EDITOR'S PAGE

History lessons

There's a bit of history inside every chip made, a genetic imprint of semiconductor technology's lineage in every mask layer. The roots trace back to Jack Kilby's aha moment with his crude integrated circuit in 1958 and further back to the Bell Labs team's discovery of the transistor effect in 1947. Every older fab is a de facto manufacturing museum, with antiquated production lines and old-fashioned facility designs, still running 4- and 6-in. wafers through horizontal-tube furnaces, plucky vacuum tools, and manual inspection systems on a less-than-ergonomic factory floor. But many of the surviving artifacts and documents detailing the history of Silicon Valley and the global semiconductor industry are in danger of being lost unless concerted efforts are made to preserve them. The collective memory is weakening as well, since many key industry pioneers have already passed away, and many more have pushed well past retirement age.

Thankfully, several organizations have recently stepped up their chipmaking-annals preservation work. VLSI Research has launched the Chip History Center (www.chiphistory.org), which segments the on-line collection into documents, equipment landmarks (mostly brochures from the "infant industry" of the 1960s through the "full maturity" 1990s), and "key" papers and presentations (which so far includes only a few talks given by VLSI honcho G. Dan Hutcheson). Also featured on the site are several promotional videos as well as a recent interview filmed with Sunlin Chou, in which he offers fascinating insights into the evolution of Intel's R&D strategies. As long as it continually adds more documents, images, videos, and links and doesn't become too commercialized and self-serving, chiphistory.org has the potential to become a key reference source for semiconductor history scholars and aficionados.

SEMI started getting serious about archiving and preserving the legacies of its member companies and the people who ran them about four years ago. SEMI board member Duane Wadsworth says that his wife Lorna asked him if anyone was "making notes" about what's happened with the industry. Her question stumped him and forced him into action. He submitted a proposal for a SEMI museum first to Stan Myers, head of the trade organization, and then to the SEMI board, which unanimously approved it.

What was first proposed as a "bricks and mortar concept," explains Wadsworth, "has evolved since then to the realization that we cannot do this alone nor should we do this alone.... We have an association with the Computer History Museum (in Mountain View) and have met with Henry Lowood of Stanford's Green Library, who is bibliographer of the science and technology collections." Among the Green's collection is the Silicon Genesis project, which consists of 25 broadcast-quality videos of interviews with Silicon Valley founding fathers such as Gordon Moore, Charlie Sporck, and Jim Morgan. Wadsworth notes that the library also has the complete William Shockley and Fairchild collections.

SEMI itself has already received the papers of retired materials-guru Dan Rose and the late Phil Gregory, a former exec with Raytheon as well as one-time president, chairman, and executive director of SEMI. Wadsworth says they're looking for original pieces of equipment, old engineering notebooks, and the like. He mentioned that SEMI's growing collection includes pieces, literally, of the old Wagon Wheel, a legendary Silicon Valley watering hole where many deals were struck and "many livers were left on the barstool."

An intriguing part of the trade group's efforts is its recently initiated "oral history archives" project, which is collecting interviews with those who began and ran the first equipment and materials companies in the 1960s and 1970s. Craig Addison, a senior editor at SEMI, says that he has conducted between 20 and 25 interviews so far. He has spoken with such relatively well-known players as Ken Levy, Brad Mattson, and Shoichiro Yoshida, as well as such less-heralded stars as silicon maven Bob Lorenzini and Mike McNeilly, who told Addison that part of the money he used to found Applied Materials in 1967 was borrowed from his father-in-law.

Wadsworth says that SEMI, in celebration of its 35th anniversary in 2005, plans to put out a CD-ROM next year containing the oral history archives and other historical information. "We do want people to look in their attics and say, 'gee, maybe these guys would like this.' We want to collect the artifacts that are out there."