Two years since the first integrated circuits became available from Mullard’s Southampton facility, the groundwork for a ‘Ford type’ mass production unit has been built round that pilot installation. So starts a story in Electronics Weekly’s issue of September 24th 1969.
It continues: ‘Dr F.E.Jones, who heads Mullard’s wing of the giant Philips group, readily concedes that Mullards were slow to jump on the IC band-wagon, but he now believes that next year will see returns begin to accrue on their considerable investment in new plant, research and in production hardware.’
The story goes on to say that the plant will be the biggest semiconductor facility in Europe, employing 3,000 people including 200 scientists and engineers.
‘Mullard is currently operating a DTL and TTL diffusion unit and a third MOS diffusion unit is being laid down’, says the report.
The story goes on to say that Mullard expected the market to grow 3X in the 1970s decade, and that Dr Jones predicted that the market for transistors would be 16 billion units a year in the 1980s.
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