Bassett:When Henry Lowood spoke to you, a number of the Fairchild groups were in a state of transistion. Could you talk about what happened to them since that time?
Deal: This would have been in the 1988 time period. Keep in mind that Schlumberger sold Fairchild to National in late 1987. Before that happened, probably in early 1987, the R&D library, which was one of the leading semiconductor technical libraries in the area, was spun off from Fairchild under the direction of Tony Ley. He got Sandra Crabtree, a former Schlumberger employee that had been running the Fairchild library, to go with him and set up a separate company. It was called Lucid and was established in Santa Clara. That library continued for about five years, servicing some of the smaller companies in the area, including Advantage where I was later. I don't think Lucid is running at this point. So that was one organization that was spun off from R&D and was not sold to National. National had a good library at the time and that was the reason.
Another area that left Fairchild eventually was the cHRGe-coupled device area (CCD). That organization was originally headed by Gil Amelio who arrived from Bell Laboratories in 1971. In about 1977, it was quite successful, but Fairchild wanted it to have a better production atmosphere so it was moved over into the MOS division of Fairchild and Gil Amelio was made head of that division. In 1979 Gil Amelio left to go to Rockwell and Will Steffe, who had been at Fairchild R&D for some time in cHRGe of device development, took over the CCD area. Later after National purchased Fairchild, the CCD area was left in Schlumberger under the general department called Fairchild Weston Systems, that included some of the other government supported facilities on the east coast of Fairchild. It turned out that in 1988 that whole Fairchild Weston group, was bought by Loral and stayed active since then, although I just heard that in early 1996, Loral was purchased by Lockheed Martin. Some of the original Fairchild people are still in that group.
Still another area of interest is the Fairchild Test Systems Group, which again was left with Schlumberger upon the National purchase of Fairchild. Test Systems group became very successful, and as I recall, for several years was the leading manufacturer of integrated circuit testers. It may not be number one now, but it certainly has been successful and as I recall, it is still an active division of Schlumberger. I guess those are the three main ones we want to talk about, we had already talked about the Clipper being sold to Integraph from Fairchild R&D at the time of the National purchase of Fairchild and also Artificial Intelligence was kept as a part of Schlumberger. I don't know what the status of those two groups is today.
Bassett:Could you talk about what happened to the R&D building after National bought Fairchild?
Deal: When National bought Fairchild they made known their intent to sell the old R&D building at the Stanford Industrial Park. They did, they sold it to some developers about a year or so after the purchase of Fairchild and the building stood empty for quite a while and finally some new developers purchased the building or perhaps it was the ones that had purchased it in the first place, and tore down the building. In its place they built three very modern new office type buldings that could be used for research except they could not be used for chemical processing, since that had been a problem in that area anyway. A few years ago I attended the dedication of the new building in which they also dedicated a nice plaque to Fairchild and Fairchild R&D and had some previous Fairchild people, including Gordon Moore, there to give a talk about the history of that building. As far as I know those three buildings are housing various types of companies.
Bassett:At the time of your last interview you were fairly optimistic that National was intending to carry on some of the Fairchild traditions and that Fairchild would live on in National. Could you give us an update on what happened in that regard?
Deal: It is difficult to know what to expect from from National, especially since Gil Amelio, who it turns out left Rockwell and came to National about three years ago as president, has now left. We expected that things for R&D in particular would even improve from what National had said they were going to do earlier. Unfortunately Gil Amelio, just this year, has left, to take over Apple as president and chief executive and chairman of the board there. I have talked to some National/Fairchild people since then and they are sort of up in the air as to what they might expect. I think I mentioned in an earlier interview that the Fairchild name was going to be continued there as they called the National research group the Fairchild research group and they had the Fairchild research building. I believe now that has been discontinued and just recently they had announced that a new R&D would be set up there, but without Amelio there I don't know what to expect, it is very difficult to know. I should also mention that the only Fairchild facility kept by National was the South Portland, Maine facility, which was the oldest, but by coincidence was the facility that was started by Charlie Sporck when he was at Fairchild, before he got involved in National.
Bassett:So none of the Fairchild facilites in Silicon Valley were kept by National?
Deal: No, none in Silicon Valley, the one in Puyallup, Washington was sold.
Bassett:Shiprock, New Mexico?
Deal:Shiprock had been sold earlier, before National, so it wasn't a factor. There were Fairchild facilities in Hong Kong and the Far East for assembly and I don't know what has happened there.
Bassett:You had mentioned in the previous interview that National had kept on some of Fairchild's memberships in university affiliations.
Deal:National had essentially agreed to keep all the affilate memberships going, including CIS at Stanford, SRC (Semiconductor Research Corporation), and various other things. Some of that is still up in the air.
Bassett:Could you talk a little bit about your affiliation with Advantage and how that got started?
Deal: As I had indicated earlier I had gone to National, over to their building in January 1988, shortly after the purchase of Fairchild. For the next year there were about twenty five of us from the R&D lab that were assigned to the new building, called Building E or the Fairchild Research Building.
Bassett:Where was that building?
Deal: That was in Santa Clara, in the main National complex, which runs down the border between Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. It was soon apparent that it was not really clear what the Fairchild people would be doing. We were trying to help the various product lines that were in the Bay Area and other places by technologies that were represented by the different people. I got involved in a number of things such as the patent committee, a company-wide seminar, (We were going to establish a National seminar type thing like we had at Fairchild.) and several other things. But it wasn't really clear what I and several other people were going to be involved in.
[Break in Tape]
In January of 1989 I was in the National cafeteria and happened to run into a man by the name of Mike McNeilly, who I had known many years earlier, he had founded Applied Materials in the early 1970s as I recall. He was there to see someone else about what I don't know. We started talking about a new company he had started called Advantage Production Technology. It had just been moved to the Bay Area, in fact just down the street from National on Kifer Road. They had come from Albuquerque, New Mexico, but they had not been successful there. They had reincorporated, he was senior vice president and a fellow by the name of Franc DeWeeger, who had had a number of years at Signetics, ASM, and a couple of other companies was president. The main product they were going to build was a vapor phase wafer cleaner. It turns out that most wafer-cleaning processes in the semiconductor business for the past thirty years or so have involved cleaning solutions where you immerse the wafers in a tank of a particular chemical. One of the processes we use is called the RCA Clean developed by Werner Kern. This involves chemicals such as ammonium peroxide and hydrochloric acid peroxide. The idea was that by going to a gas type of process you could save a lot of money and process time and be more effective than liquid cleans; this was our talking point. And also be much more suitable for environmental applications, using so much less chemicals. So to make a long story short, I joined them the next month in February 1989, as vice president of development there. At the time I joined there were about ten people and it grew to about fifty-five or sixty over the next three years. It was a good time to start a company like this making this kind of a process, but it was also a bad time. The good time was that the industry was starting to look at vapor phase type processing, because of some of these considerations I was talking about, environmental and so on. It was a bad time because the business was not good. We had financial support from Sierra Ventures, which was a company in Menlo Park, California. We were going along fairly well, we got a contract from Sematech to build an advanced system beyond the one we were doing at that point, called the Edge 2000. We had pretty good luck in competing with FSI in Minneapolis, which was the main company providing this vapor phase type of equipment using HF as the chemical for etching oxides and cleaning the surfaces. Unfortunately business in the semiconductor industry didn't pick up fast enough and Advantage finally had to close down. Some of the technology and assets were sold to Genus, another equipment company, but to my knowledge nothing has been done with that process since. As it turns out, FSI, our major competitor, was a company I was involved with for a short time when I was at National for the year. They had asked me to be on their Technical Advisory Board, but I thought it wasn't proper for a potential customer of the company to be on an advisory board. They were the main ones that were concerned about Advantage, but they were the main beneficiaries of our demise.
Bassett:How did you go about getting customers at Advantage and what sort of success did you have in selling these systems?
Deal: We did a lot of visiting the companies. We had some people, including the marketing manager, Joe Nava, who had a lot of contacts. He had been working with a wafer stepper company prior to that. I had a lot of technical contacts, so I accompanied Joe and sometimes Mike McNeilly on trips to customers. Mike McNeilly also knew a lot of people in the industry. We gave technical papers, I gave a paper in October 1989, which coincidentally was when we had the earthquake in California that week, this was at the Electrochemical Society in Florida. We got a lot of good press in some of the trade journals, because different ones of us knew people in those journals, like Solid State Technology, Semiconductor International, and so on. We were going pretty well and we had a good relationship with a lot of the major companies like TI, Motorola, AT&T and so on. In fact TI was one of our early customers and did a lot of evaluations of our systems.
Bassett:Would most of the companies have bought one system to evaluate?
Deal: That's right. We didn't sell many multiple systems to any company. We weren't in that position yet. AMD was also an early customer and they were the first ones to put it into production. It was found that one particular process, a pre-silicide clean, was suitably handled by the vapor phase HF, in fact it was very difficult to produce those types of devices without it. So they bought two machines and used them, I believe it was in Albuquerque, New Mexico in their production. And they still probably are using vapor phase HF today, although they probably aren't using Advantage, they are probably using FSI equipment.
Bassett:You had talked about the RCA Clean as the entrenched cleaning method, would you say the Advantage method was significantly better, or better, but not enough to encourage people to take away their RCA Clean systems and buy an Advantage system.
Deal: We had a list of advantages of vapor phase cleaning over liquid phase, which was the RCA process. These included cost of chemicals, disposal of chemicals, less impurities, much improved environmental effects, lower cost, simpler processing and the like. Probably the biggest talking point we had, which was only then starting, and even now, is just starting to be implemented, is what is called integrated processing or cluster type processing. [It involves combining a series of critical steps used in the fabrication of devices in a system containing individual process modules. The wafers can be treated in one module and transferred to other modules in an inert gas or vacuum. The best example is that of preparing an MOS gate structure, which involves cleaning the silicon surface, next growing the gate oxide, and finally depositing a poly-Si gate. By means of a cluster system, these three critical steps can be carried out sequentially, without exposing the sensitive surfaces to the ambient. Such a concept is much easier to effect in a gas or vapor ambient than in a liquid, immerson- type cleaning solutions.]
Bassett:It sounds like the problem with Advantage was mostly one of timing rather than technology.
Deal: Certainly it was not the technology, it was the timing. There were certain things in the business end of the company that I think could have been improved. I am not making a pun here, but we had a lot of advantages. In this type of technology we also were associated with Sumitomo Metals in Japan; they were our agent there. They were very much in support of us. I made several trips to Japan to give technical presentations there and the Japanese were very interested in vapor phase cleaning. In fact today the FSI Company has an affiliate in Japan and they are very successful in selling this equipment there.
Bassett:Could you talk about the connections Advantage had with Stanford and the earlier National work?
Deal: It even goes back to the Fairchild days when we were involved with various Stanford people working on the SUPREM program. Later on, in about the past four or five years at Fairchild we had gotten involved with Professor Bob Helms in working on cleaning techniques, cleaning mechanisms of silicon wafers. We supported a student whom I later hired at Advantage. One of the fellows I was working with there, Dah-Bin Kao, was also involved with me at National, and then went over to Advantage. In fact there were two or three other people that I hired that had worked for me at Fairchild. At any rate, the work we were doing with Bob Helms continued, in that we supported Bob Helms in a program when we were at Advantage. We were doing it to some extent at National, but not too much in that year. At Advantage we continued and he was on our Technical Advisory Board and we carried out various tests at Stanford that we didn't have the capability for at a small company like Advantage.
Bassett:Would that have been at CIS [the Center for Integrated Systems]?
Deal: Most of the processing was done through CIS, yes.
Bassett:Is there anything else you want to say about Advantage?
Deal: No, I don't think so, I think Advantage was a very good learning experience, and certainly gave me more knowledge of the wafer cleaning field which I have used since in consulting.
Bassett:You might say a few words about vapor phase cleaning now. Is it becoming more prominent or is liquid clean still the dominant method used in the industry now?
Deal: I should first say that vapor phase cleaning hasn't gone as fast as we had promised or hoped at Advantage. However it is still increasing in its popularity as the wafer sizes get larger and the dimensions get smaller, it appears that more and more, certain applications in the wafer fabrication process will have to use vapor processing. Of course, just like a lot of other things in semiconductor technology, when a new technology comes along, the people who are involved in the old one figure out ways to improve the old one. This has certainly happened in the wafer wet cleaning area. However some of these things like the environmental problems, use of DI water, which is tremendous in the wet processing, I don't think can be overcome. I think the future still means that we are going to go to vapor phase processing.
Bassett:Are the companies still pretty well divided between wet cleaning and vapor phase cleaning or do some offer systems that do both?
Deal: Well, FSI, which I am associated with now, has both spray cleaning processes, which uses liquid, sort of in between the regular immersion and the vapor. Another company called Submicron has both wet processing and vapor processing, in fact two of the guys that helped get that started were with FSI. There are not too many other companies. There is one called Semitool in Montana that has both; those companies started in the liquid and are switching over. A company like FSI started with the spray, which is a semiliquid, and got involved in the vapor. I guess there are no companies still which started stricly in the vapor and stayed in vapor.
Bassett:Could you talk about your current affiliation with Stanford and how that has changed over time.
Deal: As I indicated, Advantage went out of business in about January 1992. They were in business three years in the Bay Area. At that time I had to decide whether I wanted to retire or try to get another position somewhere else in the industry. I talked about that with Bob Helms and he suggested that I come up to Stanford and he would provide me with an office up here. Which he has done. He could do that because I was a consulting professor and would continue to be. Since January 1992, I have had an office in the McCullough Building and work with Bob Helms's group on a part-time basis. I consult with students that are working in areas similiar to what my background has been, cleaning, oxidation, surface chemistry and the like. Some of our work here is done in the CIS Building, so some of the same processes that we were evaluating, some of the same techniques, we are still concerned with here. Other things that I am involved in, in addition to Stanford, is that I now do consult, I am member of the Technical Advisory Board for FSI, in Chaska, Minnesota, near Minneapolis, I have a son working in the same area there. I should also mention that my younger son is at Stanford in the CIS area working with Jim Plummer.
Another company that I am involved with is Balazs Analytical Laboratory, who we worked with at Fairchild. They are an analytical company, generally using wet, chemical methods, rather than SIMS (Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry), or TXRF (Total Reflection X-Ray Fluorescence). This company is getting more involved in wafer analysis for contaminants, so I can provide information there. I am on their board of directors.
Bassett:Checking for sodium levels and things like that?
Deal: All sorts of impurities, sodium, all the heavy metals. Iron, copper, chromium, are all common metals that are found on the wafer surfaces. This is one of the things that companies like Advantage and FSI have been involved in, is to try to remove those metals during the processing. Balazs then provides the service of analyzing for those impurities on the wafer surface. They are also one of the first companies to monitor and control DI water systems. They are probably one of the best known in that still. They also get involved in analyzing impurities that are used in chemicals that are used in the semiconductor industry. One other area that I have been involved in quite a bit is to give advice--consulting--to patent law firms that are involved with the semiconductor component companies in patent disputes or litigations. A lot of these litigations go back even into the 1960s. There are some of us around still who were involved in processing and various effects from that time. Fortunately I have quite a significant literature file that I can use for these litigations and this is very important to the patent attorneys. There are many many patent lawyers in the Bay Area as well as the rest of the world it seems.
Bassett:Is there anything else you would like to add?
Deal: The only other question might be as to where do we stand in 1996 as compared to when I left Fairchild in 1987, got into National, and so on. The interesting thing is that most of the developments in processing wafers seems to be in the direction of getting smaller as far as the dimensions of the devices and integrated circuits and larger as far as the wafers. But as you look back over the last thirty years not that much has really changed in how we fabricate integrated circuits. We start with silicon and use an oxide to mask against diffusing impurities to passivate the junctions formed from these impurities. We use lithography and these are still optical lithography steps to define the patterns on the wafers. We have changed pretty much from aluminum to polycrystalline silicon or even metal silicides to form the interconnect steps. When you look at it, however, not really much has changed. We just get smaller and smaller, with more and more components. I was reading about billion component devices now that are being fabricated. That is quite a long way we have gone since the initial days when we had one device per chip.
Bassett:Do you see any competitors to the MOS transistor on the immediate horizon?
Deal: I don't, immediately. I haven't heard of too much. We had things in the past like bubble memories and so on, and we talked about molecular type material devices where you used various organics and try to duplicate human body functions even, like the brain. I am not hearing as much of that these days as I did in the past. I think the work is still going on, probably in universities. We are now going below the original limit of one micrometer for optical lithography. We are now down to three tenths, and we are predicting we will go down to a tenth of a micron. The SIA, Semiconductor Industry Association, roadmap is giving predictions as to what will happen in the next ten years, and they predict we will go down into that tenth micron dimension, by say the year 2002 or something. They may be overoptimistic as far as the contamination levels. On the other hand, we may not have to get as low contamination levels as some people predicted because with methods of making devices we are able to get around some of that. So at this point, it is hard to say what may happen in the future. I should point out, when we talk about going below the predicted limits, we at one time thought we wouldn't get below a thousand angstroms for gate oxide, and now we are talking about fifty angstroms and maybe by making some modifications to that gate oxide we would even go below fifty angstroms. I at one time predicted we would be using silicon dioxide until I retired and that certainly has been the case, although that may change in the future.