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Oral History – Hans Camenzind
Continued)
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This was cheap for them and a
chance for me to get started. They
paid $1200 a month for a year, and loaned me some of the equipment, which
they didn’t need, since they had just lost 50% of their engineers. So, it was an ideal situation.
This
was an unusual arrangement for those days?
Yes, very unusual. Unheard of. Looking back I’m surprised that I took that risk. I had a wife and four children at home,
$400 in the bank, and I had been making $18,000 at Signetics, so this would
be done to $14,4000. But I quickly
got two more contracts, so this worked out very well. Nobody else followed me. Signetics didn’t ask others to resign
and take independent contracts. It just wasn’t done yet.
Getting
back to the 555, what gave you the idea of a timer/oscillator chip?
I actually have to go back about
two or three years, while I was still at PR Mallory company. Being a research type, I could do
anything that came to mind – I could explore. So, my background is in radio
and telephone. I went to an apprenticeship in Switzerland with what they
call a “radio mechanic” – I fixed
radios. So, I knew what was
required to integrate a radio, make a chip, to put a radio on silicon.
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Oral History – Hans Camenzind
(Continued)
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Had
you started working with vacuum tubes earlier in Switzerland?
Oh yeah, absolutely. The first time I encountered transistors
was at college. I had to write a
term paper. That was the first time
I used transistors, which were very expensive.
But, having a background in
radio, I thought it would be nice to make a chip that did all the functions
of a radio. The biggest obstacle
was the tuned circuit. When you
look at a radio, it has these “IF cans”. A good one has at least three of
these. And, not only is this a
component you can’t put on silicon, you know, inductors are very difficult
to integrate, but these are very precise.
A radio station, say at 1 Mhz, the next station is 20Khz away. So, that requires some precision. And everybody was working on tuned
circuits, or filters they called them, and I thought they were going the
wrong way. Since there are no
inductors, there are capacitors in an integrated circuit, they had methods
to make an inductor from a capacitor.
It was kind of a reflection of it (the capacitor) so they called it
the gyrator. A very fancy name. And
I thought it was just an academic exercise that could never get the
precision, so why bother.
I looked around, and thought
that somewhere in the past, there must have been some attempt to make a
tuned circuit other than with an LC or crystal.
Go
To Camenzind Oral History,Page 5
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