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Later, I was on a team with
several others, including Tony Peldunas from the Development shop, to work
on improving the design of the 2N32 point contact transistor. There were
several problems, including the movement of the point contact whiskers for
the collector and emitter terminals after the device was made – this
resulted in intermittent behavior.
Several members of the team worked on this problem, with each change
making improvements. We changed the
materials used to “pot” the germanium pellet and the point contacts, from
polyisobutlene wax and coil dope to silicone grease and glass-filled oven
cured araldite. In this case we
used glass spheres (10 to 30 um and 30 to 170 um) mixed with the araldite
and applied to the germanium point area and cured for 24 hours at 105
degrees c. This change improved the
mechanical stability of the points, but was not completely satisfactory.
I was responsible for a number
of early transistors. For example,
I was assigned the development work on the germanium alloy transistor which
was eventually sold to industrial and military customers as the 2N331. This was developed as part of a military
contract and I remember developing the report where we used 39 of the first
of these units to be tested as part of the MIL_T_19500/4 qualification. We passed this and the specification was
accepted on July 30, 1957. After working on many different transistor and
IC’s in the 60s, 70s and 80s, I
retired from RCA in 1990. My last
assignment was in computer aided design applications which were used to
design IC’s.
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