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Historic Note
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Over a 36 year career at RCA,
from July 1951 until retirement in 1987, Frank Wheatley was responsible for
a number of “firsts” in the area of semiconductor research – his
contributions are numerous, including 58 U.S. patents granted and
additional patents currently pending. In addition, he has presented 57
professional papers and published an additional 91 papers over the span of
six decades. His most productive patent is the U.S. Letters Patent No.
4,364,073, entitled “Power MOSFET with an Anode Region”. This was filed
March 25, 1980, and issued Dec 14, 1982 to Hans W. Becke and Carl F.
Wheatley, Jr.. This is the seminal patent of the Insulated Gate Bipolar
Transistor (IGBT), which led to 1999 world sales in excess of $500,000,000,
the most recent year of data availability. In 1994, the College of
Engineering of the University of Maryland cited Mr. Wheatley for his
invention of the IGBT and other contributions by awarding him their
Centennial medal. This medal was given to the 100 most distinguished engineering
graduates during the college’s 100 year existence. Five years later, the
University of Maryland recognized Mr. Wheatley as one of their most
esteemed alumni innovators by naming him to the Hall of Fame of the A.
James Clark School of Engineering. Other recognitions include three awards
from RCA, four from Harris Corporation, and five from the IEEE, including
the honor of Life Fellow.
Mr. Wheatley retired from RCA in
1987. At that time he was manager of the Rad Hard Power and Advanced
Device Design Group. He continues his work as a consultant to Intersil
Semiconductor (successor to RCA, GE and Harris) and to Mission Research
Corp.
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Oral History – C. Frank Wheatley
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This
History was provided by Mr. Wheatley
in
January, 2001.
Following a two year and one
half year commitment to the Army during WWII, I obtained a BSEE from the
University of Maryland, graduating in 1951. I joined RCA in July, 1951 and
started right away in the Corporate Training Program, which consisted of
several six week assignments at various RCA facilities, in order to see
what different types of work was being done. I had four separate training
assignments. Two of these assignments were directed related to early
transistor/diode research and development at the Harrison plant Tube
Division. I’ll provide details later. The other assignments were involved
with Pickup and Phototubes (Lancaster Tube Plant), a Fire Control Computer
(Camden) and a tape duplication amplifier the Record Engineering facility
at Indianapolis. I served as a production engineer on early transistors at
Harrison in 1953 and 1954, and then moved to the new Somerville facility
Semiconductor products Division, starting in 1955 as an Applications
engineer.
In 1955, I designed and
reduced to practice a monolithic power integrated circuit, which combined a
power transistor and a “Barton” compensation diode upon a common germanium
die, resulting in one of the world’s first integrated circuits. This was
done to improve thermal coupling between the devices. In the early 1960s,
I designed two noteworthy all-transistor circuits, including an auto radio
(Automatic Radio Corp) and a high fidelity stereo amplifier (Heathkit
AA-21). These were world firsts when measured by performance, production capability
and reliability.
Go To Wheatley Oral History, Page 2
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