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Biograhic Note
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Mr. Robert E. Kleppinger
received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of
Nebraska in 1951 and an MS degree in 1955 from Stevens Institute. He was a design and development engineer
at the RCA Semiconductor Advanced Development Group at the Harrison
plant. His first assignment was to
transfer the newly invented alloy junction transistors from the Labs at
Princteton to the Tube Division at Harrison and set up large scale
production – these were the first junction transistors manufactured by
RCA. From these very
technologically challenging beginnings, Rob continued to be associated with
semiconductor development and production at RCA for forty years, retiring
in 1991. He held a variety of
positions, including Engineering Leader, Senior Engineer, and Principal
Member of Technical Staff, and worked on a wide variety of solid state
technologies and projects. He has
published several papers in the RCA Engineer, has received Plant and
Divisional Technical Excellence Awards, has presented numerous papers at
Industry Meetings, has copyrights on three computer programs, and was
granted a patent related to semiconductor research.
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Oral History – Rob Kleppinger
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This Oral History was provided by
Mr. Kleppinger in Feb, 2001.
I started at RCA in July,
1951, and for the first six months I attended a specialized training
program. After the training, in Jan
1952, I started at the Harrison facility in the Advanced Development Group
working on semiconductors. At that
time, Charles Mueller and Jack Pankove were working at the RCA Labs in
Princeton on the first RCA junction transistors – these were identified as
type TA153. I started right away with
these junction units. At that time
there were only three of us at Harrison working on transistors – myself,
Fred Hunter and Bob Slade, who was the manager of this Advanced Development
Group. We were all engineers and we
also had a part time technician named Margaret Deavy (she also worked for
the vacuum tube engineers who were at Harrison).
I remember that one of our
first breakthroughs on the alloy junction transistors was the discovery
that we weren’t using a high enough temperature for the indium to react
effectively with the germanium and provide good quality junctions on a
consistent basis. Once we corrected
this, our meager yield on these early transistors really improved. At the beginning, we didn’t even have a
furnace to melt the indium – I was using an RF germanium crystal growing
furnace instead. We used a hot
hydrogen gas to provide the heat to hand-solder the leads to the indium
areas after melting.
Go
To Kleppinger Oral History, Page 2
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