RCA Transistor Oral History Wheatley Page2

EARLY TRANSISTOR HISTORY AT RCA

C. Frank Wheatley

Oral History – C. Frank Wheatley (Continued)

I published extensively upon transistor television, with major contributions in the understanding and solutions of failures from transients for horizontal deflection circuitry.

In early 1968, I designed an integrated circuit and submitted a proposal to Picatinny Arsenal disclosing an inexpensive circuit to control self-detonation of land mines. In 1978, I and a colleague developed a power IC process and an operational amplifier upon a single die, which delivered 50 watts of continuous sine wave power into a 10 ohm load while maintaining all other characteristics typical of operational amplifiers. The monolithic Darlington transistor I co-designed became an industry standard. A two-terminal all-electronic temperature sensor and a thermally ballasted bipolar power transistor are also included in my work.

My responsibilities since 1979 include device design of power MOSFETs, IGBTs, and power bipolar transistors. I am the architect of the industry standard logic level FETs, the MegaFETs and the Radiation Hardened Power MOSFETs. My current activities include studies and publications relating to single event gate rupture (SEGR) and single event burnout (SEB) of power MOSFETs. I used this knowledge to develop radiation hardened power MOSFETs currently being used in the International Space Station.

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Oral History – C. Frank Wheatley (Continued)

The following is the text from a Nov 19, 1951 report written by Frank Wheatley describing one of his initial RCA six week training assignments (from Oct 15 to Nov 23, 1951).

“This report covers the third of four six week assignments for me. This assignment was with the Engineering Section of the Harrison Tube Plant in K.M. McLaughlin’s Tube Development Shop. I was under the direct supervision of A. E. Chettle.

My work at Harrison was with Germanium diodes and transistors. In the manufacture of transistors, the spacing between the emitter and the collector is very small and rather critical. The initial spacing was found to decrease by a varying amount during the processing of the transistor. My project was to either eliminate this variation or to stabilize it to a fixed variation. I was to pick the project up where Harry Day, another trainee, left off. I found that the variations were due to metal relaxation as suggested by H. Day. A series of experiments showed that relaxation of the phosphor-bronze emitter and collector was the sole contributing factor to the relaxation. A prebaking process was tested and found to eliminate the variations. This prebaking has now been incorporated into the production schedule. I also designed a 100 megacycle low power oscillator and made several suggestions on the manufacture of the germanium diodes and transistors…….”

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