Ch 5: Mortars and Mass Production (Chip War)

• Jay Lathrop joined Texas Instruments on September 1, 1958, shortly after Jack Kilby’s summer spent tinkering in TI’s labs.
• After graduating from MIT and working at a U.S government lab to devise a proximity fuse for an 81mm mortar shell, he was struggling with mesa-shaped transistors that were proving difficult to miniaturize.
• He then came up with the idea of using a microscope lens flipped upside down so its lens could take something big and make it look smaller – this process became known as photolithography or printing with light which allowed him to produce transistors much smaller than previously possible measuring only one tenth of an inch in diameter and 0.0005 inches in height .
• Pat Haggerty and Jack Kilby realized his process was worth more than the $25K prize given by the Army; they knew light rays could solve mass production problems mechanizing chipmaking like never before seen .
• Implementing lithography at TI required new materials & processes such as buying their own centrifuges for purer chemicals & making masks themselves due to lack of precision elsewhere along w/ ultra pure silicon wafers not sold anywhere else .
• Mass production of components was difficult due to impurities, variation in temperature and pressure, and contamination by particles of dust.
• Texas Instruments organized thousands of experiments to assess the impact of different temperatures, chemical combinations, and production processes.
• Morris Chang improved TI’s manufacturing yield with his methodical approach while Mary Anne Potter ran round-the-clock tests for scaling up chip production for the Minuteman missile.
• Noyce hired James Nall from Jay Lathrop’s lab to develop photolithography at Fairchild Semiconductor while Andy Grove worked on improving their manufacturing process after fleeing Hungary’s Communist government as a refugee.
• Shockley won a Nobel Prize for inventing transistors but it was engineers like Chang who turned them into useful products through trial & error methods that enabled mass market productization in mid 1960s.

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