IBM to sell mainframe computers. Spiegel explained that Honeywell wanted to steal a march on its competitors by being the first computer manufacturer to build a machine that used semiconductor memory instead of magnetic core. He knew that Fairchild had come very close to developing a bipolar memory circuit with sixteen cells, or bits. Yet Fairchild had never quite managed it, because somehow one of the cells was always a dud. Insiders used to joke that Fairchild’s R&D people had built a great 15-bit memory chip.
Spiegel explained to the people at Intel that Honeywell wanted to be able to ship a new line of computers in 1969 or 1970 that would contain a 64-bit scratchpad memory, big enough to store an eight-letter English word. The company was inviting a number of firms in the electronics business to try to build some working prototypes to this testing specification. Intel was new and untried, but Noyce and Moore’s pedigrees were impressive. If Honeywell could give Intel a downpayment of $10,000 to help fund its research work, was the company interested in trying to beat the other six companies that had already started on the problem?
The offer was less crazy than it sounded. Whichever company came up with a mass-produced chip first was likely to win an order from Honeywell for 10,000 units at $100 apiece. So the up-front fee, although crucially important for a startup that had to keep an eye on its bank balance, represented a bet that only represented 1% of what Honeywell was expecting the finished chips to cost. Since it was by no means clear that anyone could build a 64-bit semiconductor memory circuit, the $10,000 was a small price to pay for adding one more talented team to the field already competing for the prize. Anyway, one of Intel’s engineers had impressed Spiegel and his colleagues as particularly committed and reassuring: H. T. Chua, a Stanford graduate of Chinese ancestry who had immigrated to the US from Singapore. Chua was a quiet, thoughtful man, but he had a air of unmistakable quiet confidence about him which seemed to exude the message: We’ll build your chip for you, and we’ll beat everyone else too.
Chua kept his promise. When Spiegel returned to California in the spring of 1969, Chua met him at the factory door with a sample chip in his hand. The chip designed for Honeywell therefore became the new company’s first commercial product. It was a symptom of Intel’s target market that the new chip wasn’t even given a name. Instead, it was referred to only by a part number, 3101. Intel’s potential customers were engineers inside computer companies, who thought of themselves as rational decision-makers choosing between one part and another strictly on technical merit, quality and price. A catchy name wouldn’t have increased sales; on the contrary, it might have excited suspicion that there was a shortage of engineering talent to cover up for. A simple part number, preferably a number that meant something, was what Intel needed to go for.
Bob Graham, Intel’s marketing chief, realized the success of the 3101 could be of enormous value to Intel. The industry was littered with companies that made grand promises which they failed to fulfil. Cynics used to joke that National Semiconductor, in particular, used to send around a specification for a new chip to customers, and then wait to see what reaction it got before deciding whether to start designing it. Graham wanted Intel to earn the opposite reputation, so he coined the slogan INTEL DELIVERS. It became almost an unbreakable rule inside Intel never to announce a product in advance, just in case something went wrong ‘twixt cup and lip. Instead, he resolved that the company would wait until chips were already on distributors’ shelves before going out to customers to spread the word about a new device.
This early triumph from the bipolar team cranked up the pressure on the competing MOS team to deliver. At one point Vadasz and his colleagues became convinced that they were almost there. The test production line they had set up yielded one device that worked perfectly. The MOS team immediately toasted its arrival with champagne in the cramped company cafeteria – but it was to be many months before they were able 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
