing.

Laws: At the time you were doing this work, Jay, do you remember about how big the company was,how many, let's say starting in late '59? Was it around 600 at that point?

Last: It was 600, about the time we started to program. It was turning into a big company then.

Laws: Sure was, 600's a good size.

Norman: I was 592, I think, and that was August of '59.

Haas: You were 592 in August of '59?

Norman: Yep.

Haas: Oh, I'm thinking '58. Yeah, you're right.

Laws: So we've gone through a year or more development project. We've made hundreds, if not
thousands of devices now. Jay, you mentioned that even some of these Phase One devices were
sampled to customers. How did you select the customers? How did you decide who should get them,and what kind of feedback were you expecting from them?

Last: That's more in Bob's area to discuss, I think. As I said, there was not a tremendous interest inside
the company for integrated circuits. Bob was developing an interest outside of the company. He gave atalk in February, discussing this in detail, and gave a succession of talks in the spring.

Laws: So that was February, 1960.

Last: February of '60. Bob was talking down some of the practical problems we were having making thedevices and pointing out, eventually these things were going to take over the world. He illustrated, I
think--

Kattner: Great vision, Bob.
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Norman: I had the great advantage of ignorance.

Laws: Tell us about your first discussions with customers, and how they felt and responded.

Norman: Remember, I came from military background, as far as use, applications and stuff. So I worked
with Howard Bobb, who was military marketing at Fairchild. So he and I spent a fair amount of time
together. I was telling Jay earlier -- in fact, he probably remembered, that we delivered the first two flipflops to Fort Monmouth, to a guy who promptly put them in his drawer, and never looked at them.

Laws: When was that, Bob? Do you remember?

Norman: Well, I'm a little confused, because if you like, I'm in a time warp. Vic Grinich -- see, mybackground in computers was to start shake, rattle and roll on everything I built as soon as I built it. That
was the environment I came from, and that's what I was doing with these things. We shortly moved out of
844 Charleston into a little building behind it, on was it Fabian Way?

Haas: Fabian Way.

Norman: And set up shop in there, and did a lot of temperature stuff and things like that. As Isy pointed
out, a lot of those plastic back devices, just wouldn't stand up to the temperature environment, and that
was a requirement. And the other thing was, there was a paper in the proceedings in the fall of '59, an
IBM paper on test to failure. Vic said, "I want us to do that on Micrologic." Certainly I was in favor of that.
It involved quite a bit, but we learned a lot more from that, not just about the integrated circuit stuff, butalso transistors. We learned exactly where to set the centrifuge, and what to call failures, and what tests
were important and not important, of the mechanical shake, rattle and roll type. So that turned out to beimportant, not just to the integrated circuit program, but also to the transistor programs at Fairchild. We
also took every integrated circuit we got, and put it on 125 degrees C operating life test. So when we
finally gave the paper on Micrologic, we had data in hand from the tests we had been running, as to thereliability of the parts. I was impressed then, and impressed now with what we did on that test to failure
program. We ran temperatures down to liquid carbon dioxide. We ran temperatures up until the devices
just got turned into resistors, but we did all these centrifuge tests. In fact, early into the Micrologic
program, we got a request from Ames laboratory to know if we could put together some devices for themto shoot from a 20 millimeter cannon. We had in hand the information that said that would work. We
actually built hybrid devices for them, which they fired into the supersonic wind tunnel, over here at Ames,
to test what happened to things in hypersonic flight. So it was a lot of spillover from that. Vic's integrity,
in saying that we should do this, and how we did it and what we learned from doing it, at a time when wewere still a small company, I think was incredible. It made it very easy when I went into MIT
Instrumentation Lab to talk about Micrologic. I had all the data. They chose to go our way, instead ofwith welded Cordwood modules on the Apollo command module. Except they'd only use gates. They
were afraid something might happen and the other devices wouldn't be available. So they built the whole
computer with gates, but it worked for everything they did.

Laws: Jay, you had a question about the design of the DCTL.

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Last: We certainly picked DCTL because it was the simplest to fabricate, and didn't have terribly difficult
components to make. I wanted to ask Bob what other circuits were discussed. Were you discussing
things with Vic about other things we should be doing?

Norman: About that time, a request came in from IBM for us to do DTL circuits, because all their work
was in DTL. I went through it some with Vic from a circuit standpoint and the [numbers and ]kinds ofcomponents [including capacitors] that would have to be built in order to do it. [It is worth mentioning thatDTL capacitors were yield problem for some years. Meanwhile we developed Transistor Transistor
Logic, TTL. When we filed for a patent we learned of a coincidental invention by Pacific Semiconductor
and withdrew.] But fundamentally, as I expressed it to Vic, I didn't want to dilute what we were doing with
the DCTL. I'd had a lot of experience with that, and in a sense, we had embarked on it. That's where I
wanted to take it. He agreed with that. [We did put in place it backup plan that if we couldn't produce anintegrated circuit we would produce the transistor and integral base resistor as a DCTL transistor, thesilicon analog of the 2N240. That would have been the subject 1960 ISSCC paper. We should haveproceeded with that anyhow since there would be many available sockets for a silicon "surface barriertransistor".]

Laws: When you went out to the customers with your first devices, did they think that this was a good
choice, or would they have preferred to have something different?

Norman: They all preferred something different. At WESCON, by then there was a group of us fromaround the country who I called "paneleers." They started having panels at all these conferences and I
was one of the paneleers. That kind of question would come up. I would stand up -- and it was in thefirst Westcon.

Laws: This was WESCON in 1960?

Norman: Yes. I said, "How many of you are ready to quit designing flip-flops for every job you do?" AndI think about three people stood up. Out of hundreds. We're in this big, huge Cow Palace [near San
Francisco]. The following year, I asked that same question, and only three people didn't stand up.

Laws: Fascinating change in that short a time.

Norman: It is a fascinating change. But I, of course, had done a lot of work, learning how to build DCTL
that worked, and had the advantage that, resistors were per square, so many ohms per square, so thesize of resistors was important, and certainly capacitors were a big deal from a chip area standpoint. The
disadvantage of DCTL to the equipment manufacturer was that the transistors were by far-- by maybe
two orders of magnitude-- the most expensive component in the computer. So the idea that you're going
to forgo resistors at 15 or 20 cents apiece, for a transistor at $15 or $20 a piece just didn't make sense.
But in terms of the overall ability to build a rugged computer, with a few consistent components, it was thefirst machine to a control computer, was a DCTL computer. When you're business is transistors, and infact, the easiest thing for you to fabricate more than one of on a chip, and the least area on a chip, istransistors, then DCTL makes a hell of a lot of sense.

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Laws: If you took these first two flip-flops to this gentleman at Fort Monmouth, who obviously didn't
understand what a jewel he had in his desk drawer all those years, was it just a shotgun approach to themarket, or did you know exactly where you wanted to take these?

Norman: I think it was July; I gave a talk at the NATO AGARD [Advisory Group on Aeronautical
Research and Development] conference in Oslo, Norway.

Laws: This is July, '60. [Norman: Yes. It was an R&D conference. We got a lot of response, and of course Howard [Bobb] wasout shaking trees everywhere there were trees. We had a lot of interest from a lot of people. Then AC
Spark Plug division in General Motors started looking at this for flight control, which they actually built.
Martin Denver was looking at these for test equipment. There were two kinds of customers in the digital
realm at that time. There were the people like Sperry, who were building the fairly small, militarycomputers to do a variety of jobs, and people like Univac and IBM and so forth, were building large dataprocessing machines. We were selling, if you will, to the small, military computer, where reliability was
terribly important. It's interesting that about that time, there was a paper, I think from Remington Rand
about introducing faults into a computer, so that the technicians would stay capable of quickly finding andfixing faults. Perhaps a year earlier, they didn't have that problem, but as the computers got morereliable, they did have the problem that the technicians were losing their ability to keep these big
computers online. So we had two different worlds going on out there, and we were aiming for the highintegrity world.

Laws: People who would pay for small size, high reliability, low power. Typically, what were the devices
priced at initially? Say in 100 piece quantities. Do you remember?

Norman: I'd figured out some time before that it was costing us $60 a transistor to build a computer, notincluding the cost of the transistors. So when we talked about pricing on the first flip-flop, which had six
transistors, I said, "Let's price it at $360." I think they actually did price it that, must have been for at least
an hour or so. Then, of course, it began coming down. But basically, I would guess people were paying$100 apiece for integrated circuits at that time. I think that's about where it was.

Last: One point I'd like to make, at this same time, the reaction of the sales department was not
extremely favorable toward integrated circuits. I was at a meeting. I don’t remember, but it was all of the
top people in the company, including Tom Bay, the marketing manager. Tom said to this group, saying
all the money I had wasted on integrated circuits, and we should shut down the group. There was just asilence. Nobody came to my defense or anything.

Laws: Because they were having trouble selling it, Jay?

Last: No, because they had such a successful business selling transistors to circuit designers and here
they were seeing that they were going to lose their main customers with integrated circuits. They were
finding a big resistance to selling a fabricated circuit to somebody. The circuit designers all basically
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didn't want to. So Tom Bay just looked on it as a big nuisance and an impediment to his main role, which
was selling transistors and diodes. But it shocked me, of course.
[Note from Bob Norman: Tom didn't like his salesmen pushing ICs they didn't have instead oftransistors they did have. Transistors were selling in the $5-$10 range.]

Laws: About what time was this, Jay?

Last: This would be in the fall of '60. It was just before we had made the first diffused device.

Laws: But it hadn't been formally announced to the public at that time. That came in '61.

Last: No, we hadn't announced the device. But Tom expressed in fairly graphic language what hethought .we should do with that program. As I said, nobody commented on it, or said, "Tom, where are
you coming from?" They just sat there and let me stew in this.

Laws: You felt that it showed a lack of understanding of the potential.

Last: It showed why the integrated circuit got off to such a slow start. It was a completely different world.
It was as big a change as from the vacuum tube to the transistor, from design points of view and theapproach to it.

Laws: We hear the same stories about the microprocessors going through exactly the same cycle, trying
to get people to understand what it was for.

Last: That's right.

Laws: People don't seem to learn from history, do they?

Kattner: No, they certainly don't.

Norman: He was upset, because too many salesmen were talking about integrated circuits, which they
didn't have -- if they had orders, they couldn't ship them-- instead of talking about transistors, which they
did have. It was a fairly common thing for the salesman to talk about what he didn't have. Tom wasreally angry about that.

Laws: So what was the first real design win that you saw, Bob, that said, "Boy, I think this thing is going
to be important?"

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Norman: It never occurred to me. I don't know.

Laws: The MIT visit?

Norman: I was very happy about that. Fundamentally, I couldn't think of a better place to put all the work
we had done on building a reliable solution. Probably the reason for MIT is Walt Andrews, the only guy in
Fairchild who got list price on everything he sold. Part of the reason for our visit to MIT is that we were
working with them. They were getting ready to use welded Cordwood modules, on the Command
Module. Fairchild built the transistors for that. In fact, part of my job at Fairchild was evaluating this. The
problem was lead consistency. If they didn't have high consistency in the leads of the transistors wewere shipping them, then that would throw off the weld schedule on the interconnecting wires in themodule. So one of the problems solved by the integrated circuits was that they no longer had to worry
about that. In fact, the fundamental attribute of the integrated circuits is a consistency of the technologies
we were using throughout. By then, well known, reliable transistor technology. I think Howard [Bobb]
probably took advantage of my knowledge of all the problems these guys were having using transistors[in the cordwood modules].

Laws: Do you remember when you made that first call on MIT, which year?

Norman: Oh, it was in '60.

Laws: And I think it was in 1962 before they made the commitment to actually use the circuit.

Norman: [This would be after they spent a lot of money validating the reliability of Micrologic]. Thosethings take a while. Well, they used to at Sperry, so that kind of thing didn't bother me. But it was part ofTom Bay's problem.

Laws: So Jay, in late '60, you were somewhat shocked that the sales department wasn't going to spend
a lot of time selling your baby. You left the company early in '61?

Last: Yes, I did.

Laws: Was that as a result of that [comment by Tom Bay]?

Last: It was one of a number of things. I went from an environment where integrated circuits were very
minor thing to join Henry Singleton. He said, "I want to build a systems company [Teledyne] based on
advanced integrated circuits." The company was changing its nature then too. The eight of us started it,
and we worked together collegially as a team. By this time the company was getting stratified and I wasjust another employee in a back room in an R&D lab. I loved the excitement of starting Fairchild. I said,"That would be fun to do again." So I was ready to go. Isy left with me and Jean left with me. Lionel laterin that year started his own company. You can see that the believers left the company to do somethingelse.
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Laws: Sure. You and Isy went to start an IC company {Amelco], and Lionel, you went to foundSignetics, I believe. Again, to focus on integrated circuits.

Kattner: Primarily, yes. It was the only thing we focused on.

Laws: Meanwhile, Bob, you stayed with Fairchild until you founded General Microelectronics. What year
was that?

Norman: In '63.

Laws: So you did stay the first couple of years after the introduction of the Micrologic device.

Norman: Yes.

Laws: And the first public introduction of that, I believe was at the IRE [Institute of Radio Engineers
Conference in New York] in March, 1961 when the Life magazine picture came out that we're familiar
with.

Last: At that time, we made the thing too small. The Life magazine picture shows the device in a realsmall, TO-18 can, which the customer couldn't handle easily. So we quickly backed off and put it in alarger package.

Laws: And what style package did you put it in?

Kattner: The TO-5 can.

Last: The standard TO-5 package. So we miniaturized too much.

Laws: "Smaller than the D on the dime" was the caption in the magazine.

Last: Yes. A memo I ran across was [written] in December of '61. There was a sales department
document that said, "The integrated circuit has arrived. We've now sold half a million dollars' worth ofthem, and we've got the complete family to sell." It went on to discuss the good response that it was
getting. When we left, we had made just the first flip-flop. Lionel, in the months he was there, filled out
the family and got them into some kind of production.

Laws: What were the other members of the family, Lionel? There was a gate.

Kattner: We had a gate, a half shift register, and the adder, I think.
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Haas: Half adder.

Kattner: Half adder, yes.

Haas: Counter adapter [used to build a fast carry counter, dual three input gate, and the buffer.

Kattner: Yeah, there we go. They were all previously designed. The layouts were completed, so it was
just then a matter of producing them. So before I left, we had--Laws: Was it like a master slice, single design you just masked differently, or was each one uniquely
designed?

Last: The others had more transistors. [Each was uniquely designed]

Kattner: Yeah, more complex. But the transistor was the same transistor. And then, of course,
resistors, depending on what value you wanted determined the size of the layout. So most of the otherdevices were all combinations of different components. They all followed the same processing. The flipflop was the basic one, and whatever we accomplished there applied to all the rest of them. Not to say
there weren't some difficulties. You still had alignment problems even then, in the photo masking, butdiffusion was fairly well under control.

Laws: And you were still working with the 25 micron tolerance at that point, or had you tightened up
anything?

Kattner: We had tightened it up quite a bit.

Laws: To what, do you remember?

Kattner: No, I don't really recall any more. I know the wafers were like 80 microns thick.

Laws: What size wafers were you working on?

Kattner: Roughly an inch in diameter.

Laws: You started out at an inch?

Last: Three-quarters was the first one, then an inch. Then we had to cut a bevel on one side, so thattook away some of the area. There wasn't a whole lot. One other thing we haven't mentioned, the fact

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that we were trying to get the optimum transistor for this particular environment, so there was a lot of work
going on, developing a good transistor. It was a dumbbell transistor. Isy was involved with that.

Laws: Dumbbell, meaning the shape. How did you come up with that shape, Isy?

Haas: Well, the shape was obvious. The problems were not. The stumbling blocks with the RTL or
DCTL was the low input impedance of the transistor. To get decent distribution, you had to have VBEs
within a couple of millivolts. That was not possible, so we started adding an external resistor. Somebody
had the bright idea of, "Why don't we just elongate the base to make the Rb prime, the input resistor,
larger?" Well, in theory that works, but when the transistor goes into saturation, it looks like a collectorbase by-pass diode, that decreases the input impedance again, and also increases the collector
saturation volt. So that was kind of a negative benefit, which really brought forth the fact that in integrated
circuits understanding the solid state physics of the chip was key to making good working circuits. This
became even more apparent later on, with TTL, DTL and all those saturating components on a single
silicon area. Later on, this is after Fairchild, I figured out that if you put two collectors on a transistor, you
would solve the problem. Fortunately, Fairchild did not have that patent. Teledyne did. Fortunately forme, I really enjoyed that part of the work. I happened to have the right background for this solid statephysics and electronics combination, to understand what was going on. I think Lionel and I worked very
well as a team. I would figure out what was wrong, and he would figure out how to fix it. And Dave
Allison was an extremely key person.

Laws: He was the diffusion expert?

Kattner: He was a device developer. [He also had a lot of diffusion experience.]

Haas: He worked for Jean, I think. He pointed out a lot of the problems that we couldn't understand, likethe overlapping diode, he pointed out to me.

Laws: Tell us more about the overlapping diode. It's come up a couple of times.

Haas: When a transistor goes into saturation, the base become more positive than the collector. So you
have a “P” base and an “N” collector, giving you a forward biased “PN” diode. It looks like you haveanother diode with an anode on the base and a cathode on the collector, PN. Well, that clamps thecollector to follow the base. [So when you build a resistor into the base in series with the base byelongating the base (which is what we did), the base voltage will rise when the base is driven positive andthe transistor goes into saturation. But as the base goes more positive because of the base current
flowing into the built-in base resistor, the base voltage cannot rise indefinitely because it is clamped to thecollector voltage as if a forward biased “PN” diode clamps the base contact to the collector; and so thebase is clamped to the collector earlier than it would otherwise.] So it was kind of a lose-lose situation,
instead of a win-win situation. I think eventually, Fairchild took the dumbbell resistor out of the base andput an external base resistor, but I'm not sure. That eliminated the problem. It took more room on thechip but it helped to sell the device.

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Kattner: It worked.

Laws: Bob, you referred to the circuit as DCTL, but later on, several years later, Fairchild started calling
it RTL. Was anything different about the circuit, or was that easier to say?

Norman: It's kind of interesting, because the DCTL means that there's no intervening component
between the collector on one transistor and the base of the next. As a logic form, the way the Philco
2N240 transistor and it's various derivatives worked very well in DCTL. The reason it worked is because
there was an intrinsic resistor in the surface barrier. So when I was proposing DCTL at Fairchild, I was
saying, "We have to build in that resistor." When somebody, I don't know who, decided we'd just extend
the base and that will simplify that, and that's where the overlap diode problem [came from] -- but theconsistent thing was to get that small amount of resistance [about 125 ohms] in series with the base, andthat would prevent the various problems the DCTL had when you didn't have that intrinsic resistor.
Somewhere, I guess somebody probably complained to marketing, it wasn't really DCTL because there
was a resistor there. Then they came up with another way around it. And besides, that was another way
to solve the problem that some people fundamentally didn't like DCTL.

Laws: So RTL was DCTL at Fairchild. There was no difference, no change as you moved forward.

Norman: No. Prior to that, as I said, because of the cost of using transistor-only type logic at Sperry, we
had developed resistor-coupled transistor logic, where we did all the summing in resistors, instead of in
the transistor. So a three-input NOR gate had three resistors and one transistor, instead of threetransistors. We call that resistor-coupled transistor logic. But then you started getting all theseacronyms. It kind of got confusing what you were talking about. We knew what we were making.

Last: One point on the diffusion, we keep referring to Dave Allison, who was really an unsung hero at
Fairchild. He joined when the company started, and he was extremely important on the diffusion
processes for our first device, and he continued, as has been discussed here, to be a very senior person
in diffusion.

Norman: He was skinny as a rail, and seemed to lose weight every time there was a problem.

Laws: You talked about a number of unsung heroes today. You talked about Jim Nall, you talked about
Dave Allison, you talked about Sam Fok. Are there others that you'd like people to know about who
made a contribution here?

Last: I think those were the key ones. Robert Martin, who brought back, for some reason the idea ofusing a different boron compound, which eased the boron diffusion. He worked on that, and Lionel
picked that up, which helped greatly to make the diffused isolation device possible. So he was an unsung
person. Do you remember more about your interaction with him?

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Kattner: Very little, because once that was suggested, we kind of took it and ran with it. It worked, so I
didn't really have too much more interaction with him on that.

Laws: There's a couple of other names that turn up on some of the early app notes. There's Don Farina,
Richard Andersen, they were involved in helping market the products to customers?

Norman: Don had worked for me at Sperry. Then he came when we set up the Micrologic program, hecame to work for me in device evaluation at Fairchild. He was the one that did the measurements thatshowed that the Ebers and Moll equations would apply to planar devices, which was very important tocoming up with a robust circuit design for the DCTL. And I did it over several decades of current andseveral temperatures and so forth. The guys, Don, Dic Anderson, Orville Baker, Howard Bogert, Helmut
Wolf, Bill Hafner, Dick Crippen and others in the group, did a lot of the grunt work that's required any time
you're taking something and getting ready to manufacture it and make sure that, the design will be robust
over the temperature, over all the margins, and that it will be, to the extent that we can influence it, will be
manufacturable. He was an important part of that, and Dick Anderson also was very important. We had
Howard Bogert who was part of that group. He and Dick Anderson started together coming out of
Stanford. Howard, took gate elements, the three input gates, and cut the collector leads apart, and usedthat to measure the transistor characteristics, which showed how closely matched the base emittercharacteristics were, which then said that we had a leg up in using these processes on analog devices.
He did a lot of that work. So we had an incredible team of people working on this.

Laws: You mentioned a number of salesmen: Howard Bobb, also the gentleman who never cut theprice, I don’t remember his name.

Norman: Walter Andrews.

Laws: In my experience, there are two or three really champion salesmen out there that just take thisthing and run. Are there any others that come to mind that could make it happen in the field?

Norman: Dick Eiler and Tom Murphy, both government-oriented people. One of the fairly importantsales events that happened, although we didn't know it at the time, was when this guy came in from the
Department of Defense. His name was John Orleman. He came down to see me in my office at FabianWay. I'm describing all the stuff that we've done and we're doing, and this is pretty early in the program.
He's got a little pad that must about an inch or an inch and a half square, and he's making little notes. I'mkind of, how much can you write on a little pad an inch and a half square. A month or so later, Gordon
Moore calls me up to his office and say, "We have a RFP from NSA." What it was, was a verbatim[transcript] of what I had talked to him about in that meeting. It turned out John had been a stenographer
in the Signal Corps before he went there. , So that's how we got the R-13 contract, which was a second
generation of the DCTL integrated circuits, designed for lower power and with higher complexity devices.
And at that time, of course, it was all communications, security stuff.

Laws: What's R-13? Does that mean anything to the uninitiated?

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Norman: I don’t know, but it's also called Milliwatt logic.

Laws: And that came out in about '64 or so?

Norman: No, no. It came out, it must have been '62, before I left [Fairchild Semiconductor in early ’62
and Fairchild Space and Defense Systems] in July of '63, so it was out well before that. They'd asked us
to do reliability and QA specs. We took all the stuff we had done under the [Micrologic] test to failure
program. The only [residual] problem we were having at that time was that in die-attach, inmanufacturing, sometimes the girl's tweezer, when she was scrubbing the die into the header, thetweezer would slip and scratch the metal. Enough metal would remain so that the device worked when
we tested it, but very quickly, like due to metal migration or something, [the conductor] would separate
and the chip would quit. So we had to do an optical inspection, which drove manufacturing insane,
because they had to work with one device at a time on that, until R&D came up with a way to put a glass
coating on the chip, and cut the incidence of that problem way down. The other one, the integrated circuit
was a low impedance device. We normally did gross leak tests, by putting a device in a detergent. If it'sa transistor, we put the device in the can into a detergent and if any got into the can, then of course we'd
see that, and the characteristics of the transistor instantly, and throw the transistor away. But the
integrated circuits were such low impedance devices, we wouldn't see it. It wasn't until one time, at an
RRE conference, Joe Gattuso was a salesman. I'm standing there at the booth and he comes and says,"I just got these integrated circuits. I had left the uncapped circuits in the pocket of my shirt when it went
to the laundry, and when it came back, there's no metal." Then we realized that if we did that gross leaktest on integrated circuits, we could wipe them out without even knowing, or just trap some of that stuff
inside cans. We had to go to a completely different gross leak test on these things.

Laws: We're running towards the end of this tape, so I'm going to ask a couple more questions. What I'dlike for now is to get you to look back, and then ask each of you, what are your strongest memories of
those times? What are the things that you're most proud of? What are the things that stick in your mind?
Jay, could you start off!

Last: Well, it was just such an exciting time. We were working ahead of the technology that existed, so
we had to make a new invention every day -- you could immediately see the contributions you weremaking to move the whole thing forward. It was certainly the most exciting and interesting time of my life.

Kattner: I'd sort of describe it the same way Jay has. For me at least, it was beyond my imagination at
the time, because I had no idea what I was going to be doing when I came there to Fairchild. So I
learned a lot within another couple of years that I was there. Ultimately, before I left, I realized that theworld is changing. We're onto a whole new era of technology, and the future's out there. At that time,
you couldn't even imagine how things would change and change so rapidly. It was almost like orders ofmagnitude every year that you saw more progress and new devices, new methods. The whole thing just
improved by leaps and bounds. It was an exciting time to be involved with it. That's all I can say. It's thebest part of your life, really.

Haas: I have to second everything that's been said. In addition, I can say that I'm convinced that thework we did has changed society.

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Norman: It was an incredible experience for me, working with these guys. As I've said to them before,
our ability to interact. They were beating their heads against the wall, and to me, it's simple, because
every time I asked them for something, they did it. What more can you-- I'm a systems guy, what do I
know? But I'm so incredibly happy at what we turned out. What we turned out was good stuff thatworked. You didn't have to do any fiddling around with it. You didn't have to protect it from theenvironment or anything else. It just worked. To me, I'm an engineer. That's why I get the big bucks.

Laws: Lionel, you mentioned you had a sense of where this thing could go. Did you really understandwhat this was going to mean in ten or 20 years beyond?

Kattner: Specifically no, but I just had a pretty good insight that we were really onto somethingphenomenal. That's basically why I left, started another company, because I knew it was going to be an
exciting time. I also realized it wasn't going to be easy. I knew enough then that I knew that the customer
still thought in terms of discrete devices. What would happen to all the circuit engineers out there in theindustry? Because we were going to replace them, so it was going to be a long drawn out battle, and it
was for a few more years. I think everybody experienced that. .[At the time I felt we could put fifty to ahundred transistors and passive elements (capacitors and resistors) on a single chip but a diffusedcollector would be crucial. Subsequent to leaving Fairchild the diffused collector was accomplished at
Signetics and that vision was realized.]

Laws: It took longer than expected then, to get the circuits accepted and into production, Jay?

Last: Yes. It certainly did. It was a military business and it took a couple of things happening. Gordon
Moore has told me that he wrote his famous paper discussing Moore's Law because he was feeling so
frustrated that the world wasn't accepting integrated circuits.

Laws: And this was in '65.

Last: Sixty-four. He wrote that in '64, and he was pointing out that the circuits were going to be acceptedfor economic reasons, and not for the small size or power or the other reasons that had been led up tothat time. So it was a four or five year period. A couple of technical things happened in that time.
Epitaxy made an enormous effect on the ability to fabricate these things. These long diffusions we had
went away. Then eventually, the MOS circuitry came in. That's the one that has changed the world,going up to millions of devices, instead of the dozens we were talking. It's pretty hard to say, "This device
is going to change the world, and there's going to be millions of devices on a wafer," when your yields are
so low. If you made a device that had a dozen transistors on, you thought you'd conquered the world. I
don’t think anybody could ever imagine where this was going to go, to the extent that it's gone now. You
start looking at how much R&D has gone into the development of the products we have now. You justlook at each company, spending upwards of 10 and 20 percent on R&D, and you multiply all thesebillions of dollars of all these companies, you have an unbelievable amount of development work that's
taken place in the last half century. So none of this came easy. Every step forward is a difficult thing. I
haven't seen any early remarks about how big these things were going to get. Anybody that made any
estimate like that was low by a couple of orders of magnitude.

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Laws: Before we sign off, does anybody want to add anything, before we finish?
[Note from Bob Norman: Howard Bobb and I left Fairchild Semiconductor in early '62 to join the newly
formed Fairchild Space and Defense Systems on Porter Drive in Stanford Industrial Park. Our firstcontract was from the Air Force for a Triple Redundant Adaptive Flight Control System for the X-5 rocket
plane. Gene Franklin and Bernie Widrow of Stanford Control Systems Lab consulted. This was
fabricated using Micrologic and successfully flown on the X-5.]
Last: I think we covered it.

Kattner: Covered pretty well.

Haas: Thank you for your work.

Last: Yes, thank you.

Laws: I would like to thank you gentlemen for coming in at such short notice. This was another historic
moment and I'm thrilled to have captured it with you.

Everyone: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW
ADDENDUM
Fairchild Micrologic Integrated Circuit Development Chronology
Compiled by David A. Laws and Michael Riordan

December 1957 - On December 1, 1957 theoretical physicist and co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor
Corporation, Jean Hoerni describes in his lab notebook an idea for a new method of fabricating
semiconductor devices under the heading “Method of protecting exposed p-n junctions at the surface ofsilicon transistors by oxide masking techniques.” Due to other priorities Hoerni’s idea is not pursued atthat time.
January 1959 - Seeking a solution to reliability problems with exposed p-n junctions on the company’s
mesa transistors, Hoerni returns to his 1957 concept. On January 14 he prepares a patent disclosure
based on his notes and proceeds to develop a prototype device that he demonstrates to his colleagues inMarch. U. S. Patent number 3,025,589 “Method of Manufacturing Semiconductor Devices” describing the“planar” process is filed on May 1, 1959 and issued March 20, 1962. Also in January, director of research
Robert N. Noyce writes down his ideas on interconnecting multiple devices on a single piece of silicon byusing the oxide layer as an insulator and p-n junctions for isolation between components.
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March 1959 - Texas Instruments announces Jack Kilby’s Solid Circuit concept at the Institute of RadioEngineers (IRE) conference in New York. Noyce calls a meeting to discuss how to respond to the TI
device. He describes his interconnection ideas that in association with Hoerni’s planar structure lead tothe filing of U. S. Patent number 2981877 “Semiconductor device-and-lead structure” on July 30, 1959.
This fundamental patent on the monolithic integrated circuit (IC) was issued on April 25, 1961.
April 1959 – Unknown to the Fairchild group, physicist Kurt Lehovec at Sprague Electric files for U. S.
patent number 3029366 “Multiple Semiconductor Assembly” that describes electrical isolation of multiple
semiconductor devices with reverse-biased p-n junctions. Lehovec’s work takes precedence overNoyce’s notes and was issued on April 10, 1962.
August 1959 - Following discussions with Noyce, Fairchild co-founder Jay Last builds a concept
integrated circuit (made of individual silicon transistor chips on a ceramic substrate with pencil lines asload resistors) to “show the flag” at the WESCON trade show.
September 1959 - Last forms a team to develop a monolithic IC; members include Sam Fok, Isy Haas,
Lionel Kattner, and James Nall. That fall, Robert Norman, Device Evaluation section head under Victor
Grinich, uses electrical data developed by Donald Farina to design a direct-coupled transistor logic(DCTL) four-transistor flip-flop integrated circuit.
December 1959 - In his notebook entry of 12/22/59, Kattner records the metal interconnect pattern hedesigned for the circuit with an active area of 28 by 34 mils based on a “physical isolation” techniquedevised by Last, to be accomplished by etching the wafer from the back side through to the oxide layer
and filling the cavity with epoxy or plastic material.
February 1960 - Norman, Last, and Haas present the first public paper on Micrologic, “Solid-State
Micrologic Elements,” at the 1960 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (Session VII:
Microelectronic Considerations) on Friday, February 12, 1960.
May 1960 - The first working flip-flop IC with four transistors with diffused base and load resistors
fabricated with Last’s physical isolation method is tested on May 26, 1960. (See “FF-105” in Kattner
notebook, dated 5/26/60)
August 1960 - Kattner explores alternative isolation techniques (See Kattner, “Micrologic Electrical
Isolation,” notebook entry 8/27/60) such as the Noyce p-n junction approach after discussing diffusion
techniques with diffusion expert David Allison. Haas proposes fabricating the deep junctions with boron
diffusions across the back and in selected areas on the front of the wafer. (See Haas patent notebook
8/31/60). Requiring diffusion times of 18-24 hours, much of this work is “bootlegged” in the evenings andweekends due to limited furnace capacity.
September 1960 - The first successful devices made using diffused isolation are tested on September
27, 1960. This success is further borne out by Haas and Kattner comments in a Fairchild R&D progress
report dated October 1, 1960 (for example, Kattner: “Rather marked success has been achieved in thedevelopment of electrically isolated DCTL flip-flops.”)November 1960 - Subsequent temperature and lifetime tests show that reliability of flip-flop ICs madewith diffused isolation are far superior to those made with physical isolation. In the November 1, 1960,
R&D progress report, Nall states: “The electrical isolation studies look by far to be the best and mosteconomical method of making micrologic elements.”
January 1961 - Tests by Norman’s group indicate that the first Micrologic ICs are finally ready formarketing. The February 8, 1961, R&D Progress Report (for the period ending 1/31/61) summary by
Grinich and Gordon Moore states: “The flip-flop runs indicate we are in adequate shape for a productannouncement at the March IRE.”
March 1961 - Fairchild begins formal marketing of the type “F” Micrologic integrated circuit flip-flop at apress conference at the March 1961 IRE Conference in New York. A photograph of an earlier, physicallyisolated device is published in the March 10 issue of Life magazine.
December 1961 - During the summer Fairchild introduces five additional members of the Micrologic
family and on December 1, 1961, an internal sales memo states "We are at a point now where we can
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discuss micrologic as a true product. Our shipments by the end of December will be in the $500,000
region and the current backlog is about 5K units"
Sources:
1. Last, J. E-mail of 10/17/06 and 3/22/08
2. Kattner, L. E-mail of 12/12/07
3. Hass, I. E-mail of 12/24/07
4. Norman, R. E-mail of 2/22/08
5. Norman, R. Last, J. Haas, I. "Solid-state Micrologic Elements," Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digestof Technical Papers. 1960 IEEE International Volume: III, (Feb 1960)
6. Riordan., Michael. “The Silicon Dioxide Solution: How physicist Jean Hoerni built the bridge from thetransistor to the integrated circuit,” IEEE Spectrum (December 2007)

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