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Biographic Note
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Dr. Hung Chang Lin has been
associated with the semiconductor field for over 50 years, beginning in
1950 with his pioneering work at
the RCA ISL labs with early transistor circuitry. He holds a BS EE from
Chiaotung University (1941), an MSEE from the University of Michigan (1948)
and a PhD from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (1956). Dr. Lin is the holder of 57 U.S.
patents, and is the author/co-author of 170 technical papers and several respected
texts on semiconductors, including “Integrated Electronics,” (Holden Day,
1967), “Selected Semiconductor Circuits Handbook,” (Wiley and Sons, 1960),
and “Semiconductor Electronics Education Committee Notes 1,” (Wiley and
Sons, 1963). In the 1950s and
1960s, he worked at several key semiconductor companies, including RCA,
CBS/Hytron and Westinghouse. He was
elected an IEEE Fellow “for contributions to semiconductor electronics and
circuits and pioneering of integrated circuits”, and served as Chairman of
its Linear Integrated Circuits Task Group and was the Associate Editor of
the Journal of Solid State Circuits.
He was the recipient of the 1978 J. J. Ebers Award of the IEEE
Electron Devices Society. Since
1969, Dr. Lin has been a Professor at the University of Maryland and is
currently Professor Emeritus.
Lin
Historic Audio Recordings
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Oral History – H. C. Lin
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This Oral History was taken in
the Fall of 2003 and highlights Dr. Lin’s contributions to early germanium
transistor circuitry in the 1950s and early IC work in the 1960s.
I think
you started in the semiconductor field with RCA. Is that right?
I started with RCA in 1948. Bell Labs had just invented the
transistor, and RCA tried early to catch up. When I first started, I joined
them in their patent department. They had a vacancy there, so when I finished
at the University of Michigan, I took the job. I worked in the RCA patent department for two years before I
got into transistors, from 1948 to 1950.
In the early 1950s, RCA
was second only to Bell Labs/Western Electric in the number of transistor
related patents.
Well, that was the golden age of RCA. They had
so many patents, that just from the royalties on these patents, they could
support that whole lab. After
working in the RCA patent office, I then worked for the RCA ISL (Industry
Service Laboratories) group. Originally RCA had been formed by Westinghouse
and GE, to pull all their patents together, and the ISL had been formed to
teach people how to use the patents.
This work involved writing reports or visiting the licensees to pass
out patent information.
Go
To Lin Oral History, Page 2
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