Lowood: I'd like to start by asking you to describe the Fairchild facilities here in the Industrial Park.

Deal: I've always felt that the research building at Fairchild, here in the Industrial Park, was outstanding. Not only the location, but the way the building was arranged. It's somewhat different that most of the typical electronics-type buildings, semiconductor-type buildings, which are usually square and have several floors. In this case, it's a series of wings, and offices are on the outside of each wing, and the laboratories on the inside. That means every person, essentially, every professional person has an office, and Fairchild was very liberal in that respect, in that anyone that would be starting here with a Ph.D., for instance, would probably get a single office. Someone at a somewhat lower rating would be two to an office, but never more than two to an office. The facilities themselves, which provided the capability to have our laboratory here, such as the gases, high purity gases, DI [deionized] water, everything else in that regard, were really always in good shape. In fact, just a couple, three years before the sale of Fairchild to National, they had gone through and redone the entire facility. This was money that, of course, was provided by Schlumberger. So even today, with the building's future somewhat in doubt, the capabilities with regard to the processing of semiconductors are in top shape.

Lowood: When you came here, it was a new building?

Deal: When I came here, it had been built six months before. That is, the first two wings and part of the administration wing. That was in 1963. Those parts of the building were built in 1962 and it was occupied late in 1962. I got here in March of '63. Business was so good in those days that we soon filled up that building and we needed more space, so it was decided in 1966 to expand, adding a third wing with a second story--the first two wings only had one story plus the basement, and the basement parts of those two wings were not finished off at all. But the addition of the third wing more than doubled the usable space of the facility, and so at that point, then, we were able to accommodate, at one point, with three shifts, limited shifts on second and third, six hundred people in here. And the overall area was over 200,000 square feet usable area.

Lowood: You mentioned that the design was different from other lab facilities. Do you know who was behind that?

Deal: No, I don't. I suppose Gordon Moore had something to do with it, and Bob Noyce, but who really decided on that, I don't know. It causes a problem, I think, and has caused a problem today in selling the building to someone else, because it is in a different shape, and perhaps more inefficient for other types of business. But the use of the wings, and having the courtyards, makes it very pleasant to work in, and one of the most desirable places--both because of that and because of its location on the Stanford campus--most desirable of any place in the valley, as far as I'm concerned.

Lowood: So certainly, compared to Rheem, which you had just left back then, it was a completely different situation.

Deal: Rheem was a converted warehouse, essentially. Rheem did build a new building, which still exists today and is used, but it's a square building, and very typical of the semiconductor buildings. Very similar to the main Fairchild headquarters building down on Ellis. In fact, the Rheem/Raytheon building is right next door to that one.

Lowood: I guess a square building is cheaper, is that why?

Deal: Oh, I'm sure it is, yes. A square building's more efficient to run, so this is not a cost-efficient building from that standpoint, especially from the cost in the Industrial Park. On the other hand, since we had a lease, a forty-nine year lease with Stanford, and that lease was paid up in full, right from the start, we were not affected by later increases in building rates.

Lowood: I see.

Deal: Of course, the building was paid for also.

Lowood: I guess that's right, because Stanford changed its policy about those pay-in-advance rates.

Deal: I think that's the case. I don't think that it's possible any more.

Lowood: Can you compare the facilities here, in terms of equipment, primarily, but also in terms of space, to University facilities that you've seen, such as the Stanford Electronics Laboratory, or something like that.

Deal: In those days, there wasn't a lot of difference, because the equipment that we had was not very sophisticated. It soon changed, and as time went on we brought in new equipment. Then the industry--this is typical of industry in general--soon outdistanced the university laboratories very rapidly. This building, however, I would say, would compare reasonably well with the Stanford CIS [Center for Integrated Systems] building. In fact, the clean space in the CIS building is very similar to one of our fabs here, our cleanest fab here. On the other hand, we have three other fabs as well. But the equipment and the conditions and the facilities are very similar between the two. But keep in mind that Stanford is unique in some respects, as far as its capabilities there. There are only one or two other schools that could compare with Stanford.

Lowood: Prior to building CIS, I suppose, the facilities weren't very good on campus?

Deal: No, they were not.

Lowood: Were there cases where researchers from Stanford would try to use the facilities here, or get involved in a joint project? Was there that much of a difference?

Deal: I think the main difference was that we would have capabilities here, and we still do, that Stanford does not have. They just can't afford to be involved in so many different areas and have so much equipment. So we would do a lot of processing, on an individual basis, for instance, an evaporation of a certain metal that they wouldn't be able to do. Perhaps a certain oxidation that we had set up here that they couldn't run, we would do it for them. We were doing that continually. On the other hand, we did get some work done at Stanford in the early days. I remember where Jim Gibbons had an ion implantation unit that could do certain things. We got some work done there on an experimental basis. When we didn't have or didn't want to get involved in that particular element that was being implanted. So there was some cross-cooperation going on in that regard.

Lowood: And you mentioned Gibbons. Were there other faculty in electrical engineering or other departments that come to mind as people that were, that you would do things like that for?

Deal: That's right. Jim Gibbons was one of our early consultants here, as was Jim Angell. Later, then, we got involved more with Jim Meindl, Jim Plummer, Krishna Saraswat, Bob Dutton, a whole series of people. As our people got acquainted with them, and in certain cases got involved in joint projects, then we had this kind of cooperative research going back and forth. Some of the work was done here, some there, and in certain cases, some of the students spent time here. Even today, as we transferred the Fairchild Research Center to National, we have a student working on a project with me, and he's spending at least one or possibly two days a week in our laboratory, even though we're set up on a limited basis. We're doing certain electrical measurements that can be done down there, that Stanford does not have the capability to do.

Lowood: These would be entirely electrical engineering students, or would there be some in materials science?

Deal: In our facility we've had both--well, we've had materials science, electrical engineering, and applied physics. I can think of, I don't think we worked with any other groups. But those three, we have.

Lowood: I'm interested what kind of projects involved with applied physics would have come up?

Deal: In the applied physics, there was some work being done in CVD or gas dynamic type of thing. We hired one of the students here. He's since gone back to Stanford to get an M.B.A.

Lowood: Do you know who the advisor was, for this?

Deal: I don't remember in that case. I can think of another area where computer modelling was done in conjunction with a professor in applied physics, but again, I wasn't involved in that directly. My interactions have been primarily with electrical engineering and materials science.

Lowood: I think, you mentioned Gibbons, Angell, Meindl, mostly people in electrical engineering. Who would be some of the names from materials science?

Deal: Professor Sinclair and John Bravman, who is now a professor there, actually worked here during the time he was in graduate school. He worked in our materials analysis lab. Professor Tiller is involved in the computer modelling program. We've done a limited amount of work with Professor Stevenson, Dave Stevenson. One of our people worked with Professor Barnett , and I think there were some others that, again, I can't recall. Now I am mentioning people that I am familiar with that were more in the device and processing area. We've also had considerable interaction with people in computer science area. Professor Wooley has been a consultant here. Professor Flynn, I believe he's a professor, and several others, and again, I'm not as familiar with them.

Lowood: This goes, this tie-in with the artificial intelligence effort that Schlumberger started...

Deal: AI is another one that should be mentioned. Before the Artificial Intelligence Group split off into a separate Schlumberger laboratory, they were a part of our laboratory here, and there was considerable interaction between the AI people here and at Stanford. And one of the people, Marty Tenenbaum, is today a consulting professor at Stanford in that area. Now, of course, through the Schlumberger lab, rather than through the National/Fairchild lab.

Lowood: When you array all of these, you name all of these names, it's quite a few interactions. Do you think there would have been the same quantity of interactions if, say, you had been located three miles down the Peninsula. Do you think a lot of that had to do with the physical location on campus?

Deal: No question it had to do with the physical location. Now whether, if Fairchild had been in the location where National is today, whether we had had that many interactions, probably we would not have. The fact is that several of the students, for instance, that worked here, rode bicycles to school and would ride them over here, and we've had some professors that did that. They would not have ridden their bicycles down into Santa Clara. On the other hand, three miles to Stanford along the Peninsula here is a lot easier than Berkeley, and you compare Stanford with Berkeley, there are a lot of interesting programs that we'd like to be involved, if we can, and we'd like to have more professors involved with us. It's just too far. It's a one hour drive, approximately, over to Berkeley.

Lowood: One of the rationales for the--going back to Varian, which was the first company in the Industrial Park, of course--was this sort of currency of the realm, which would be graduate students, and one part of it being what you just described, that the graduate students could be involved at the companies. And then the other part was recruiting of the graduate students. Has that sort of thing happened as well, that Stanford grads have come to work here after they've gotten their Ph.D.s?

Deal: To a large extent. Now, there were times--I can think of at least two times--when business was pretty bad and when R & D was not at a very high level, in which we were unable to hire graduate students from anywhere, let alone Stanford. And that always turns off the faculty, especially, and the students that come along. So you have to go through another period of time to build up your reputation and the confidence that the faculty and students have in the company. Fortunately we were able to do that after these couple of times that were fairly bad, businesswise. But overall we've been very successful in working with students and recruiting and hiring them. And many of the Stanford students have come here over the years, to Fairchild.

Lowood: Could you describe your role in these programs over the years? Well, first maybe I should backtrack and say, these kinds of interactions probably began around the mid- or late-'60s, or did they begin earlier?

Deal: We had interactions with people like Jim Gibbons, who was a consultant here and taught courses here, and Jim Angell, in the mid-sixties. And we've had various professors as consultants over the years, from both materials science and electrical engineering. My direct interaction, as far as cooperative programs, began in about 1972-1973, when DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration] decided that they wanted to get involved in some sort of a process modelling program, and approached Stanford and Fairchild, it turns out. They approached me in this regard, to see about getting a program started. This was the start of the program which was called SUPREM, and has gone since about 1973 or 4, still running at the present time, supported in part by DARPA now, and part by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, SRC. And initially, a certain amount, fraction, let's say about twenty percent of the work was done here, and the other eighty percent at Stanford. And we employed a series of people, working for me, on our part of it over the years, and a lot was done at Stanford. That was really the start of my interaction with Stanford. At that point, I was appointed a consulting professor, as a part of that program.

Lowood: So, you were approached as the head of a division of R & D?

Deal: Of a research department. Also, because of my reputation in the area of oxidation and passivation, and they needed that part of it. They had no one at Stanford in that area. And so it was a good fit.

Lowood: Just to jump ahead, am I right that over the years you've become actually responsible in an administrative sense for the liaison with universities?

Deal: That's right. I then later was in charge of the liaison with all university interactions for Fairchild Research, which really included the rest of the company, since all of those interactions were centered through the research lab. Not only Stanford, but all the other key universities that we dealt with.

Lowood: About when did that start?

Deal: I would say about 1978 or '79, on an official basis. It was sort of a transition-type of thing.

Lowood: In what way?

Deal: Well, I wasn't officially responsible before that, and I was after. I was doing this sort of thing probably earlier than that.

Lowood: By the way, SUPREM, was that an acronym?

Deal: Yes. Stanford University Process Engineering Model.

Lowood: You mentioned how the project started, that DARPA basically approached Fairchild and Stanford to get it started. How successful was that program? What sorts of things were done initially and over the years?

Deal: Well, we've gone through, now, at least four versions of SUPREM. They have released SUPREM-4, and several hundred companies have software for SUPREM to do process modelling. Every major company that does any work uses that program to some extent. Some use it only on individual processes, and some use it for the complete modelling and simulations of a complete process for making a circuit. Out of that come other programs that have been developed by people like Bob Dutton, Jim Plummer, and so on, that support it more in the device area. But as far as I know, it's the most successful one. Others have been developed, one has been--several have been developed in Japan, for instance, and there's one at North Carolina. But I think they are all really supplementing the Stanford process modelling program.

Lowood: The idea of a program, it was always meant to be a computer program, right from the beginning?

Deal: Yes. The whole point is to take a process, like silicon oxidation, and understand it and develop some relationship, some possible empirical relationship or even more than that, that can be then put into a computer program, and then you can put any variable in, and predict what you should get by using the various variables. Or you may decide you want to end up with a certain oxide of thickness such-and-such. You can then use the program to determine what conditions should be used to get it.

Lowood: And obviously that saves a lot of money, to be able to do it in simulation.

Deal: Yes, I think a lot of the complicated processes we have today have to use some sort of process modelling. You cannot take the time that it would take to go through all of the variables and try and zero in on what you want to get.

Lowood: Because this is a really interesting example of university-industry cooperation, can you explain how the project was divided up, how it was started up?

Deal: Well, essentially, at the start Jim Meindl was the project manager, and he assigned various people at Stanford, what responsibilities they would have, and we also agreed on what would be done here. I think for a while Ted Kamins from HP was involved, who had worked here originally, and a couple of other people to a lesser extent, like Walt Benzing of Applied Materials was involved in the program. But for the most part, I think most of the experimental work was done at Stanford--as I said, eighty percent--and about twenty percent here. And then, each of those research people--initially, people like Plummer, Jim Plummer, and Krishna Saraswat were research associates. They were not yet professors. They would have graduate students working with them. And there was a whole series of graduate students that have gotten their degrees at Stanford supported by the DARPA/SUPREM funding and contributing to that. I think it would be interesting today to go through and just tabulate all of those pieces of research that were done based on that program alone, considerable. And also, it would be interesting to see how the knowledge of semiconductor processing--that is, the basic knowledge--has been increased through that one program.

Lowood: A lot of it, then, was generating the empirical data that would be the database for the program, right?

Deal: That's right. And trying to understand the mechanisms involved so you could go from a qualitative to a quantitative understanding of the processes.

Lowood: Could this project have been done, the way it was done, by Fairchild alone or by Stanford alone, do you think?

Deal: Well, since the majority of it was done at Stanford, I think you could certainly say that it could have been done by Stanford alone, and in fact, in more recent years, it has, when we pulled out of the active experimental part of the program. Whether it could have been done at a company is another story, because it took a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of capability that the company probably wouldn't want to devote. That's why most of these programs have come out of universities, these types of programs, like SUPREM, SAMPLE, which is one related to lithography, was done at Berkeley, many device type of modelling programs have been done at universities. Maybe one or two have been done at places like IBM or Bell.

Lowood: The kind of knowledge that is required for generating a successful program like SUPREM, and now I mean a research program, not a computer program, is something that Stanford, or any university, brings to industry in a collaboration like this?

Deal: Yes. One of the noted successes of Stanford and the companies in Silicon Valley, are the cooperative efforts in this regard. Because Stanford can't use the program by itself, they have to get the industrial companies, then, to use the computer program part and give feedback, as far as some of the problems they might have, and they're always problems with things that turn out that are not as you originally thought they were. So they depend on that. Each year a meeting is held at Stanford, which is a review of the latest advances during the past year, in the SUPREM modelling program. And they use one of the days as feedback from the industrial users, the customers.

Lowood: Has there been any change in the level of DARPA support since the fifteen years or so that the program's been going?

Deal: The main change in DARPA support has been the reduction of money that's available for silicon processing. And, as I said, it's now supported partly by DARPA and partly by SRC (Semiconductor Research Corporation) , and SRC is supporting the continuing silicon support, and DARPA is now only supporting the gallium arsenide program. There is now a program that's been going on for about three years in modelling the processing of gallium arsenide, and the version that is out now is called SUPREM 3.5, which is appropriate, of course, for gallium arsenide, which was by accident, as I understand it.

Lowood: That's one we'll have to footnote to explain that pun. So there haven't been any periods when the program as a whole has been questioned?

Deal: I believe that DARPA personnel have been very satisfied with the results, and to my knowledge there has not been any question about the continuing support of it, even after fifteen years.

Lowood: Let's talk now about some of the major research and development projects at Fairchild from about 1970 or so. We've talked about some of the ones from the sixties. As you look back over, say, the last eighteen years or whatever, what have been the major efforts. And in particular, I wonder if you could relate them to the changing fortunes of the company. You know, the company's been sold a couple of times. How can you relate the changing emphases in the R & D efforts to the changing fortunes of the company.

Deal: Well, if you mention 1970, that, of course, is a key date as far as the development of what we call the isoplanar process. Isoplanar is the bipolar version of oxide isolation, whereas the MOS version of oxide isolation was developed in Europe, at both Philips and SGS, I believe. The bipolar process was much more difficult to implement, and it was done at Fairchild, and for several years Fairchild was the only company that could actually produce that type of process, where you have a version, a type of structure that isolates the devices by oxides rather than by diffusion. This allows you to make much smaller devices. You can make higher density and higher performance devices. This really gave Fairchild the edge, which they still have held, in the past years, with respect to bipolar technology. So that has to be a key one. That was developed here in R & D. As time went on, a lot of the other improvements that were improvements in the density of bipolar, as well as MOS, and I think with regard to your question of the fortunes of the company and the developments in R & D, the latter part of the seventies were getting pretty bad, as far as the business and profit picture for Fairchild. A lot of people have questioned whether Fairchild would have lasted any longer than the end of 1970s if Schlumberger hadn't purchased them at that time. Now, there are two aspects of the purchase of Fairchild by Schlumberger. One was very positive, one was very negative, and I guess you may want to talk about that. The positive aspect is that Schlumberger was a very wealthy company in those days, and had a lot of cash and needed somewhere to invest it in. They had the concept that you needed R & D to survive, and a semiconductor company was no exception, and maybe it was even more so in that case. And so they poured a lot of money into the research center here, both as far as capital equipment, the building, facilities, as I mentioned earlier, and into the programs. And so there was a noted pickup in the amount of work that was done here, and I think in the accomplishments, because of that, just because of the influx of funding from Schlumberger.

Lowood: Let me get your next thought on the next tape.

[END OF SIDE A, TAPE 1, BEGINNING OF SIDE B, TAPE 1]

Deal: So I've mentioned the positive aspect of the purchase of Fairchild by Schlumberger, which was cash, essentially. The negative aspect had to do with management. Whereas Schlumberger was a very well run company and was recognized as such, it was in an area of oil exploration of international scope which was a lot different than operating a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley. But they were of the old school which said that you could take any manager, and if he was successful, he could manage anything else. So they provided us with a manager who thought he could run Fairchild, without paying attention to the rules and the unwritten laws that existed, with regards to the semiconductor and electronics business. This is an example: one of the things that they put into effect was that no one could be rehired at Fairchild after they had left the company. And this is just not the way Silicon Valley operated.

Lowood: It was an old version of company loyalty or something.

Deal: That's right. And in the oil industry, that was the case and it worked. It did not work here. Another thing was they did not believe in any incentives, bonuses or anything like that for the majority of the workers in the company. No stock options. Only the very top few. This did not work, and so even though we were successful in developing new technology during the time, 1979-1984 or 5, for a five year period, we were also losing a lot of good people, because they couldn't work under those conditions. And when I say "we," I mean more the rest of the company. The R & D situation was a lot more stable, because people liked to work under those conditions and weren't as concerned about making a lot of money, which was one of the big issues. We had a program in the company called the Key Technologist Program, which rewarded research people and individual contributors in a way that they could not be rewarded in the same way that managers could be rewarded. Schlumberger eliminated this program. This did affect the morale in R & D, but it took a while to really cause any concern, because people were still interested in working under these conditions that we had. The conditions were still very favorable. These were some of the things that were done by Schlumberger and the man that was brought in to run Schlumberger. And after five years, Schlumberger finally realized things were not progressing as they should have, and at this point they brought in Don Brooks, from TI, to run the company, but it was about a year or two too late, it seems, if you look back.

Lowood: The manager that was brought in by Schlumberger, that wasn't Corrigan, was it?

Deal: No, Corrigan was the president of the company when we were sold to Schlumberger, and he either resigned at that point or was asked to resign, who knows.

Lowood: So who was the fellow that was brought in?

Deal: Tom Roberts. Tom Roberts was a successful manager from Schlumberger, but he did not have the right philosophy to run a semiconductor company, apparently.

Lowood: I looked at, there was an enormous amount of publicity when Schlumberger bought Fairchild. All the magazines, of course, ran lengthy stories. There was a lot of discussion about this venerated company in the industry being purchased by a foreign company and all of that. Did that issue have any effect on the company, other than what you've mentioned in terms of culture, was there any kind of . . . ?

Deal: Well, there was some concern about a so-called foreign company buying Fairchild. However, most of us had the attitude that Schlumberger was not really a foreign company, per se, it was an international company. And indeed, even at the time that they bought Fairchild in 1979, they had dual headquarters in Paris and in New York, and as time went on, that gradually shifted to New York, and I think, at the end, the headquarters were essentially in New York, although they were chartered in the Dutch Antilles, as I recall, and started, of course, in France.

Lowood: The head of Schlumberger at the time, was a Frenchman, I recall.

Deal: Jean Riboud.

Lowood: Riboud, exactly.

Deal: He was a great supporter of Fairchild. He was the one that was instrumental in Schlumberger buying Fairchild. Unfortunately, he became ill in the past two years and resigned and then actually died. The man that he put in in place of himself before he actually died was also a supporter of Fairchild, but was not as strong, not as strong a leader, apparently, did not have the backing or the respect of the Schlumberger organization, the family. There are a lot of Schlumberger family that still head the petroleum interest in the company. So after about a year he was replaced by a man who, apparently, was under their control, and immediately, he took steps, made the statement that Fairchild would be sold. We were listed as a discontinued operation. And it was at this point that Don Brooks, then, tried to put together a sale to Fujitsu. The proposed company that would have come out of that, a joint Fairchild-Fujitsu America company, that would have been continued to be called Fairchild, would have been a very strong company. There's no question about it, and this is what many of the competitors were concerned about, and successfully lobbied to have the government put pressure on the two companies not to complete the sale.

Lowood: So, in a sense, the issue of national security, as it was presented, was something of a smoke screen, from that point of view.

Deal: Well, I think it was both. I think the competition was concerned, but also there were certain government people that were concerned about the Japanese takeover of business in the United States. As it turns out--as it turned out then, there was no law that said they couldn't do it, but there are still ways of putting pressure on any company, whether it's United States or non-United States, with respect to government contracts and so on, that you can prevent it, and the Japanese, the Fujitsu people, just didn't want to have to face all this, and they have chosen, now, to operate separately as most of the other Japanese companies have done, and set up their American subsidiaries. Most of the people here had mixed feelings about working for a Japanese company. I think, when we've seen other smaller companies that were purchased by the Japanese, or where someone might even go to work for a Japanese company in this country, there was some raised eyebrows, of course, about that. Now when you have to face a situation yourself, as to whether you want to work for a Japanese company or try and find another employment, that really puts the pressure on you. So it's hard to know what people would have done, overall. Most of them, though, I think would have stayed with the company, especially since it was going to be retained as Fairchild, named Fairchild.

Lowood: So there was a very, very different reaction when Fujitsu came into the picture than there had been when Schlumberger . . .

Deal: That's right. No one was really concerned about Schlumberger because they were not an electronics company, and they were not a threat anywhere. They were the leading oil exploration company, even at that point, throughout the world, but as far as the electronics business was concerned, they had a very limited impact on the business.

Lowood: Now, as the company went from being Fairchild to being Fairchild-Schlumberger and then the Fujitsu thing happened, and eventually National Semiconductor bought the company, over this period of about, I guess, what, '79 to '87, what kinds of things were happening in the research, and how was that affecting the research and development facility?

Deal: Because of the support of the research operation by Schlumberger, a number of very significant developments came about, and these, interestingly enough, had to do with more products, product structures, than fundamental processes. Such things as FACT, Fairchild Advanced CMOS Technology, and FAST, Fairchild Advanced Schottky Technology, and Aspect. It's a very fast type of form of TTL bipolar circuit. And then lastly, but not least, the so-called Clipper, thirty-two bit microprocessor. All were developed in the research laboratory here, and were all considered to be some of the most advanced technology in the industry, and in fact, these types of things were why National was so interested in acquiring Fairchild, because it was things that they did not have, especially, with the exception of the microprocessor.

Lowood: I guess, increasingly over the years, the successful part of the company was the R & D?

Deal: Well, I would have to say that, of course. When you're talking about things like FACT, FAST, ASPECT, and so on, it's really a combination, even though they're developed in R & D, to be successful, they have to be manufactured. And so this was more of a cooperative effort, and probably more so than it had been in the earlier history of the company, where you had joint effort between R & D and the product divisions.

Lowood: And these were then successful? Clipper's the only one I'm familiar with.

Deal: All of these are successful and are well-known in the business as being the most advanced technology. We also had a very strong gate array program, that's merged, of course, with National, and in fact the general manager of the Fairchild Gate Array Division is now the general manager of the National Gate Array Division and is the only instance where a Fairchild manager was put in charge of a division at National.

Lowood: Now in terms of your own place within the company, between '72 and '82, your title was manager of device technology, according to your record.

Deal: Well, we kept changing that organization, depending on various things. Essentially, my position during all of this time had to do with managing the materials and process research, and we changed that, for various reasons, political in certain cases. Integrated circuit R & D at one point, device technology, semiconductor technology, but really it was always the same type of thing. We were developing the advanced technology.

Lowood: So, then, you would say within those years, your responsibility within the company was at about the same level, or was there an increasing span of responsibilities?

Deal: I think it was pretty much at the same level.

Lowood: I noticed one item that you had mentioned in your resume memory was liaison between R & D and other units in the company.

Deal: That's right. That was part of that same effort, although the interesting thing there is that because the difference of opinion of some of the general managers or the senior vice-president who was over R & D--they had different opinions as to how much we should interface between R & D and the rest of the company. You might think that it's a good thing, but certain people did not and were planning to keep everything quite confidential, didn't want us interfacing as much. This is somewhat frustrating of course, people that are trying to do what they think is the most beneficial to the company.

Lowood: I don't follow the logic behind wanting to do that.

Deal: Well, you're starting to get in to some personal feelings of some of the managers, I think, and certain personalities.

Lowood: So people didn't get along?

Deal: Yes. In this business, there's always competition within a given company, among the various general managers or top managers, and they're concerned about maybe losing some of the credit they might get, things like this.

Lowood: Well, given that, was your role to smooth over these kinds of problems and to find a relationship that worked between R & D and other parts of the company? Was that it?

Deal: No, we were pretty well told what to do. What we could do and what we couldn't do, we were really told.

[BREAK IN TAPE]

Lowood: OK. Let's just talk then about some of the kinds of mechanisms that you set up to improve communication within the company.

Deal: OK. One of the things that I was responsible for, early, really starting about 1970, was what we called the Publications Group, and this consisted of the library, which was one of the outstanding semiconductor company libraries in the Valley, certainly, included a photography shop--we had a photographer here. It included a print shop and a technical illustrator, and we set up programs, then, that involved technical reports and memos which had already been started to some extent, but we continued and expanded them at that point. We continued the outstanding publication procedure and policy that Fairchild had. Over the years, they have continually been known as one of the outstanding companies for allowing and encouraging published papers, because of all the technology that came out of here. Of course, that was important. The library not only provided input to R & D, but also the rest of the company, and then as the computer generation came on, they shifted from some of the older methods of communication to computerized types. This was greatly expanded, I should point out, when Schlumberger took over and Tony Ley was made vice-president and brought with him a woman who was working for him in England for Schlumberger, in charge of one of what they called "Technical Information Centers" there. So we expanded greatly at that point.

One of the other responsibilities that I had was a part of the Key Technology Program that was, I think I mentioned earlier, was to encourage the development of individual contributors and non-managers, which would be primarily in R & D, but also in other parts of the company. But as a part of the Key Technology Program we had an all-company seminar, that was held each year, and it was based very much on an IEEE- or an Electrochemical Society-type symposium, which we would invite people to submit abstracts, say, in about January, and we had a committee which was composed of people throughout the company, about eight or ten people, that would review the abstracts, screen them, and then select those that would be considered for presentation, and the people would be asked to prepare their papers, primarily to be orally presented, not as a manuscript. All the slides had to be prepared within the R & D facility, in our publications group. We found out after the first year we had to do that because of the poor quality that would come out of some of the groups, and then we would have a two-day program. During this program, each of the two days, we would start out with an outside invited speaker, generally a professor from Stanford or some other university throughout the country, and we would have various sessions. And as it got more successful, we would have parallel sessions in the afternoon. And this was an outstanding way for people to get together throughout the company. We had people coming from all over the world, from facilities, and talk with each other and hear what was going on. We had extended abstracts required during the latter seminars that we had, and I think this continued for about eight or nine years, until the last year, during the time that we were negotiating for a new owner. Even Schlumberger was quite impressed with this program and sent people. We invited four or five invited papers from Schlumberger to be given, although they really didn't fit into the scope, the subject matter of the main seminar.

Lowood: From what you said, this program went on from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties.

Deal: The mid-eighties, yes, about eight or nine years.

Lowood: Did it involve other companies?

Deal: No.

Lowood: This was entirely internal.

Deal: Always strictly Fairchild, and limited Schlumberger participation.

Lowood: Were there other kinds of activities within the company that improved communication?

Deal: Over the years, we have different types of programs in which we would have committees or groups get together on a particular technology and meet. Some of these we would actually have meetings as a follow-on to the seminars, since the people were here anyway. For instance, you might get all the people in the company in the various facilities who are involved in photoresist processes, or all the people that were involved in CVD deposition or oxidation. One of the problems in any company, Fairchild or whatever company it is, you find that you have problems that are very similar that come up in the different facilities, different product lines, that people do not get the information back and forth. One group may solve a problem, and several other groups may be struggling with the problem and don't know that there is a solution to it. So between this type of thing and also, as I mentioned, the vice-president of research was also responsible, on a dotted-line basis, for the engineering managers at each facility, and there would be meetings that would be called by the vice-president to have these people talk about problems. Generally, these would be more management-type of problems, decision-type of meetings rather than technology type. So the other type, where you were actually talking to the working engineer, get them together, I think would be more successful from that standpoint, to solve technical problems.

Lowood: From your point of view and experience on this general problem of communication between the research and development side of the company and the other units in the company, can you differentiate what works from what doesn't work?

Deal: Well, as I said, the more of the working end, of interaction between the working engineers you can get, the better off you are, because they're the ones that are working on the problems, know the answers and know how to solve them. You can get the managers together, and that's important for certain things, but that doesn't solve some of the basic day-to-day problems.

Lowood: So in part, it's creating links across the company rather than up the organization and back down again.

Deal: And back down again, right. I think more could be done in any company with respect to distributing technical information, through technical reports and memos and the like. One of the ways you can do this, is through your library or technical information centers, but they never seem to have the time and the facilities, the capabilities, to do this. The technical report system that we've had at Fairchild over the years is one way to do this, I think.

Lowood: Do you have exchange arrangements for technical reports with universities and companies?

Deal: No. All these are considered confidential, with one exception. If a paper has been accepted, the manuscript has been accepted for publication, then it would be a declassified technical report. But those would be available through reprints anyway.

Lowood: I know, in computer science, Stanford has a lot of series of technical reports that they exchange.

Deal: Stanford distributes a lot of these reports through the CIS program, among other things. But of course those, coming from a university, are not classified or considered proprietary, whereas those that are developed and written within a company, many times would be a company-private type of thing.

Lowood: I remember when the AI lab was set up, and Xerox PARC or some other labs in computer science, they for a while were distributing a lot of technical reports, and that that was a a way of communicating within computer science. Do you think, was there ever any thought given to getting involved in that kind of distribution of information, from the company out, you know, providing information to other companies?

Deal: Typically not, because the climate is so secret in these companies, and there's so much concern about information going to other competitors that it's not done. I know that companies like Xerox have also, and HP to some extent, invited people to seminars that they had. But Fairchild has never done that, and I don't think companies like Intel or National or AMD do either, just because of the problems of handling this sort of thing.

Lowood: What about at a personal level? Within The Electrochemical Society, there must be a lot of people from different companies that meet, maybe just at local restaurants in the Silicon Valley, because the companies are so close.

Deal: I'm going to a planning meeting for The Electrochemical Society tonight, and companies will be represented all across the Valley, and that is certainly the place where people will have interaction, and unfortunately, some of the maybe the newer, younger people, will talk about things more that they should, from many of the companies. But that is one way, of course, that information is disseminated throughout the industry.

Lowood: And from what you said, it's discouraged?

Deal: I think, yes, people get more mature about it, and then they understand what they can and can't talk about. A lot of things you can talk about.

Lowood: In your own situation, because you've mentioned that you've published quite a bit of the work that you've done, are you a little bit freer to discuss your work with colleagues, do you think, because you're at the research end of it?

Deal: Certainly the research people are freer to discuss some of their work, because it is more fundamental, and they will attend meetings and report the work at the technical meetings as well, whereas people that are working in development and in production have less opportunity to do that, because they don't have that kind of work they can talk about. They can only talk about their problems and their yields and so on, and that's the sort of thing you don't want to talk about.

Lowood: I recently heard an anecdote from a friend of mine who's in industry and is working on superconductors, and he told me that one thing that always happens at professional meetings if one gives a presentation is whatever you talk about, usually somebody at Bell Labs stands up at some point and asks a question that basically implies, "Oh, we've already done that at some point." Is there a parallel thing in your area? Did those sorts of things happen a lot?

Deal: Oh, yes. The work has typically always been competitive, and has always oneupsmanship in effect. And many times you'll hear someone say, "We did that a number of years ago." And in fact, that sort of thing is happening and more realistic today than it has been, because we have a whole new generation of people, and a lot of these people have not had the opportunity or the time to read a lot of the older literature, and you will find that some things are being developed and invented again.

Lowood: Is there an example that you can think of?

Deal: Well, it's difficult to give a specific example right now. It's more individual processes. It's difficult to do it on a non-personal basis, because since I've done so much work in certain areas that I could certainly bring up cases where I think the work has been done in the past. I'm very careful not to try and point it out in a manner than may be not acceptable to people. But it is certainly the case that work continues to be done. Maybe it has to be. Maybe the people have to go through some of the studies and investigations to learn more about it. But then, maybe they also think they are seeing it for the first time, and that may not be the case.

[END OF SIDE B, TAPE 1, BEGINNING OF SIDE A, TAPE 2]

Lowood: I wanted to get back to a couple of things about the seventies, and I've just been looking through the business press in the early seventies to mid-seventies. I've noticed a number of references to the company's product line at that time. I think in Business Week they talk about it "lagging" in CMOS technology, and that seemed kind of strange to me, given the lead that Fairchild had had in that area.

Deal: We lagged in MOS technology, period, over the years, even during the sixties when the technology was invented, and certainly a lot of the technology related to it, at Fairchild. We were not able to take advantage of it, and that happened again in CMOS technology. The CMOS process or design of CMOS was invented at Fairchild by Wanlass and Sah in the early 1960s, and the first isoplanar CMOS was developed here in the early 1970s. Yet again, other companies were more able to take advantage of that technology and put it into production than Fairchild. We had a continuing change of personnel in our MOS-related groups, whereas the bipolar production areas remained fairly stable.

Lowood: So this goes back to what you said, I think in our first talk, maybe, or early in the second, that a key factor had been, the technology would be developed here in its initial stages, then somebody would leave and take it with them to a new company or something like that and that's what hurt the company.

Deal: That's absolutely correct, and that's continuing to be the case in CMOS technology. No different.

Lowood: So that was a major factor, then, with the problems that the company had?

Deal: I have to believe that, right.

Lowood: We talked a little bit, off and on, about Les Hogan and his being replaced by Corrigan in 1974. Is there anything, do you think, that can be added to that, as far as Corrigan was perceived in the company, or whether it had any changes for the organization.

Deal: Well, as far as Corrigan replacing Hogan, it was just a difference of two personalities, and I guess Corrigan was more aggressive than Hogan. Hogan was certainly well-liked and respected, and he still is. Corrigan was not well-liked and respected in those days. Interestingly enough, he is more today, and apparently has been more successful at LSI Logic than he was at Fairchild, for what reason I don't know. He's got a lot of Fairchild people at LSI Logic. In my own situation, I think I mentioned earlier, that I got along pretty well with him and was supported more by him than some of the other managers later, in the work that we were trying to do here.

Lowood: I think journalists had a big field day with that transition and the circumstances of the transition.

Deal: I imagine so.

Lowood: But you were familiar with Rheem, with a company where the morale really did drop pretty much to the bottom. Was it anything like that here?

Deal: Not as I recall. The biggest problem with Corrigan was that he had some interesting ideas, and one of these was that Fairchild should get into commercial products, and this included calculators, which we did not get into, and watches, which we did, TV games, which we did. We beefed up the optoelectronics area, LEDs and displays and this sort of thing, and we were not able to compete with the Japanese. No American company was able to compete, and so this really, I think, was the thing that led to a lot of the problems at Fairchild, because a lot of the profits went into those areas, and so in the late seventies, what happened to Fairchild was because of those ventures which were not successful, and that's when Schlumberger, then, bought Fairchild. In fact, I believe that most people think that Corrigan actually persuaded Schlumberger to buy Fairchild, rather than a company like Gould, who were also interested. They later bought AMI. And Schlumberger looked like a much better possibility, and it probably was, in a lot of respects.

Lowood: So I guess, then, you mentioned the one problem of people leaving the company, and then another, which in the late seventies was happening at the same time, was just the prices of a lot of these markets that were entered by the company, the prices started dropping when the Japanese came in.

Deal: That's right. We were not able to manufacture that kind of products at a profit.

Lowood: So you had at least these two pressures at the same time.

Deal: Right.

Lowood: We've also mentioned the sale to Schlumberger in '79 and Riboud's role in that. The company, under Schlumberger, did fall--I just looked at some Dataquest statistics--and they said that in '79 the company had been sixth in semiconductor sales, and in '84 had been eleventh. Do you think Schlumberger failed in any way?

Deal: The management. This is where the management philosophy of Schlumberger, as imposed on Fairchild, was not successful, and there's no question about that. That, coupled with the increased Japanese competition was just too much. Because TI and Motorola were able to overcome the Japanese competition to a considerable extent, and Intel and some of the others, even National.

Lowood: The things you were talking about were things like the different culture of the management?

Deal: That's right. Philosophy of management.

Lowood: Just to hear what you have to say about these, some of the things that were in the newspapers a lot in that time period were the chemical leaks, the underground water situation at the South San Jose plant. Of course, that had nothing to do with the R & D plant here.

Deal: Well, of course, that was an industry-wide thing, and it hit Fairchild as hard as or harder than other companies, with the exception of the San Jose leak, which actually got into water systems. Fairchild was really no different, it was also included along with Intel and Raytheon and several others in Mountain View, for instance, at about the same level. I think the one area that really hurt the reputation of Fairchild was South San Jose, and that was because they were in an area that was separate from everyone else, except IBM. IBM, by the way, had the same problems in South San Jose and are still in the news regarding that, both IBM and Fairchild.

Lowood: How did people working in the company react to the negative publicity?

Deal: Didn't seem to bother that much. People were either in the industry or not in the industry, I guess.

Lowood: Was R & D called in to investigate the problem at all?

Deal: This was handled primarily through our central corporate group, Health and Safety Group, and because Schlumberger had decentralized the company so much, each division, including R & D, operated pretty much independently, and so we were not involved.

Lowood: And you weren't involved personally in that?

Deal: The only thing we were involved in were some investigation on the site here. There is some contamination directly underneath this building, which has not gone anywhere else. There's no wells or drinking water that are used in this vicinity anyway, so it doesn't seem to be a problem. But there is considerable contamination throughout Stanford Industrial Park. I think you've probably read about that. More of it on the other side of Veterans' Hospital, in the Watkins-Johnson/Xerox/HP area.

Lowood: And, to a certain extent, on campus as well.

Deal: That's more above-ground, isn't it?

Lowood: More above-ground, just how to bring things onto campus, take them off campus, and how to dispose of them, and that sort of thing.

Deal: We have had minimum of interaction and problems with the neighbors in this area. We have had a little problem with noise, in which it turns out that due to a freak of nature, somehow, certain houses may hear some of our equipment more than other houses that are closer to our facility. This was part of the Schlumberger upgrade, which was to provide muffles on some of our air-handling equipment and outside power supplies and this sort of thing. But it's still a minimum. We've had, overall, very little problems with any of the neighbors.

Lowood: This is a bit of an aside, but has anything changed in terms of the kinds of requirements and standards that the Industrial Park administration sets up?

Deal: Not as far as the industrial park, but the City of Palo Alto has continued to put in very strict regulations, and in fact Fairchild was used as one of the initial sites to upgrade the gas facilities, closure facilities. And we have had, up until the last year, of course, they're now discontinuing this building, very good relations with the City of Palo Alto and the fire department and the health and safety people there.

Lowood: When did this start, this relationship with the city? I mean in terms of this particular project?

Deal: About two--oh, more than that now--probably about four years ago. And the key thing is that if the companies will volunteer to work with the cities and to help improve the situation, why, you'll find that they'll be very easy to work with, rather than if you try to get around regulations and not meet the code requirements.

Lowood: I just want to ask you about one other thing that was in the news about the company, and again this may have just been in a different division. Of course, there was a lot of publicity about the DOD chip testing requirements and the violation--I don't know if they went beyond being alleged violations--of the chip-testing requirements or not. Was that involved at all with R & D?

Deal: R & D was not involved with that at all. That had to do with one of the production facilities. I think the feeling was that it was the sort of thing that several companies were involved with. National was also, I think AMD. Any company that depends on the military for a reasonable amount of business, apparently, gets involved in this sort of thing occasionally. You can say that if the company had better management or better control over some of these testing procedures, why, they wouldn't have the trouble. But I can't really speak about that sort of thing. It did not really affect us that much, we didn't get involved with it.

Lowood: Lastly, just to, catching up with the history of the company, I suppose, you mentioned the events leading up to the circumstances surrounding the sale to National in '87, but I don't think you actually reviewed how this sale came about and who the principals involved in that were. Can you maybe go over that, briefly?

Deal: Are you talking about the sale to National, or the whole year in which the question of the sale was . . .?

Lowood: Well, let's go with the whole year, then.

Deal: I think I mentioned earlier that after Riboud had resigned as president of Schlumberger and brought in his own man--I can't remember his name right now, another Frenchman--, he was in a year. And then at the end of that year, it was announced by Schlumberger, when the new president was put in, that Fairchild would be disposed of, in one way or the other. This meant, and I think this was early 1987 or even late 1986, this of course caused considerable unrest at Fairchild and in R & D, because no one knew what was going to happen. It was finally announced that Don Brooks had came to an agreement with Fujitsu, for Fujitsu to buy Fairchild and to then organize the company by combining Fairchild with the American part of Fujitsu, which was very strong in itself. In fact, if this had come about, the calculations showed that this combined company, a combined American Fujitsu-Fairchild company, would be one of the largest in the world. It would be closer to those of Japan, which, I think, at that point had number one, two, and four, or something like that.

Well, when the pressure was put on the two companies not to complete the sale, then, naturally, something else had to be done. It was still stated by Schlumberger that they wanted to get rid of the company, and we were listed still as a non-operating division or something like that, or a discontinued division. It was then reported, and I don't know if it was official or not, that Don Brooks was proposing a leveraged buyout by management, and that he had indeed obtained the necessary funding. We kept waiting for an announcement that this would happen, but it didn't happen. It became obvious that Schlumberger was not going to accept this directly, and for whatever reason, we started to get rumors of other companies that would possible buy Fairchild. One was National, one was Siemens, I think, and there were a couple of others. Rumors, of course, were flying all around. Then, at one point, we had representatives of several companies come in to Fairchild, including R & D, and interview us, essentially. And I don't want to go into those details as to who they were and what happened, but it ended up, then, that the announcement was made, I believe, in September of 1987, that National had, indeed, agreed to purchase Fairchild. It was obvious that Don Brooks was quite bitter about it, because he gave a talk at one of the manager meetings, and in fact the initial meeting of National people, talked to all those people at Fairchild, Brooks introduced them and was not happy at that point, and of course blamed Schlumberger for it all. He didn't blame National. He said, if he were National he would have done the same thing, because the price for purchasing Fairchild was very cheap, $200 million, or was it $100 million? Whatever it was, it was very cheap.

Lowood: Because they basically wanted to get rid of it?

Deal: Yes. They wanted to get rid of it. A lot of people likened it to the gift that GE made of the RCA research labs to SRI, which they gave them. That really made the people at RCA research labs feel bad, because they weren't worth anything; they were given away. And this was almost the way, we felt, at Fairchild.

Lowood: You mentioned that there was a strong feeling of ill ease when the Japanese came up. Well, of course, National had been a competitor for a long time, too. How did . . .?

Deal: Morale, for a while, was very low. National has never been the type of company that Fairchild has been. They haven't claimed to be; they operate at the other end. They are a high-production, low-technology company; Fairchild is medium-production but high-technology. There have been all sorts of stories throughout the years of people that have either had worked at National or had gone to National from Fairchild or have talked to other people that have worked at National, and National just didn't have a good reputation from the standpoint of the Fairchild people. National knew this, and for that reason, they made a lot of efforts to assure the Fairchild people that they were going to be accepted and have a place to work under the conditions that they were used to. Maybe not the same conditions, but certainly would be acceptable. So I have to give National credit for that. They did a very good job in working out the plans for the transfer.

Lowood: For them, it's a big swallow, because it's a whole R & D operation.

Deal: We're not talking just about R & D, we're talking about the entire company. With respect to R & D, it was not as good a thing as you might expect. The way it was worked out is a certain number of openings for R & D people were established throughout National, not especially within an R & D organization. I think it ended up that about fifty percent of the R & D people ended up working at National somewhere. Some of them would not go to National, and they started interviewing, the business was just starting up again, so that they all had no problems getting jobs. So we ended up having about fifty percent of the R & D people going somewhere in National, but only a very small number going into what was later renamed the Fairchild Research Center at National. So the real R & D at National is less than ten percent of what was here at Fairchild.

Lowood: And in terms of--well, let's start just with R & D. If you take a diagram of the areas in which R & D is involved at Fairchild, which ones have been retained going to National and which ones have been cut out entirely?

Deal: As far as the R & D, they were only people in my department.

Lowood: So Materials and Processes?

Deal: That's right. Now, I have to qualify that quite a bit. First, National has a different type of organization, so there are certain groups of people, like the design people, and the CAD people, that are not in R & D but they are part of a product group, so the R & D people in the organization are still there, but they're in the fifty percent, not the ten percent. National also had a very strong development effort, and so what we might have called device development here is now in a non-R & D organization but it's in an overall technology group. So again, fifty percent of R & D is located in National. But what's really called R & D, or the Fairchild Research Center of National, only includes process technology from materials and processes people.

Lowood: Is there an area that was cut out entirely, or that Schlumberger took with it?

Deal: Well, Schlumberger had already taken AI and computer science. But I don't think any area was cut out entirely that was included in the final R & D at Fairchild.

Lowood: For Fairchild in general, I have the same questions as with R & D. Were there any areas of the company, of its product line or its production facilities that have not gone to National? I suppose there might be some overlaps there.

Deal: Clipper. The Clipper was the one that was sold to Integraph, because National also had a thirty-two bit microprocessor. Many people think that they made a mistake, and that the Clipper was more advanced. I guess that maybe is a matter of opinion, or maybe you have to be involved in that area to really know. But I have certainly read that. And naturally the Fairchild Clipper people felt that. That's the one group. The other group, I think I maybe mentioned earlier that there were some problems in assimilation, was Linear. Both the Linear Group at National and Linear Group at Fairchild were equal, both fairly strong. Many of the Linear people at National had come from Fairchild, and I think that was the biggest, really the biggest overlap we had. One other area that had been a problem, and probably will be a problem for a while to come, the mask-making areas. It's a small group in each company but very important, and it turns out that both in National and Fairchild, we have long-term employees, many of them twenty-five years at Fairchild, maybe twenty years at National. You only need one mask-making facility, you don't need two, and you don't need double the number when you combine a company like this. So we're having some problems in how to handle those areas.

Lowood: So there are a variety, one can see there are a variety of different ways in which things overlap, both personnel and projects, I guess you would say. The two thirty-two bit microprocessors, that's a case where . . .

Deal: In that case they sold one, but they wouldn't do that in the Linear case, they wouldn't do that in the mask-making case. You would just have to work out details of where people could be placed in other positions.

Lowood: Is there anything else, I wanted to ask you now about some things specifically relating to your own career in the last twenty minutes or half an hour that we have. Were there any things about the company that you think we should mention, or reflections on changes over the years, or issues that have been important over the years?

Deal: No. I can say one thing. We talked about university interactions and so on. It was obvious, when we went to National, that National did not have much of a university program, they did not recruit at Stanford, they did not recruit at MIT, they had a very bad reputation at many of the universities, sort of following the reputation that the Fairchild people had of National. To the credit of National, they have set up programs in which they have incorporated many of our programs that we had at Fairchild into National. An example of that is that Fairchild was a member of CIS and the Solid State Affiliates at Stanford, they were a member of the affiliates at MIT, at Berkeley, Cornell, and National was only member of the Cornell Affiliates, because Charlie Sporck was a graduate of Cornell. In the past couple months, after quite a bit of lobbying with National management, especially Charlie Sporck, they have agreed to support all of the programs that Fairchild was supporting, all of these affiliates. Now we have to come back in a year and show what we've gotten out of that, but I think we will be successful in continuing those. They also want to establish some sort of a yearly seminar, which would be called the Fairchild Seminar, similar to what we had here. They've increased the recruiting on the graduate level considerably, again, just because they're able to do that now with the Fairchild philosophy entering in through the many Fairchild people that are there. So this is one of the interesting things that's come out of this sale, is that National will definitely be affected, and as far as we're concerned, in a positive direction.

Lowood: So there's a sense in which, in addition to the name, I suppose, Fairchild is living on, in a sense, as part of National.

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: As these programs continue.

Deal: As these programs continue, right.

Lowood: I wanted, then, to just ask you about a few things where you can just talk about your own involvement in some projects. We've talked about a lot of the university/industry relations in which you've been involved. I wonder if you could talk specifically about the involvement you've had in the Center for Integrated Systems at Stanford, and from what you know, how that came about and how that's developed.

Deal: Well, the CIS, of course, was developed later, it was about 1982 or something that Fairchild joined. It really didn't change our interaction with Stanford because we were already heavily involved and we sort of just fit right into that. The programs regarding process modelling and so on continued, and many of the people that are involved in the process modelling programs are also in CIS.

Lowood: Fairchild's one of the companies that pays Stanford, what is it, three quarters of a million a year?

Deal: $750,000. Yes. And another interesting thing is that Schlumberger had also gotten involved, through Fairchild, and at the time of the sale of Fairchild to National, both companies expressed an interest in continuing in CIS, and last month the governing board of CIS accepted membership from both Schlumberger and National, which means, of course, that Stanford/CIS did not get an additional $750,000, but they were also smart enough to realize that $120,000 a year from two companies is better than from one or from none.

Lowood: Oh, that's right, the $750, 000 is an initial.

Deal: Initial, and then there's $120,000 a year, which is more than double any other company's affiliates. MIT is $45,000.

Lowood: Schlumberger's interest stems from the continuing computer science program?

Deal: Computer science and AI, right.

Lowood: So it's a little different from what National, it's a little different slant.

Deal: That's exactly right.

Lowood: Has Fairchild sent a Fellow, a Resident Fellow?

Deal: We've sent two. One was from AI, and the second one was from my department, who then went into AI, and he's now there, rather than at National.

Lowood: Do you remember the names of the two?

Deal: Well, the first one was Schiffner, and the second one was Tony Crossley, . The first one was AI.

Lowood: And Crossley was the one who came from . . .?

Deal: He came from my department, was a process person, but got involved in, interested in AI while at Stanford, and then when he came back, he went to Schlumberger rather than back to Fairchild.

Lowood: I'm just curious what sort of thing he did that involved a crossover from processes?

Deal: Well, he got involved in AI methods of process control. Expert systems type of things, they call them. Developing expert systems for controlling and monitoring processes.

[END OF SIDE A, TAPE 2/BEGINNING OF SIDE B, TAPE 2]

Lowood: Now you mentioned you've been a consulting professor since the beginning of the SUPREM project, at Stanford.

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: What does a consulting professorship involve?

Deal: Well, it varies, depending on the individual. In this case, it was primarily continuing to be involved in the SUPREM program and visit Stanford periodically, give seminars--I give a couple seminars there a year. I serve on some thesis committees for graduate students. We have students here visiting on a formal or informal arrangement. What is says, really, consulting, a consulting professor.

Lowood: When you say you give seminars, did you mean quarter-long graduate seminars?

Deal: No, just individual seminars. I did not teach any course. They have other ways of having people teach there. They would be more, I don't know what they're called at Stanford. There's also adjunct professors that actually work full-time there. A consulting professor does not receive any pay, salary.

Lowood: Has Fairchild, I'm just curious, ever taken post-docs from Stanford, using fellowship money of one sort of another?

Deal: Schlumberger has had Fairchild Fellows, in which they're supporting graduate students. Fairchild has, in the past, and even up until the sale, was supporting individual students. We don't have a post-doc program, such as, I think, IBM is one of the few, maybe, that do that.

Lowood: Xerox, I think, does.

Deal: Xerox does?

Lowood: Yes. How did that work out with the graduate students? Would they apply for, how would they find out about the fellowships?

Deal: Well, the official Schlumberger or Fairchild Fellowships are ones that they apply through the school. These are offered through the school. Even today there are Fairchild Fellowships that are still available through the Fairchild Foundation at schools like Lehigh, and the Fairchild Foundation, by the way, has built a number of buildings. One at Lehigh, one at MIT. There's a Fairchild building at Stanford, which of course is medical and not electronics. The electronics people at Stanford will never forgive themselves, because they missed out. They did not apply for the funding. The medical people did and got the funds.

Lowood: This was a foundation that was set up . . .

Deal: By the estate of Sherman Fairchild, who left no descendants. I should also point out that that same funding set up a scholarship fund for children of Fairchild employees, and initially--I don't think we talked about this, did we?

Lowood: No.

Deal: Initially, it paid for all tuition and board and room for ten students each year. That means at any given time, there were forty students that were being supported. But it started when tuition was something like $2000 a year, and I had two sons who both got scholarships based on strictly on ability, not on need. And when the second son was finished, the expenses were running over $10,000 a year, and the foundation funding for this purpose was running out of money, and so they cut it down, then, after that to $2000 a year and five students a year.

Lowood: These weren't restricted to Stanford, or were they?

Deal: No, no. This was strictly Fairchild, anywhere. It was for undergraduate. And just as an added footnote to that one, my two sons both went on to get Ph.D.s, one at Stanford, one at UCLA, and both are in the same business that I am in. They are both doing semiconductor processing.

Lowood: Did you encourage them, or . . . ?

Deal: No.

Lowood: Neutral.

Deal: Neutral, and one son is at Stanford as a research associate in the electrical engineering/CIS.

Lowood: OK, I knew that.

Deal: The other son is at Honeywell. And the other interesting thing is that very few, if you look at the fields that these people go into, very few do go into science. Most of them go into something else.

Lowood: So it's a four-year thing that's given to them before they really know what field they'll end up in.

Deal: Well, it's not restricted to science, anyway, so the ones that win the scholarships could be in anything, but there turned out to be very few in science. Which is too bad, you know, because here's a company like Fairchild, and the money coming from Sherman Fairchild, who was in a scientific area, certainly. I guess it has something to do with the lack of participation in the U.S., Americans, U.S.-born people in the electronics business today.

Lowood: Is that something that's changed dramatically over the last twenty years.

Deal: Oh, tremendously. You can see it both in the attendance in the universities and also in the employment.

Lowood: Is is a neutral phenomenon, or in what ways is it negative or positive?

Deal: You can't say that it's negative, I guess, because this country is supposed to be based on the assimilation of all nationalities, so maybe this is just the phase we're in now, where we're getting many more people, say, from Asian countries than from European countries. Although we've seen the difference, in whether the people that are employed were born in this country or not born in this country, and Fairchild does not require citizenship, whereas some of the other companies, I suppose, Lockheed and some do.

Lowood: From your point of view, has there been any effect on the way work is done, or have any adjustments had to be made, as a supervisor.

Deal: The one place that I can see a marked effect is in the communications and publications, I really see that.

Lowood: It's more difficult?

Deal: It's more difficult, yes.

Lowood: Has there been a special program to address that, at all?

Deal: I don't think so, and that's a good point. Why hasn't there been? I don't know. There certainly has not been in the graduate schools, where the people come from. It's important, because communication is very important. In a lot of areas, I guess, it's not as important as others.

Lowood: I guess one of the problems is it's such a long reach, I know, and if you're in chemistry, for example, where the problem was learning German, that's not the same as going all the way over to Japanese or Chinese.

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: There was one thing I wanted to ask you about that we talked about when I was over at National a couple weeks ago. You mentioned that you had a role in coordinating Fairchild grants to universities.

Deal: Yes, and we mentioned those grants.

Lowood: Those are the grants we've talked about already, OK.

Deal: And the same thing that we've transferred over to National.

Lowood: This is the penultimate question and is about your activities in The Electrochemical Society over the years. Can you start out by telling how that started and how that's grown, your involvement, leading up, I guess, to this year as president of the Society.

Deal: Interesting thing is that I just got a letter congratulating me, as far as being president of The Electrochemical Society, from my first boss at Kaiser in Spokane, Washington. He's now retired, but he was an active member then, and encouraged me to join the Society when I was in Spokane. I joined in 1955. There was not a local section in Spokane, there weren't enough people, but there was in San Francisco, when I came here, and so I started attending the local section meetings of The Electrochemical Society in 1960, and I've done so ever since, and I gradually, then, started attending the national meetings--there are two a year--and got active, and I have made that my main society. A lot of people are involved in IEEE, for instance, or some other metallurgical societies, but for the type of work that I've been involved in, which was semiconductor processing, The Electrochemical Society has become a leading society for that particular discipline. The ECS is fairly small; it's only got about 6000 paid members. Fifty percent of the people that attend the meetings are non-members, which we're trying to do something about, but have not been too successful so far. But for that membership, it's much more effective than, say, the hundred or two hundred thousand member IEEE or some of the other larger societies. And its the one society that, as I have I said, I picked to be active in, and I have been over the years. The IEEE is certainly the leading device and electronics society. There's nothing else that could even compare with it. The IEEE is not really one society, it's a series of societies within the main group.

Lowood: In the Valley, after the IEEE, would The Electrochemical Society be one of the more active ones in this region?

Deal: I guess, although the American Chemical Society is quite active here. The AIME is active here. Just a lot of the people will attend even more than one society.

Lowood: I guess I've already asked you what kinds of communication occur in a professional society like that, and as you mentioned, depending on your level of experience, it varies quite a bit. But you've presented most of your research to meetings of The Electrochemical Society, I guess.

Deal: Well, fifty percent, estimated, of my papers have been presented in The Electrochemical Society meetings and the publication.

Lowood: And the other fifty percent have . . .

Deal: They varied all over the place. Other societies, other society journals, and so on. In my role as coordinating some of the university activities, I've given a lot of presentations in the universities throughout the United States; well, in other countries, too. That's another outlet for distributing information. A lot of professors, of course, are involved in these societies, and you're also interested in students, and we've been very successful, I've been very successful, in interviewing, hiring students that I have met the first time at an ECS meeting.

Lowood: I guess this year, a significant percentage, of your time, will probably be involved in Electrochemical Society business?.

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: Is that sort of thing actively encouraged by companies?

Deal: Oh, yes. Very good publicity, both from the standpoint of recruiting as well as just general publicity. And National is very good in that respect. They depend a lot on public relations. More so, I would say, than Fairchild. Fairchild didn't have to have the public relations because of the technology reputation they already had. Whereas a company like National, that does not have the one avenue, through the technical publications and activities, they have to do it another way, and so they do it through various methods of press releases and so on.

Lowood: You specifically have been representing the company, in a sense, as president of The Electrochemical Society.

Deal: That's right. Now they aren't unhappy about that.

Lowood: Are there other activities that you think you should be mentioned, in terms of your own work, and I guess, life in Santa Clara County? Are there community activities and things, you think, in terms of rounding out the oral history, should be mentioned?

Deal: No. Because of my two sons, I've been active in earlier years in the Scouts, and so on. I was active in the Scouts myself. And of course the various school organizations, church organizations, and so on. But I think people like myself tend to get involved in the technical aspect and are limited more there and don't have the time to get in some of the more community organizations. I certainly would not have the time to get involved in political things, city councils and so on, school boards.

Lowood: Have there been any committees, I don't know, on issues, some of the academies of sciences, academies of engineering or political bodies, form these ad hoc committees of scientists to investigate things like auto emissions or one can mention, breeder reactors or all kinds of things. Have there been any committees like that that you've been involved in, as a professional?

Deal: Typically not. The Electrochemical Society, over the years, has chosen to stay out of some of the more public issues, controversial issues. We have, however, just established a committee on external affairs, which will get more involved in government-related activities. We think we're going to have to in the future, for the benefit of the Society and the members. But I certainly have not gotten involved in some of those things.

Lowood: On another level, just about the community, I suppose I should ask for your impressions about how the community has changed and how the life-style has changed over the last thirty years or so that you've been living here. Could you talk about some of the differences between 1958 and 1988, as far as being a resident?

Deal: Interestingly enough, the biggest concern we had was more in the sixties, and especially because our kids were in school, then, in Palo Alto, and there was a lot of unrest in Palo Alto during that time, especially at Cubberley High School, where our two boys and our daughter attended. But the positive side of that is that the Palo Alto schools were set up in what they called lanes, in which, depending on the abilities and capabilities, your children would be in one group as opposed to another. Of course, some people opposed that, but from our standpoint, it was very good, because they essentially worked, went to school with people who had the same interests and capabilities, and they did not get involved with a lot of these that were involved in some of the disruptions and so on. That sort of phased out, though, in the seventies, and we haven't had nearly as much of that. When my daughter, who is the youngest, went to school, there wasn't any of that going on.

Lowood: Would the traffic and those kinds of things?

Deal: Well, that was another story. I've always felt fortunate because we've lived in Palo Alto and have lived reasonably close to the laboratory here. However, since I've started to drive down to Santa Clara, since you're going against traffic, it's actually in some ways an easier drive. I go down Bayshore in the morning, and I don't have nearly the stoplights to have to worry about as just coming across Palo Alto, down Arastradero, Charleston/Arastradero, there are a tremendous number of stoplights.

Lowood: So you're saying the predominant traffic is from the south to the north in the morning?

Deal: Yes, it's going into San Francisco.

Lowood: Oh, that's interesting.

Deal: Until you get down towards, past Lawrence Expressway. But I leave fairly early, about seven o'clock, and I have not stopped and I go fifty-five an hour right straight through, once I get on 101, and turn right on Lawrence Expressway and you're almost at National at that point.

Lowood: When you came in fifty-eight, though, there were still, maybe not in Palo Alto, but certainly south of here there were still the fruit orchards?

Deal: And there were two-lane roads and stop signs. When we think back about it, and I was working in Mountain View, it was just as big a hassle to drive to Mountain View on the two-lane roads and the four-way stops as it is today. That's very interesting. Bayshore was just being completed at that point, and I went down Alma. You notice traffic more, but not in proportion to what probably a lot of people have to put up with. I guess I've been fortunate living in the north end of Santa Clara County rather than the south end.

Lowood: OK. I think--just let me check here, if there was any other. . . I guess the only other thing I see here that we haven't actually covered is, and this is maybe a unique opportunity to ask you this sort of a question, looking forward to the future, and I guess you're now talking mostly about National and the kind of research things that are happening, are there any developments that you see occurring now that I would ask you about in ten years, maybe, if I were interviewing you again? Are there particular areas that are seen as being particularly promising within National and worth betting on?

Deal: Well, that's hard to say, if there are areas within National. I think National will go into areas that become promising, in general. But one of the things that we have just been talking about, and continues to come up, are some of the other semiconductor materials. Not compound semiconductors, like gallium arsenide and so on, but more organic materials. I may have touched briefly on this earlier in this discussion, having to do with what we call molecular electronics, and organic/biological materials closer to, well actually, the brain, that are becoming more and more apparent that something will probably happen in those areas, and it would tend to shift the emphasis from solid state to organic/bio-type companies.

Lowood: I'll ask a naive question. Is this the same sort of general area when one reads about neural networks and that sort of thing?

Deal: It's sort of related, yes. It's sort of related.

Lowood: But you're more interested in what materials will make that happen.

Deal: Right. Materials themselves, and what might replace silicon for instance. A few years ago, a big story was, of course, bubble memories, which was garnet materials, and it's sort of getting into that area. But now we're talking about getting away from crystalline solids completely. Another thing that came along a few years ago was amorphous materials, the whole thing with Ovshinsky. He was a big operator and was going to add all sorts of new developments. He's still getting funding from various sources. This is really a generation past even amorphous materials--glasses, and this sort of thing, and it's organic/biological.

Lowood: Where in nature does one find?

Deal: Proteins, or something like that, you know. Someone was telling me that they're getting materials, now, out of flowers. Some sort of organic things that you might be able to have just an infinite number of units in cells. So this is certainly one area. The other area that people still look at are things called quantum devices, in which you're using a different type of physics to get device action. These are in more conventional materials. They might be monolayers of gallium arsenide, and silicon or gallium arsenide, and gallium aluminum arsenide, or things like that. Using new techniques like molecular beam epitaxy to generate these layered materials or types of device characteristics.

Lowood: This is the kind of work that someone like Mac Beasley does at Stanford?

Deal: Maybe. University of Illinois is doing quite a bit of this, and other people. But what we're talking about here is even a jump past that. Superconductors, again, is still a material, is a crystal, and a solid material. Now that will probably come first; then you have these things on beyond. So that's the best guess that people have today as to what we'll be talking about in twenty-five years.

Lowood: And there is some effort?

Deal: And there is effort in some of the companies and universities along these lines, right, right now.

Lowood: OK. Well that is pretty much the end, as far as I'm concerned, unless you think there are some concluding remarks you wanted to make, or something we forgot, or anything like that. This is your opportunity.

Deal: I can't think so. You can look back over a period of time and see all the things that have happened and then try and predict what's going to happen in the future, and it's very difficult. It's just amazing what has happened in this area and how it's affected the world and everyone's living.

[END OF INTERVIEW]