Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim, died earlier this week, He made his name at Fairchild, as a co-founder of AMD, and at Intersil before founding Maxim Integrated Products which became an outstanding success.
He was a great advocate of nepotism, and employed many members of his family at Maxim. He would defend this practice vigorously as being highly productive.
He tells the most hilarious story in his Silicon Genesis interview about how Jack Welch of GE came to see him with the intention of buying Intersil.
'They arranged for him to come out and take me to dinner', remembers Gifford, 'so he comes out. Nice guy. I like the guy. . . . . We drive up to the city and have dinner. Both of us get about half drunk. Maybe all drunk, probably'.
After they talk about the deal over dinner they leave the restaurant. 'So we get out', recalls Gifford, 'we get into a wrestling match. We do all kinds of stuff screwing around. We finally go home.'
Gifford started in the semiconductor business at Fairchild where he was the only manager the legendary Bob Widlar would allow to handle Widlar's first IC design, the 702 amplifier.
He left Fairchild to join Jerry Sanders and John Carey in co-founding AMD, then left AMD to join Intersil. In 1983, he founded Maxim Integrated Products.
Maxim quickly made its name by pioneering the trend to low-power analogue, and Gifford grew the company to a $2 billion a year revenue operation with very high profit margins.
Gifford left Maxim in 2007 at the time of the
He was 68. He will be remembered as one of the toughest and most colourful of all the semiconductor industry's pioneers.
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