Memories

• Bell Laboratories
  
At Bell, I dealt with the possible uses of Charge Coupled Devices as memories. Because of their serial nature, their niche in the hierarchy would have been similar to that of hard disk memories, but with much less latency. As part of this work, I established that CCD memories would never have enough cost advantage over DRAM to gain a place in practical systems.
 
• Harris Semiconductor
Harris had a position in the market for Bipolar PROMs, and when I took over the memory product development activity, Dave Taylor and I created a new family of PROMs. Harris introduced the first member of that family (512 x 4) in depth of the 1974/75 recession, and within a few years the product family represented a very large fraction of Harris's commercial business. Subsequently, we introduced a 1K NMOS memory, but that was not really successful. On the other hand, with Chuck Gregory, we created a line of synchronous CMOS SRAMs that were quite successful. A big factor was the fact that Harris knew how to manufacture CMOS.
 
• Fairchild Semiconductor
  
Fairchild's MOS operation had three memory programs going on when I joined. One was CCD memories, and while Fairchild had built 64K CCD memories that worked pretty well, the old problem about the cost and benefits had not changed. If anything, it had gotten worse, because HDD technology had a steeper learning curve than IC technology. We killed that one.
In the other areas of MOS memory, Fairchild was spread too thinly, with activities in DRAM, EPROM and SRAM. The 1981 recession effectively eliminated the DRAM program, because prices dropped well below costs. Before I left the Fairchild memory activity, we worked bravely to enter the high speed SRAM market, but the manufacturing resource in South San Jose was clearly marginal. Yields were always too low.
 
• National Semiconductor
At National, which had exited the DRAM market several years earlier, Charlie Sprock had a dream that in a post Sematech world, he could re-enter if he found the right partnership. Because of my Nagasaki factory experience, I became the point man for a Mitsubishi partnership. While we had some very productive plans, at the end of the day, National could not enter at a competitive scale without building an entirely new plant. We assessed the costs and risks, and the answer had to be no.

After that, I managed, on a temporary basis, the high speed SRAM activity in Puyallup, WA. Puyallup was serving Cray from a 4-inch wafer fab. We qualified production, and ramped from zero to shipping a few million dollars per month. However, having but a single customer doomed that product line. No semiconductor business survives on one customer. That was a major learning experience.