The man sitting across the desk from me had come to Case Western Reserve University in the winter of early 1975 to recruit new engineering graduates for Hewlett-Packard. The university had recently acquired an HP 9830A desktop computer and 9866A thermal page printer. These two products transformed my computer experience. Instead of feeding punched cards…
The first six parts of this article series described developments at major semiconductor vendors that played big roles in the MOSFET’s development. However, because fabs were relatively easy to create in the early days of ICs, there are many smaller stories as well. The following story, about one HP division’s involvement in MOSFET and NMOS…
Part 1 of this article series discussed the earliest programmable ICs that could be used to implement logic circuits. Not quite programmable logic, Harris Semiconductor’s programmable diode arrays and PROMs laid the groundwork for PLDs (programmable logic devices) to come. This is where we return to Napoleone Cavlan, Ronald Cline, and the story of how…