David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Without the world paying attention to them. Yes, and in Texas. Morris gets assigned as his first project to a problem child within TI. They have entered into a deal with IBM. IBM is working on their first mainframe computer, a major project that’s going to use transistor logic instead of vacuum tubes, the IBM 7090. They anticipate so much demand for this product. Usually, IBM manufactures everything for all their products themselves, but they’re like, we need more chips than we’re going to be able to make ourselves so we need a second source for chips. They turned to TI. They’re like, hey, we can give you all the designs for how to do this chip that we want for our product. We want you to additionally manufacture some of these in addition to our own line. You might even say almost like a contract manufacturer of chips or like a foundry business, almost. Hmm, interesting. But it’s not going too well. IBM’s own plant is churning out transistors with about a 10% yield. Which means that of every 100 chips that they churn out of the plant, 90% of them fail and only 10% of them work. That’s the first party line. The TI line has about a 0% yield. They’re lucky if they’re getting any. Almost everything coming off the line fails at TI when Morris shows up. Morris would say about this later, “The supervisor was concerned. The operators were concerned. Everybody was concerned.” Morris, remember, he’s a mechanical engineer by training. He starts tinkering. He’s like, this is a mechanical process, chemical and mechanical processes creating this stuff. I’m just going to use my training and optimize it like a good mechanical engineer. He starts doing some stuff and after about four months, he gets the yields at the TI plant up to 20%. Twice as good as the first party line at IBM. There’s a great profile that was one of the main sources for this episode in IEEE Spectrum. Great industry magazine that we’ll quote from here, and they write: “Suddenly, even TI president Pat Haggerty knew Morris’s name. IBM thought Chang had just gotten lucky, but when the company (IBM) sent engineers to talk to him, Morris described the theories he’d been testing and explained why his experimental process worked. The achievement propelled him into his first management job, creating a germanium transistor development department with 20-plus engineers reporting to him.” This is his first big win here in the foundry business. On the back of all this, TI is like, all right, we got a rising star here. They offered to sponsor him to go finally get his PhD. They even offered to continue paying his full salary while he’s getting his PhD, which they’re paying for. What? They think very highly of him.…

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