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Oral History – Jack Haenichen
(Continued)
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At that
time our wafer diameter was small, I think about 1”, so maybe there were
500 transistors on the wafer. I remember working late into the night, till
3 or 4 o’clock into the morning, and I got the first run out and probed
them on a Tektronix curve tracer; first I’d probe one without the
invention: “dead short”; then went to the next one, “perfect”, next one
“dead-short”, next one “perfect”. It worked! These were high voltage (100V
break down) devices and we subsequently made much higher voltage devices
with no problem.
Then,
we launched that whole product line at the IRE convention (1962) and I gave
a paper on it at the Electron Devices meeting. It was the first time I had
ever given a paper, and I was so nervous. There were slides which were
projected on a giant screen, and I had one of those flashlight pointers.
When I turned that thing on and the arrow swished from one side of the
screen to the other because I was shaking. After that was done, and I got
back to Phoenix, I went to our Communications Director, Lothar Stern, and
said “Do you ever get requests for talks?” and he said, “All the Time”, and
I said “Sign me up for every one of them.”. At some point, after about 20
of them, I became a real pro!
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Oral History – Jack Haenichen
(Continued)
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10) How broadly was the
annular process applied to transistor device design and manufacture?
We
theorized that a benefit of this technology might be that there could be
other factors that could cause inversion layers on lightly doped material,
not just P-type, but maybe N-type too, and one of them could be radiation.
So, we did some testing and found out that this “hardened” devices
significantly to radiation, not just NPNs but PNPs too. So, Motorola
switched their entire production of silicon devices to the annular
technology.
I
participated heavily in the patent work on this. Motorola had a private
firm they had hired since the very beginning of the company, and the guy’s
name who owned it was Foorman Mueller. He was a patent attorney and this
guy was a genius. He didn’t understand anything about semiconductors, but
he could pull things out of your brain that you didn’t even know were in
there. He was terrific. Needless to say, we were all excited about this
invention, so we immediately filed for patents on it, world wide. In those
days, the inventor and the attorney did a lot of searching (for prior art)
but you also paid graduate students who were in patent law school to
search. At that time we paid them $5 an hour to search.
Go
To Haenichen Oral History, Page 10
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