Inside Intel. Tim Jackson
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to build a second working MOS circuit.
Part of the trouble was that the manufacturing process itself was so rudimentary. Everyone understood that particles in the air could contaminate a semiconductor production line; the defence industry did their most sensitive assembly work inside giant sealed ‘clean rooms’, where the air was filtered to remove the tiny specks that could spoil a circuit. But Intel had no such luxury. Its fab area, recalled Andy Grove, ‘looked like Willy Wonka’s factory, with hoses and wires and contraptions chugging along … It was state-of-the-art manufacturing at the time, but by today’s standards it was unbelievably crude’.
No matter how hard they tried to clean up the fab area, the MOS engineers still couldn’t make circuits that worked. At one late-night meeting, almost in desperation, Andy Grove finally lost patience. Why was the company bothering with silicon-gate MOS technology at all? he asked. Why not go back to a similar, less tricky metal-gate technology where this problem would not arise?
It was Gordon Moore – quiet, thoughtful Gordon – who broke in on Grove’s tirade. ‘I want to see every wafer that comes off the line for the next thirty days,’ he said slowly. ‘Then we’ll make a decision on what to do.’
Over the coming days and weeks the engineers of the group brought the faulty wafers to Moore one by one. They watched him check the devices under a microscope, and test them with the makeshift equipment they had developed. Before the thirty days were up Moore told them what he thought the problem was. When a memory chip was being built, he reminded them, it had to be repeatedly heated up and cooled during different stages of the production process. The temperature change was not abnormal for the electronics industry, but this circuit was particularly sensitive. Because the design had sharp comers where the metal oxide and the silicon met, one would expand more quickly than the other, and a crack would appear that broke the circuit and rendered it useless.
Moore came up with a solution to the problem that was brilliant in its simplicity. He told the engineers to ‘dope’ the oxide with impurities so that its melting-point would fall. This would reduce the brittleness of the chip’s edges, and allow the oxide to flow evenly around the rough comers like melting ice cream. To their astonishment, the MOS team soon discovered that Moore was right. Working almost as an armchair engineer, he had solved the problem that had eluded them for months.
There was a long debate inside Intel as to whether the company should patent the ‘reflow’ process that Moore had invented. The issue was not whether the process could be patented; it clearly satisfied all the legal requirements for a patent. The bigger question was whether the patent would be self-defeating, because the information Intel would have to publish would set competitors on the right track towards similar solutions. In the end the team chose a halfway house. The process was patented in Moore’s name (and a framed copy of the patent was hung in his office as a reward); but once the chip was in production, the exact nature of the reflow process was kept secret from the hourly workers who had been hired to carry out the chip fabrication and packaging. On the long list of processes that the silicon wafer had to undergo before it could be scored and sliced up into dozens of finished memory chips, the reflow process was referred to only as ‘anneal’, a word used to mean heating glass and cooling it slowly. That way, the risk was reduced that a line worker would be offered a dollar more per hour by a competitor, and walk out of Intel’s door with the fledgling company’s most valuable trade secret.
Until there were products to sell, Bob Graham had little to do. The company did not have enough spare cash to hire salesmen to sit around and wait for the engineers to do their job. So Graham identified a candidate who could serve as his second-in-command in the sales and marketing division when the time came – and in the meantime, he amused himself fishing.
Setting his alarm clock to wake him several hours before dawn, Graham would tiptoe out of his modest house in Saratoga so as to avoid waking his wife. Then he would climb into the old Ford Mustang that he had bought from Bob Noyce, and roar up a deserted Highway 101 all the way to San Francisco, where he would park as close as possible to the Golden Gate Bridge. There, waiting under a streetlamp, he would find Gordon Moore in his overalls and work boots. With the motor engine burbling softly beneath the dark wash, the two men would ease Moore’s fishing boat out under the bridge and towards the grounds beyond the bay where salmon were plentiful.
For a scientist, Moore seemed to show scant interest in the state of repair of his craft. Sometimes he had to scrape the rust off the spark-plugs with his pocket knife. Sometimes, the boat’s rudimentary radio would cut out, leaving the fishermen cut off from the outside world. But on one occasion a more serious problem arose. The part of the expedition that required the most skill was traversing what the local fishermen called the ‘Potato Patch’, a narrow channel bordered with rocks just beyond the bridge that led to the fishing grounds beyond. One morning, just as they were halfway through the Potato Patch, Graham noticed water slopping around in the bilges of the boat.
‘Oh,’ said Moore absent-mindedly. ‘I must have forgotten to switch the bilge-pump on.’ He disappeared for a few seconds, and Graham began to hear the sound of the electric pump groaning into action. Thirty seconds later, however, the water level was still rising.
‘The pump!’ yelled Graham. ‘It’s not working!’ Frantically, he and Moore grabbed whatever receptacles were closest to hand, and began to throw bucketfuls of water overboard. Yet as fast as they bailed water out, more seemed to come in. While Graham continued to empty the buckets as fast as he could – splash, splash, splash, splash, splash – Moore went to inspect the drain fittings.
Ten minutes later the problem was solved. The hole in the boat that Moore had discovered was plugged with an old oily rag, and the two friends lay back, exhausted by their efforts. As the sun rose over the city behind them, they celebrated their survival into a new day with an early-morning beer.
BOB GRAHAM’S APPOINTMENT as Intel’s sales director had an unintended consequence. It led indirectly to the creation of another electronics company which for the next two decades would be at times Intel’s greatest ally, and at times its most bitter enemy.
Here’s how it happened.
Soon after Bob Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor to set up Intel with Gordon Moore, the management of the Fairchild parent company on the East Coast began the search for Noyce’s replacement as general manager. C. Lester Hogan, the feared and admired head of Motorola, was the man who got the job – but it was a measure of the presentiments of doom felt by company insiders that he would only accept the appointment after being offered $1m in salary over three years, plus Fairchild stock options worth over $500,000, and a loan of a further $5m to buy more stock with. Hogan also secured guarantees that he would be able to run the semiconductor operation as an independent business, free from interference by the accountants back east that had so plagued Bob Noyce.
The new general manager’s first move once he was installed at Fairchild was to fire most of the top executives left in the company, and bring in his own band of hard men, later known as Hogan’s Heroes. Only one senior manager stayed on: Jerry Sanders, the company’s sales and marketing director.
Flamboyant, clever, fast-talking and handsome, Sanders satisfied every cliché of what a businessman in California headed for the high-tech 1970s ought to look like. But behind the Italian suits and the perfectly bouffant hairstyle, the marketing chief was not what he seemed. Sanders had been born the son of a dissolute traffic-signal repairman in Chicago’s dangerous South Side, and had been brought up by his grandparents after spending his earliest years with his mother in a succession of dingy low-rent apartments while his father went on periodic drinking binges. Like many poor boys before him, Sanders had hoped to parlay his good looks into a career in the movies. But his chances were set back during his first semester into a two-year course at the University of Illinois. A gang of local toughs set on him after a football game, fractured his jaw, skull, and ribs, carved up his face with