Mannerisms

Has the semiconductor industry changed over the years? It's the sort of question people ask from time to time, usually in a bar.

A good story is told by Wilf Corrigan, one of the founding CEOs of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), about how the SIA got founded.

It was a culture clash between the flexible ethics of the PR community and the inflexible integrity of corporate Japan.

"Y'noo wa soo many semiconductor companies come to Scurtland to set up manufacturing plants?".

Most of the many stories which are told about the legendary analogue designer Bob Widlar, relate to his epic capacity for the sauce.

David Potter, founder of Psion, tells a surreal yarn describing the sudden demise of the UK personal computer industry.

Jurgen Knorr, President of Siemens Semiconductors (which became Infineon) between 1984 and 1996, tells a good story about how Europe, despite many mishaps, got up to speed on chip manufacturing in the 1980s and 90s.

A revealing yarn is told by Peter Gillibrand, GEC's PR man during the reign of GEC's long-serving and much feared boss, Lord Arnold Weinstock.

Dr Tsugio Makimoto, former President of Hitachi Semiconductors and Senior Corporate Vice-President and CTO at Sony, the author of 'Makimoto's Wave', tells an amusing yarn about how the World Semiconductor Council got established.

Maybe the reason why Gordon Moore and Charlie Sporck both have Hawaiian residences goes back over 40 years on the evidence of a yarn told by Sporck.

How many modern CEOs of wireless operators, usually obsessed by mega deals in foreign lands, pay much attention to the quality of their networks?

David Ashworth, CEO of Memec, the world's third largest distributor before it was taken over by Avnet, tells an excellent yarn of the travails of a distie's existence.

A great yarn about how the ARM1, the original ARM architecture microprocessor, was built, is told by Professor Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering at Manchester University, who co-developed the chip with Sophie Wilson.

Pasquale Pistorio, who took the loss-making, $100 million revenue Italian chip company SGS, and transformed it into the highly profitable, $10 billion revenue, top ten chip company STMicroelectronics, tells an amusing tale of leaving Motorola in 1980, where he was worldwide director of marketing, and the first non-American ever to be elected to the Motorola baord.

Ted Hoff, inventor of the microprocessor, tells an interesting yarn about how he came to join Intel as the company's 12th employee. Within three years of joining he had earned his place in history.by coming up with the 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor.

It's a little known fact that the legendary chip designer Bob Widlar, who designed the 709 op amp and the LM10 op amp voltage reference, would, on occasion, turn his hand to designing advertisements with his friend the Silicon Valley PR genius Regis McKenna.

Bob's brother, Jim Widlar, very kindly sent me the result of one of these exercises, and it has to be the best ad the semiconductor industry ever produced.

Dick Skipworth, founder of Memec, which became the third largest distributor in the world before being taken over by Avnet, is the subject of an amusing tale by Memec's long-time CFO, Colin Stevens.

Ulrich Schumacher, who was the first CEO of Infineon Technologies when it spun out of Siemens, tells an amusing yarn of his days as a marketing guy at Siemens Semiconductors.

It is a little known fact that, before he left Fairchild Semiconductor to become the CEO of National Semiconductor, Charlie Sporck had several meetings with Sir John Clark, CEO of Plessey, about him becoming CEO of Plessey Semiconductors.

Founded in 1990 with less than two million pounds of venture capital, ARM looked destined for a rocky ride. Founding CEO Sir Robin Saxby remembers a grim race against time to establish the company before the money ran out.

One of the famous events of early chip industry history was the reaction of Sherman Fairchild, backer of Fairchild Semiconductor, to the resignations of Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove when they went to found Intel. His reaction was to hire the top management of Motorola Semiconductor. Pasquale Pistorio remembers how he was sorely tempted.

Hans Snook was the most colourful and successful of all the early cellular pioneers, establishing the Orange network. But he stumbled into the wireless telecoms industry completely by chance.

Hermann Hauser, founder and CEO of Acorn Computers, then founder and CEO of VC company Amadeus, and the backer of numerous successful start-ups from ARM, to Virata to Element 14 to Plastic Logic and Icera, tells an amusing tale about one of his less successful ventures.

Brian Halla, CEO of National Semiconductor, previously at LSI Logic and Intel, tells how the whole industry's economics used to come down to one thing: how do you keep the fab full, and so defray the enormous cost of building it.

In iWeek, the week that is supposed to witness the transformation, re-invention and Second Coming of the mobile phone, it's worth asking how on earth does Steve Jobs get his people to come up with these blockbuster products?

David Potter, the founder of Psion, tells a good yarn about the company’s early days, when Psion was getting along by developing computer games. Psion was founded in 1980 and this story takes place in 1981.

One of the most famous yarns in the history of the chip industry is told about Kazuo Iwama of Sony who was the brother-in-law of Sony founder Akio Morita, and Morita’s successor as president of Sony.

Sir Clive Sinclair tells a good yarn about how his company came up with the world’s first single-chip scientific calculator.

Steve Jobs, of course, is God Almighty, but Andy Herzfeld tells a hilarious yarn about the Great Man’s foibles in his book Revolution in the Valley.

Why does a guy start spending his money like a drunken sailor on shore leave? Well he could actually be a drunken sailor on shore leave, but another likely reason is because of a woman.

Julius Blank, one of Fairchild's eight founders, tells a hilarious yarn about the night Bob Noyce turned up to join Shockley Semiconductor. Charlie Sporck recounts the tale in his book Spinoff.

Sex with a zillionaire is not all it’s cracked up to be, according to a novel written by zillionaire Tom Perkins, co-founder of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital company, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers.

Colin Stevens, former CFO of Memec which became the world's third largest distributor before being bought by Avnet, tells a tale of cultural differences as the company expanded into Japan.

One of the saddest stories of the computer industry came full circle yesterday when it was ruled by a US court that DOS copied CP/M.

The funniest of all the Bill Gates stories is told by Robert Cringely in his book Accidental Empires. It happened in 1990.

George W Bush is not the first to come up against the dry humour of the Scottish. Bush called Gordon Brown 'the humorous Scotsman' last week. Some years ago the Prince of Wales encountered another humorous Scotsman.

Summer has arrived. Iced sauvignon is on the garden table. The salads are laid out. The assorted meats are tempting. A few chums sit round the table. All is for the best in the best of all possible lunchtimes. And then . … . . then a bloody wasp arrives.

One of the greatest semiconductor CEOs was Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, who was CEO of Toshiba when Toshiba had the finest CMOS process in the world, and who took his company into a process alliance with Siemens Semiconductors and, later, a four-way process and product development co-operation with IBM, Motorola and Siemens. Kawanishi, fortunately as it turned out, has a terrific sense of humour.

Until the weather turned, it was very good to sit in the garden reading a book wittily entitled iWoz, by a great and generous-hearted man, Steve Wozniak co-founder of Apple.

Yesterday I was waiting to pay for an automatic car park, and noticed the lady in front of me trying to stuff a five pound note into the coin slot of the payment machine.

Xilinx was one of the most lucrative franchises which Memec ever signed. Dick Skipworth, Founder and CEO of Memec, which he grew to be the third largest distributor in the world until it was taken over by Avnet, tells how he bagged up Xilinx. Memec subsequently held the Xilinx franchise for over twenty years.

There is a famous yarn, told by several Fairchild veterans, about how Fairchild Semiconductor got its first order.

Hermann Hauser, former CEO of Acorn Computers, now boss of venture capital company Amadeus Capital Partners, has found haggling to be an essential part of his working life. He tells a good yarn about how he learnt the art.

Went to a wedding at the weekend. One of those modern affairs where the bride and groom have lived together for eight years and have three children.

The late Bernie Vonderschmitt, the founding CEO of Xilinx, used to tell a good yarn about how he would recruit people to the company.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, tells a hilarious story in his book, iWoz.

Owing to the vagaries of fate I fly back from Japan first class. Assuming this is my opportunity to feel like ‘The Special One’, I look forward to it, but it’s not so hot.

Get home, unpack, chuck my dirty shirts in the washing machine, go to the pub, go home, sleep.

J.J.Thomson, discoverer of the electron, was a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and he wrote a song, in their idiom, about his work with charged particles. It is sung to the tune of ‘My Darling Clementine’.

My scum-class flight to the US at the weekend compared favourably with my recent first class flight back from Japan. Both on BA.

Texas Instruments was spurred into making a patent application on Jack Kilby’s chip, seven months after Kilby conceived the idea of the IC in July 1958, because it heard that another company was about to file a patent for the first chip.

When Sir John Fleming, inventor of the vacuum tube, was lecturing on wireless transmission at the UK’s most revered scientific lecture hall at the Royal Institution, it was agreed that a dramatic addition would be the live receipt of a radio-ed message from none other than Guglielmo Marconi.

With all the whingeing and moaning coming out of the USA, as companies like Intel and Microsoft undergo anti-trust investigations in Europe, it's instructive to hear about the experience of a European company going through the US anti-trust mechanism. Interestingly, it was all completed satisfactorily, thanks to the good sense of certain high-tech US CEOs, one of whom was a former CEO of Intel.

500 blogs and a year ago, the same week as last year's Electronica, Mannerisms started and thanks to everyone who’s hit on it.

Not many people came out on the right side of a spat with Lord Arnold Weinstock, the long-time boss of GEC, but Memec, which became the world’s third largest distributor before it was sold to Avnet, recorded an honourable draw as Memec’s founding CEO, Dick Skipworth recalls.

In his book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Intel chairman Andy Grove recalls how the 1994 ‘Pentium Flaw’ fiasco affected Intel employees.

It is not well known that, after being effectively ousted from Fairchild Semiconductor, and before he started AMD, Jerry Sanders III considered switching careers and becoming a car salesman, a travel agent, and an personmal manager in the entertainment business.

In the second year of Psion's existence, the company's founder, Sir David Potter, invited one of his former graduate students at Imperial College, Charles Davies, to join the company. Together they wondered what they could produce which would have the Wow! factor.

Amadeus Capital Partners has become one of the best known high-tech venture capital companies, backing Cambridge Silicon Radio, PlasticLogic, Artimi, Axiom, Element 14, Icera and Lastminute.com. But why is it called Amadeus?

Ted Hoff, the inventor of the microprocessor, describes how he and Dov Frohman, the inventor of the EPROM, brought out the first design aid.

It's usually the guys who get to tell the tale in the semiconductor industry, so the recollections of Carole Skipworth, Dick's wife, who started Memec with him, and was a director for many years, are particularly interesting.

The greatest businessman who the late Bernie Vonderschmitt, founder of Xilinx, ever knew, was David Sarnoff. One of the many things Sarnoff taught Vonderschmitt was the importance of seeding a new market by making technology affordable.

“My idea was that as soon as I graduated, I would become a designer in a major company”, recalls Pistorio, “I looked at Olivetti, the most important electronic company in Italy, at Siemens and at Marelli - they were all looking for engineers. Demand was far outstripping the offers. Every graduate was getting 20 invitations for interview. I had ten interviews and got ten offers.”

Mistaking a silicon wafer in a box for a used pizza might have helped one promising chip company into the knacker’s yard.

Tom Perkins, partner in Silicon Valley venture capitalists Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, recounts a wistful tale in his book Valley Boy.

The ‘Asian Contagion’ of 1997-8, which led to a massive bail-out of several Asian economies by the IMF, coincided with a collapse in DRAM prices. The feisty Dr Ulrich Schumacher, formerly CEO of Siemens Semiconductors which became Infineon Technologies, and now CEO of Grace Semiconductor, was furious at what he saw as the propping up of a rival in the DRAM business by IMF money.

The biggest backer of Memec when it was founded in 1974 was Werner Stolz, inventor of the Stolz PROM programmer. He tells an interesting tale of how he got to be involved in the founding on Memec.

One of the semiconductor industry's legendary CEOs, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, who led Toshiba in the 1980s and 90s, makes some charming observations about the nature of the chip business in his book 'Chip Management'.

Today Bookham is a much diminshed entity than it was in its turn-of-the-century glory days. Then, founder Andrew Rickman developed a new manufacturing process for optical chips, IPO'd in 2000, and immediately entered the FTSE 100. He has an idiosyncratic view of how to build a company:

“Around 1999 to 2000 we talked to venture capitalists”, recalls Hal Philipp, who sold his company, Quantum Research, for $88 million to Atmel last week, “they said to us: ‘You’re not internet; you’re not telecoms; you’re nothing.’ Then they offered us £100,000 for half the business. It was appalling really.”

One of the funniest of yarns is told by the American Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman about his first day at graduate school at Princeton University when the Dean invited him for tea.

Ulrich Schumacher, later CEO of Siemens Semiconductors which became Infineon Technologies, and now CEO of Grace Semiconductor, joined Siemens as his first job after gaining his PhD.

Nowadays Toshiba is known for NAND flash, but it wasn’t always so. Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor in the 1980s and 1990s, tells how the company once grabbed half the worldwide DRAM market.

In his book High Output Management, Andy Grove, co-founder, former CEO, now Chairman Emeritus of Intel, tells how he figured out at an interview whether the interviewee could solve problems.

Sir Robin Saxby, first CEO of ARM, reckons that interviewing new recruits for the company was one of the most important tasks he had to master.

In 1980, Potter bought a company, named it Psion, and looked around for something for it to do

Years ago, living on Exmoor among ruggedly free-spirited hill farmers who saw it as a point of honour to get the better of all forms of authority, I witnessed a remarkable legal victory.

The Wagon Wheel was the Mountain View bar where Silicon Valley met, drank, gossiped, exchanged information, found new jobs and new hires and generally socialized in the pioneering days of the silicon frontier when new companies were springing up like mushrooms

Hans Snook is the most successful and colourful of all the wireless telecommunications entrepreneurs.

"Hey this was built when you Brits were conquering the world", was the greeting on the deck of the Old Queen Mary, reminding me, four hours after getting into LAX, that I was back in the land of cheery greetings from total strangers. It bucked me up.

In his book SPINOFF, Charlie Sporck, former CEO of National Semiconductor interviews both Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and Jerry Sanders, former CEO of AMD, about Intel’s decision to go sole-source on the 386.

Nowadays we are accustomed to semiconductor start-up chip companies delivering pretty incremental advantages in price/performance, but it wasn’t always like that, as the chip industry’s greatest name, Gordon Moore, recalls when recounting the story of the founding of Intel in 1968.

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, the most famous of all the Silicon Valley venture capital firms, got off to a rocky start, according to co-founder Tom Perkins in his book Valley Boy.

The Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara in a 1989 book co-authored with Sony co-founder Akio Morita called ‘The Japan that can say No’, recalls how Cabinet Ministers found a discussion on the competitiveness of industry so boring that many members appeared to fall asleep.

Andy Grove, former CEO and chairman of Intel, wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive in which he promoted the idea of inflection points, times when companies have to respond to change or die.

Akio Morita was born into a wealthy family which regularly bought all the latest electric gadgets. His father’s purchase of an electric phonograph triggered his interest in electrical things.

A re-spin is nowadays considered a disaster when a 90nm mask costs half a million, and a 65nm mask over a million, and when three months lost time to market is supposed to lose you 30 per cent of the potential revenues.

Intel’s decision to exit the semiconductor memory business, is usually attributed to a conversation between former CEOs Gordon Moore and Andy Grove. But Grove, in his book Only The Paranoid Survive, lays the credit elsewhere.

That was the headline of the cover story in the April 1st 1986 internal Intel newsletter during the worst hit the US semiconductor industry ever took, losing 27,000 jobs, 13 per cent of the electronics jobs in Silicon Valley and $2 billion in earnings in two years.

Most of us look back on life and realise we've been very lucky on occasions, even if we didn't recognise it at the time. Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, the former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, is no exception.

Julius Blank, who worked at Shockley Semiconductor before co-founding  Fairchild Semiconductor, tells how he and Eugene Kleiner, another Fairchild co-founder and founding partner of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital company Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, came to join Shockley's infant semiconductor operation

Many years ago, National Semiconductor had an assembly plant in Haiti, at that time one of the worst governed countries on earth.

To the world it was Enron, the collapsed US energy brokerage, which invented the off-balance sheet partnership. Not so. The real inventor of this financial stratagem to turn losses into profits was Tom Perkins, co-founder of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital fund company Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Silicon Valley's premier venture capital company, nearly lost its entire initial fund before it had made a single investment.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mike Moritz has given £25 million to his old Oxford College, Christ Church.

 "When I was in charge of the semiconductor business, the memory business, which today is one of the important pillars of the company, was regarded as a dog at the time. Generation shifts occurred every three or four years, prices tended to fall radically, we were losing a lot of money", writes the legendary former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, in his book Chip Management.

On Friday July 11th, Ted Hoff told the story of how he invented the microprocessor. On Friday July 18th, Busicom's Masatoshi Shima, told how he designed it. On Friday July 25th, Federico Faggin described how the first microprocessor was made. This week, Ted Hoff, tells the story of how it got taken to market.

The week before, Friday July 11th, Ted Hoff told the story of how it was invented. This week, Federico Faggin tells how it was made.

Last Friday July 11th  Ted Hoff told the story of how the first microprocessor was invented. This week, Masatoshi Shima of Busicom, tells how it was designed.

The fifth in our Friday weekly series on the invention of the microprocessor is an account of how, after getting the world's first microprocessor, the 4004, into silicon, Dr Federico Faggin set about his next task at Intel  - designing the first 8-bit microprocessor,  the 8008.

The sixth in our Friday weekly series on the early microprocessors, is told by Masatoshi Shima, designer of the breakthrough microprocessor, the 8080. "With the 8080, Intel wanted to develop a second generation 8-bit microprocessor which would compete with 16-bit minicomputers", explains Shima, "I knew how to do it."

In this, the the seventh of our Friday series about the early microprocessors, Masatoshi Shima, fresh from the success of  designing the 8080, decides to leave Intel. Shima's friend, Federico Faggin, was preparing to leave Intel to found Zilog to pursue his vision of the next generation of microprocessors, and Shima was anxious share in it.

The eighth, and last, in our Friday series on the early microprocessors is the story of Dr Federico Faggin, who, after getting the 4004, 8008 and 8080 to market at Intel, decides to strike out on his own and set up Zilog.

Not renowned for his punctuality, it turns out that Simon Knowles, founder and vice president for silicon engineering at wireless start-up Icera Semiconductor, has earned himself an interesting soubriquet from colleagues.

How often do you get an answer to a question which starts off: 'It depends how you define xyz?'

'The £25m bid by Leasco Data Processing for Pergamon Press makes considerable sense for a number of reasons', starts off an Electronics Weekly report in its issue of June 25^th 1969.

In his book Chip Management, the former CEO of Toshiba's semiconductor division, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, wonders about the system by which, after his retirement from Toshiba, several American companies invited him to join their boards.

This week Acorn celebrates its 30th anniversary. It was founded in 1978. "It was the year in which the BBC ran a programme called 'The Chip'", says Acorn co-founder Dr Hermann Hauser, now boss of Amadeus Capital Partners the high-tech venture capital company.

When Bill Hewlett pushed for the development of a handheld calculator, the marketing management at HP were fiercely against the idea.

In 1986, after Fairchild Semiconductor had been run by, in succession, Les Hogan, Wilf Corrigan and Tom Rogers, and had been sold to the French oil-field services company Schlumberger, National Semiconductor bought Fairchild for $122 million.

The Founders of Intel, by all accounts, had some epic feuds and, after they were resolved, adopted the old Soviet Union practice of air-brushing the offender out of its official history.

Ed Sturmer, co-founder, with Dick Skipworth, of Memec which became the world's third largest electronic component distributor, tells a yarn of how it nearly all went horribly wrong when, a year after starting the company, most of Memec's stock was stolen.

In 1975, Cyrus Tsui joined Monolithic Memories Inc (MMI) to work on the 5701 bit slice product line.

"I did this deal - the first deal I ever did - with Associated Semiconductor  Manufacturers (ASM) which was a joint venture betwen Philips and GEC, later wholly-owned by Philips", recalls Sir Clive Sinclair, "ASM made transistors under licence from Philco in the US and was selling them to the computer industry at very high prices. I bought the rejects."

"At Memec we developed a system of knowing and grading suppliers", says Dick Skipworth, founder and first Chairman of Memec, which became the third largest distributor in the world,.

Although Fairchild gave the first ISSCC paper on the feasibility of CMOS in 1963, and though RCA made the first working CMOS devices in 1964, it was over a decade later before anyone thought of the technology as a go-er.

Robert X Cringely, in his wonderful book Accidental Empires, tells a rib-tickling yarn about the early days pf Apple. It happened in the late 1970s when Apple had grown beyond the point that all the employees knew each other on sight. So it was decided that, like grown-up companies, they should all have name badges.

CEOs go through some of the same merde as the rest of us, as this tale, told to me by a Silicon Valley CEO, shows.

Chuck Byers, Director of Brand Management at the world's No.1 silicon foundry, TSMC, tells a great yarn of how, as a 22 year-old cub reporter, he had a lesson of supreme importance inculcated into him by his editor.

In the 1970s, the all-powerful Tokyo Civil Service decided it was time to take on the US computer colossi: IBM and the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell).

Are we in for a decade of no growth as happened to the Japanese economy when the 1980s asset bubble burst in 1990, ushering in the '90s decade when the stock market remained on its knees and interest rates went to zero?

Is protectionism about to rear its ugly head once again? One hopes this beggar-my-neighbour policy won't be adopted by governments, but it's worth recalling the world's wittiest protectionist measure.

In 1982, US IC manufacturers supplied 51 per cent of the world's chips and Japanese manufacturers supplied 35 per cent. In 1989, Japanese companies supplied 51 per cent of the market, and US manufacturers supplied 35 per cent. Out of the top ten largest microchip companies in the world, six were Japanese.

In 1970 the pre-eminent Japanese IC companies were Hitachi, NEC and Mitsubishi. Toshiba was an also-ran. That year, Toshiba sent two engineers, one of which was Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, later to become a famous CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, to meet  Sharp's most famous executive, Tadashi Sasaki.

The greatest leader the semiconductor industry ever had was Bob Noyce, co-inventor of the IC, co-founder and founding CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor, co-founder and founding CEO of Intel, founding CEO of Sematech, known to the industry as: 'The Mayor of Silicon Valley'.

'Semiconductors are like a new hit song composed on an old classical theme', writes the legendary former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors Tsuyoshi Kawanishi in his book 'Chip Management, 'What I mean by this is that the applications for semiconductors are nearly infinite, but the basic technology itself is classic'.

'When I was a student at the naval academy in World War II, I learned that there ware three levels of directives to subordinates: commands, orders and instructions.'

This week's lesson in how to manage a semiconductor company by the famous CEO of Toshiba Semiconductor, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, taken from his book Chip Management, looks at how to deal with the notorious Silicon Cycle.

In this, the fourth instalment of how to run a semiconductor company, taken from the book Chip Management by Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, the famous former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors, he addresses the issue of how to manage return on investment.

Sharp was one of the pioneers of LCD  manufacturing in Japan and, for many years, had a better than 50% world market in LCD panels. How did it achieve this pre-eminence in the industry?

Jean Hoerni, one of the 'treacherous eight' who left Shockley Semiconductor to co-found Fairchild Semiconductor, was Swiss. At Fairchild, Hoerni invented the planar transistor which was the key to Bob Noyce's invention of the integrated circuit. Hoerni left Fairchild to found successively Amelco, Union Carbide and Intersil. When he founded Intersil he  tapped a couple of Swiss watch companies, Omega and Portescap, for venture capital.

A few weeks after the invention of the transistor, while the invention was still a secret,  co-inventor Walter Brattain attended a meeting of the American Physical Society at which two graduate students from Purdue University, Seymour Benzer and Ralph Bray, were reporting the results of their experiments with germanium..

Pat Haggerty, CEO of Texas Instruments, was one of the greatest CEOs the semiconductor industry ever had. Three fabulous initiatives show why Haggerty was so great.

The first semiconductor production equipment company was Electroglas, according to Gordon Moore.

In the media business you get to go to a lot of press announcements but the only ones you remember are the cock-ups.

A charming yarn is told by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in his brilliant book iWoz.

In their pre-Apple days, Wozniak and Jobs were in the business of flogging little boxes, designed by Wozniak, which allowed you to make a telephone call anywhere in the world, for nothing.

In his book SPINOFF, Charlie Sporck tells an amazing tale about Bob Widlar the genius analogue IC designer.

Believe it or not, when the semiconductor world was young there was a time and a company where new recruits with a freshly minted PhD could work on any project they wanted until it either succeeded or totally failed.

Nicholas Negroponte, Director of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology tells a good yarn in his book, Being Digital, of how US President John F Kennedy met the television pioneer Vladimir  Zworykin.

Thomas Edison, of course, despised scientists. Attempting to prevent the glass in a light bulb discolouring, he put a small metal plate inside the bulb only to find an electric current flowing through the metal plate.

Hermann Hauser, now CEO of Amadeus the venture capital fund, made his name as CEO of Acorn Computers. Here he tells how the company made its first revenues.

Sir Clive Sinclair's famous Black Watch, launched in 1975, had a black display and you pushed a button to read the time displayed on a red LED. Sold as a kit, it cost £14.95.

Pasquale Pistorio, who put together the small, loss-making chip businesses Thomson Semiconducteurs  and SGS-Ates, to form STMicroelctronics and drove it to become the fifth largest semiconductor company in the world, worked his first 17 years in the semiconductor business at Motorola. He admired American business culture.

When Jerry Sanders, the founding CEO of AMD, was ousted from Fairchild Semiconductor, he thought about a number of careers: personal management in the entertainment business; a car dealership; a travel agency.

A copy of  a letter written to Fairchild's founding CEO Bob Noyce, by Richard Hodgson executive vice president of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, is included in SPINOFF, the book written by Charlie Spock, former CEO of National Semiconductor. Here it is:

One day, Sir Robin Saxby, took a call asking if he was interested in leading a Cambridge start-up company backed by Apple and Acorn Computers.

Winning the contract to supply the computer for the BBC's series aimed at educating the UK on the use of computers was, initially, a mixed blessing for Acorn Computers.

 Lee De Forest inventor of the Audion tube, also called both the 'De Forest valve', and the 'triode valve', which allowed the amplification of radio waves so they could travel long distances  was, in 1913, sued for mail fraud by the Attorney-General of the USA.