Bonus video material not seen in public before has been published on The Chip Warriors’ YouTube channel. The video clips are an adjunct to The Chip Warriors podcast series which celebrates America’s semiconductor pioneers.
The bonus material includes clips from semiconductor company founders Lionel Kattner (Signetics), Brad Mattson (Novellus/Mattson Tech), Ken Levy (KLA), as well as inventor Burton Wheeler (David W Mann Co/GCA) and industry veterans Jim Bagley (TI/Applied/Lam), Richard Elkus Jr (Prometrix, KLA), Papken der Torossian (SVG) and Scott Kulicke (K&S).Also included is video from the IC@50 ceremony held May 8, 2009 at the original Fairchild Semiconductor building, 844 East Charleston Road, Palo Alto, California. The event, to unveil an IEEE plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the planar process and Fairchild IC, features guest speakers Gordon Moore and Jay Last (co-founders of Fairchild Semiconductor), with introductions by Brian Halla (National Semiconductor) and Dick Ahrons (IEEE).
The Chip Warriors podcast series, written and produced by Craig Addison, is based on interviews he conducted between 2004 and 2008 for the SEMI oral history project. The interviews were used under license from SEMI, which is not affiliated with the project.
While 13 out of the more than 40 videotaped SEMI history interviews were edited for public release on the Stanford University Silicon Genesis oral history website, the bonus clips on The Chip Warriors’ YouTube channel have not been seen in public before.
In the clips, Richard Elkus Jr explains why Tencor merged with Prometrix before it merged with KLA in 1997 while Jim Bagley recounts the days at TI when latex gloves were considered a breakthrough in wafer fab cleanliness.
In the IC@50 video footage, Gordon Moore and Jay Last tell stories from the early days when Fairchild was developing processes for the IC, including how planar process inventor Jean Hoerni often blew up diffusion furnaces trying to find the right recipes, and less technical pursuits such as chasing jackrabbits out of the ladies room.
The Chip Warriors is available from major podcast platforms (Apple, Spotify, Google etc), as well as on the hosting platform Podbean:
https://chipwarriors.podbean.com/
The Chip Warriors YouTube channel link:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuk0sri0igza757AgcPj3Gg