Lowood: The first questions I wanted to ask you have to do with your upbringing in the Midwest. Can you tell me something about your family's background? Were your parents from the Midwest, for example?

Deal: Both my parents were born in Nebraska. My father came from Pennsylvania German origin, and my grandparents came from Somerset County, Pennsylvania. My mother's family was of Dutch and Cornish extraction. They lived under very modest circumstances, that is, both my grandparents, my mother's family and my father's family. But every one of the eight children on each side went to college, and several went on to get advanced degrees. My father was the oldest and so he sort of led the way on his side, and from Davenport, Nebraska, where the family lived, he went to Nebraska Wesleyan. When he graduated, both from the Academy and then from the University itself, he went into the Navy, in World War I, and then came back, and after a year, I believe, of teaching in a small school in central Nebraska, joined Nebraska Wesleyan on the staff and was there for forty years. He started, actually, teaching in manual training, and then went into education, then to psychology, and was later dean of the college for a number of years. My grandfather, his father, was a rural mail carrier, and probably didn't have any more than a sixth grade education. But as I said, all of his family went to college. Most of them, as I recall, graduated college, and two of them, my dad and a brother of his, both got Ph.D.s, and two others got masters' degrees. And for the most part, they all went into teaching.

Lowood: Teaching at the university level, or in high schools?

Deal: Three at the university level and one at high school.

Lowood: Were there any that were involved in any research fields?

Deal: No, they were all teachers, and primarily in the non-physical science area, except for, I guess I've left out my uncle, my dad's brother, who was a professor of biology in New York, so that's the closest they came to physical sciences.

Lowood: Now, that was your father's family.

Deal: That was my father's family.

Lowood: And on your mother's side?

Deal: On my mother's side, my grandfather was a agent for the Burlington Railroad in western Nebraska, and all of those children--most of them were girls, it turned out--went to college, and they married people with various backgrounds. None of them, I believe, were in the scientific area at all. Some were in teaching.

Lowood: Were there any, among the various uncles and aunts and all, were there family members who were interested in science, or in any way had a connection with the scientific professions or medicine?

Deal: Just my one uncle who was a professor of biology.

Lowood: You were born in 1927, then, and your family was rooted in the area, clearly. Did you have any interests in science or technology as a child?

Deal: Not really. The interesting thing is that the way that I got into chemistry was that in the tenth grade, as I recall, we had a course which was to describe various vocations and get people interested in what they might want to do. Everyone had to pick a particular field and then interview someone in that field, and I chose chemistry. I don't recall why, at this point. After that, I decided I would go into chemistry.

Lowood: Who did you interview, do you remember?

Deal: I believe someone at the University of Nebraska.

Lowood: And that awakened the interest in chemistry right from there or that was just portentous, do you think?

Deal: I just made the decision at that point. The other thing is, that I had a very good high school chemistry teacher. Not only was he good at chemistry and also, but as I recall, he played the piano, and I had formed a duet with another boy in high school, and we sang several places, and this chemistry professor accompanied us on the piano. So it was another area where, I think, he probably helped to direct me in various ways.

Lowood: What was the name of the high school that you attended?

Deal: This was Northeast High School in Lincoln, Nebraska. We lived in the suburb, University Place, which was built around Wesleyan, and there were two other suburbs around two other universities, and in 1941, just before I started high school, those high schools were combined into one, which was called Northeast High. Some time before those towns had been annexed to Lincoln.

Lowood: And Nebraska Wesleyan is, then, in Lincoln?

Deal: It's in Lincoln now, even though it was originally established in University Place, which was a separate town.

Lowood: Nebraska Wesleyan, is it a denominational school?

Deal: Yes. It's backed and was founded by the Methodist church, and there are a number of Wesleyans in the United States. There is one called Wesleyan in Connecticut, I believe, which was the first one, and there's an Iowa Wesleyan, and an Illinois Wesleyan, Ohio Wesleyan, West Virginia Wesleyan. Must be about fifteen or twenty.

Lowood: Was your interest in music at all connected with the religious kind of music traditions in the church there?

Deal: No, I don't think so. I was interested in music. I played the French horn, and in fact helped pay my way through college by playing in the Lincoln Symphony and the Burlington Railroad Band and the Lincoln Municipal Band. And then I also played later in the Ames Municipal Band when I was in graduate school, and in Spokane and in Palo Alto.

Lowood: So that's been an ongoing interest throughout your life?

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: You've already mentioned in your secondary schooling there was the one chemistry teacher that you remember. Were there any other teachers at that time that stand out in your mind as being influences?

Deal: I think the other ones were several of the teachers in English and in social studies and history and so on. They were all very good high school teachers, and gave us all--me and my brothers and sister--very good training.

Lowood: Was it a university community?

Deal: Yes. It was called University Place and built around Wesleyan. The high school was in-between these three suburbs, about a mile away from where I lived.

Lowood: But the level of teaching was probably pretty good.

Deal: Also because the University of Nebraska was located in Lincoln as well, and one, two, three other smaller colleges. So Lincoln is a university town, it's also the capitol of Nebraska. So, a very good place for people to raise their children, and still is.

Lowood: You mentioned that you had already decided after the interview to become a chemist. Did you do a lot of scientific experimentation as a high school student, already? Did you have a chemistry set, for example?

Deal: Not at home. I don't think I did that much. I was interested in other things, but didn't get involved much in chemistry outside of school.

Lowood: But you knew it was something that you would do anyway?

Deal: I had decided I wanted to do it and that's what I did.

Lowood: What about things like radio or hobbies like that? Did they attract you?

Deal: No, it was not involved in anything like that. Our primary interest was scouting. It turns out all of my family was in scouting, and we were all Eagle Scouts, so that was our hobby or whatever you want to call it.

Lowood: Did the Depression have a big effect on life for you?

Deal: It certainly did on the way we lived, because my dad, in the early 1930s, had to take a 50% reduction in salary, and in order to help the families of the faculty make it, the Methodist Church, which was quite active in maintaining the school in those days, helped to provide canned goods and so on for the families to live.

Lowood: Life was very modest.

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: You did attend college beginning in '46, '45, something like that?

Deal: Started in 1945, yes. For one semester. And then I was drafted. However, I was told that if I enlisted, at that point, I could have my choice of service. The war was then over, and they were quite liberal in that respect. So I chose to enlist for eighteen months and selected an army band as a place I wanted to be, and that's what I did. That choice turned out to be quite significant later on, because the people that were drafted at that time, most of them stayed in eleven months. At the start of the Korean War, people with less than a year's service were drafted again, to go to Korea. Those people that had more than a year's service were not drafted. So I had eighteen months, peacetime, and then I got the GI Bill to help support myself from then on. I took, I think, three or four courses, in the Army, under the United States Armed Forces Institute, USAFI it was called. And in addition, got physical education credit. So I was able, then, to graduate in three and a half years.

Lowood: But those courses were not aimed at the technical. . .

Deal: No, they were just electives, but I got a liberal arts degree, so I had to take quite a few courses that were not science, anyway.

Lowood: So then, was your major chemistry?

Deal: Yes. Right.

Lowood: What was the curriculum like at Nebraska Wesleyan?

Deal: Unfortunately, the Chemistry Department, in fact all the physical sciences at Wesleyan, before the war were very good, after the war were very good, but during the time that I was in, the chemistry curriculum was very poor, partly because of the people they were able to attract to teach. As it turned out, whereas my math and all the other supporting courses, and even physics, were very good, the chemistry was not. When I went to graduate school, which was Iowa State, we had to take examinations in four different divisions of chemistry. They were physical, inorganic, analytical, and inorganic. I didn't pass any of them, which turned out to be not so bad, because anyone that didn't pass these courses then had to retake the same courses in a year at Iowa State. So I retook my entire undergraduate curriculum in chemistry in the next year at Iowa State, and I was much better off because of that. I then went on to graduate school.

Lowood: Why was it that the chemistry department was particularly weak?

Deal: Because the two head people that they had gotten during the war were not really qualified.

Lowood: It wasn't that it was particularly hard to get chemists on the faculty at that time, but it had to do with the specific individuals?

Deal: Yes. They got someone, but the two primary people just were not really qualified. And they didn't last very long, but unfortunately, that was just the time that I was there.

Lowood: It was a four year school?

Deal: A four year school.

Lowood: So was the typical student there someone who would go on to graduate school?

Deal: I think Nebraska Wesleyan ranks in the top ten for its size in the United States and has for the past fifty or more years, in the number of people going on to get Ph.D.s. Very high. Again, a lot of these people were either University of Nebraska faculty children or Wesleyan faculty children or that level of person. They have high academic standards.

Lowood: When I saw the school I thought immediately of Bob Noyce--Grinnell, I guess.

Deal: Grinnell is also a Methodist school, as it turns out. Iowa has four Methodist schools, and Nebraska just has one.

Lowood: So there's this real very strong tradition of that kind of graduate education.

Deal: Yes, that's right. There's a fellow that was a manager at Bell Laboratories, I think the last job he had was manager of the Richmond laboratory, who was at Wesleyan at the same time I was, Howard Loar. The dean of Columbia University during the war, Dr. John Dunning, who was quite heavily involved in the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, was a graduate of Wesleyan. It's had a very good reputation in the sciences in providing people who go on and get their advanced degrees in a larger school.

Lowood: And particularly in the sciences?

Deal: Especially in the sciences. In biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics.

Lowood: Were there any professors there that stand out in your mind, maybe in physics or mathematics? You mentioned those were good courses.

Deal: Well, a very famous person in the first part of the century was Dr.J.C. Jensen, who was in physics, and he was just finishing up his career when I was there. Very well known. Another professor of mathematics, Professor Clinton Gass, later went on to DePauw University in Indiana, another Methodist school. He was fairly well known in the field.

Lowood: So with the exception of chemistry, you were satisfied with the kind of preparation that you had.

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: Circa 1950, would you have had a lot of mathematical training? As a graduate student, did you feel comfortable going into some of the advanced courses?

Deal: I minored in mathematics at Iowa State and got top grades there, as far as mathematics. And I had to take no courses over in that particular discipline. As it turns out, two of my brothers and my sister all went into mathematics teaching. Two brothers who have Ph.D.s were heads of departments at schools. One at Colorado State and one at Ball State University in Indiana. And they got their training in mathematics there.

Lowood: I see. Is Ervin R. Deal one of your brothers?

Deal: He is at Fort Collins, Colorado State.

Lowood: And the other brother's name is?

Deal: Duane. He is at Ball State University in Indiana.

Lowood: Since you grew up in a university environment, this may not be as remarkable as it seems to me, but did you know other families where there were so many siblings going into academic careers?

Deal: In a couple of cases, I remember that was the case. In fact, there are some examples in chemistry. The Eyrings, for instance, from Utah. There were three or four brothers who were all fairly well known in chemistry and the physical sciences. I guess it isn't really too common. I was the black sheep, of course, because I didn't go into teaching. The rest of my family were all in teaching. Dad's family as well as my own brothers and sisters.

Lowood: So teaching was higher on the scale than research, is that what you mean?

Deal: Yes. Keep in mind that there was very little industrial research before the World War II, and it was only after World War II when industrial research laboratories started to grow.

Lowood: I see. So because you didn't end up at a university, that would have made you the black sheep.

Deal: I was the black sheep because I didn't end up at a university. I did have a couple of opportunities to teach, when I got out of graduate school. For some reason, I decided to go into industry.

Lowood: Now, you mentioned, with the outbreak of the Korean War, that you did not have to go into the army. Was there any way in which those events did influence your perspective or your career plans?

Deal: No, I don't think so. It really didn't affect us. I was in graduate school at the time, and a couple of the people there were drafted, who had not had any service before, or had had less than a year. But since I was not, it didn't really matter.

Lowood: They were drafted out of graduate school, even though they were students?

Deal: I believe they were allowed to continue and finish, and then they were drafted.

Lowood: And then they would go into appropriate areas.

Deal: Hopefully they went into an area that was appropriate for their advanced education.

Lowood: The reason I ask is because, so many people that have been interviewed look at World War II as being a kind of lesson. The possibilities of big science and all of these things, where in many cases people were introduced to scientific careers through their war experience. You're a little bit later than that generation.

Deal: I'm a little later.

Lowood: The Korean War, then, was quite different. It didn't have the same effect.

Deal: The Korean War did not really make that difference, and as I recall back, it's just not the same thing at all. In fact, it didn't have the emotional stigma attached to it that, for instance, the Vietnam War did.

Lowood: It just wasn't noticed as much, is that what you mean?

Deal: That's right.

Lowood: When you finished at Wesleyan, what were the options that were open to you besides graduate school, or did you even consider any other?

Deal: I had already decided on graduate school. My dad had done his advanced degree, and my brother had already started, at Columbia, and I didn't think there was anything else to do.

Lowood: And you already knew what field it was going to be in, as well.

Deal: I knew what the field was, and that sort of is my nature, I guess, is that I plan ahead and do what I plan.

Lowood: And why did you choose Iowa State?

Deal: Partly because that was one of the most attractive areas to get into, as far as the support. As it turned out, the man in cHRGe, I guess he was administrative assistant to the director of the Institute for Atomic Research that was at Iowa State, graduated with my father from Wesleyan. And he probably contributed more than anything else to the fact that I got a good position as a graduate assistant. The Institute for Atomic Research at Iowa State was sort of like the CIS [Center for Integrated Systems] or something at Stanford, in which the students would be supported by that institute and work there on a half-time basis and pursue their graduate work. And the research they were doing for the institute would contribute to their thesis.

Lowood: So the institute was on campus.

Deal: It was on the campus.

Lowood: It was run by the university.

Deal: Run by the university, and the professors had half-time appointments with the institute and half-time teaching.

Lowood: And the funding was from the Atomic Energy Commission?

Deal: From the Atomic Energy Commission, right.

Lowood: The fields, then, were nuclear chemistry, physics.

Deal: It wasn't nuclear chemistry, especially, it was more materials science and basic physical chemistry. It was more materials. There was very little nuclear chemistry involved. That was done at other places. Iowa State was a heavy contributor to the Manhattan Project, during the war, and many of the professors, in fact my professor, Professor Harry Svec, had been employed there, as a graduate student and then after he got his Ph.D. Much of the uranium for the first atomic bomb was processed in Ames. The building where this was done was still there, it was a temporary building. I understand recently that it's been torn down a few years ago, but it was still there when I was in school.

Lowood: So Svec had been involved in that, but your work as a graduate student had no particular connection to the aftermath of the atomic bomb project or anything like that?

Deal: The only thing is that my particular graduate work was the study of oxidation of uranium, which was being produced there, still, in high purity form. Uranium and thorium--thorium was another possible metal that could be used in an atomic bomb.

Lowood: It was being produced for bombs?

Deal: No, produced for study.

Lowood: So it was kind of an after effect?

Deal: It was an advanced development effort for other materials that might be used for atomic energy.

Lowood: Taking advantage of the expertise that had been accumulated there during the war?

Deal: That's right, and that's what made Iowa State such a good graduate school, because they had a lot of good people there who had been involved before, and the chemistry department was, at that point, an outstanding department, as far as departments throughout the United States. They produced more Ph.D.s, or as many, as most of the other schools you would think of, such as MIT or Illinois or some of the other ones that were noted in chemistry.

Lowood: These were all facts, things you were aware of as you became a graduate student, right? You knew about the institute and all of that?

Deal: Right.

Lowood: In fact, you said that's what made it attractive to you, I guess, that it was support for your work as well.

Deal: That's right. Yes. If I'd have had my choice of any of the other schools, I probably would have taken Iowa State because of that, because of the reputation it had.

Lowood: Svec was your principal advisor from the very beginning?

Deal: No. I started with another man, a fellow by the name of Plucknett. He left after the first year and went to the University of Kentucky. At that point, I had known Dr. Svec and thought that he would be the person to work with, but he was not yet on the graduate staff. He had just received his Ph.D. a couple of years before, and so in order to accomplish this, I was put officially under another professor, Professor Fred Duke, whereas I worked under the direction of Professor Svec for the Atomic Energy Commission, the Institute for Atomic Research. After a couple of years, Professor Svec was put on the staff, and I just continued with him, and I was his first graduate student.

Lowood: So he was the top name on your dissertation page?

Deal: That's right. Although I think Professor Duke was also, maybe still officially in cHRGe of the committee when I finished. The two of them were sort of a team, in that sense.

Lowood: You mentioned already you had some make up work to do.

Deal: The first year I spent entirely on make up work, taking all of the Iowa State chemistry courses, in a cram session, you might say.

Lowood: And then once you got that behind you, what was in the curriculum that you were required to take and maybe how was that distinctive at Iowa State?

Deal: There were a lot of chemistry courses that were required at Iowa State in many fields. You had to take representative courses in each of the four areas that I mentioned before--physical, inorganic, analytical, and organic. And it gave us a very broad background. In addition to that, you had to have a minor, and mine was mathematics. It would have been desirable to take physics, which I was not able to do. The physics department was very closely aligned with the chemistry department. They were attached by the headquarters for the Atomic Energy Commission institute. Other courses which were just starting to be offered, interestingly enough, through the math department, were computer courses and electronic courses. And at that point, I didn't think they were worth taking. Probably one of the major mistakes in my life, because I've always felt that I have not had enough electronics and solid state as I might have. Of course, keep in mind, at that point, when I started graduate school, the transistor had only been invented for about two years. An interesting sidelight is that around that time, or shortly after, the first computer was being developed and invented at Iowa State in the physics department, and only recently was that officially decided in the courts.

Lowood: Actually, that was my next question. I guess you weren't aware of that at all, right?

Deal: I got married at the end of undergraduate school. My wife, during graduate school, worked in the soils testing lab, at Iowa State, as office manager, and used computers for their work, to catalog and keep track of all of the soils testing they were doing. This was not on, of course, the new type computer, but it was on one that was similar to the one that had been developed by him. It was all vacuum tubes and occupied a complete room. I can't remember the man's name, maybe you do.

Lowood: You mean Atanasoff?

Deal: Right, right. His work had been done in the physics department. Now this was more in the agricultural end, where this computer was located, I believe. Or maybe it was in the math department, I just don't remember. I didn't know that much about it. She knew more about it than I did.

Lowood: And this would have been '50, '51?

Deal: Yes. Between '50 and '55 I was there.

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

Lowood: OK, so you mentioned that you didn't take as much engineering or physics as you would have liked, in retrospect, you would have liked to have taken.

Deal: I would have been better off, perhaps. Who knows?

Lowood: What do you think was the most important coursework that you did take at Iowa State?

Deal: Well, I think the physical chemistry, because that was really the type of work that I was involved in. Physical chemistry can involve all sorts of things. Gaseous reactions, liquid reactions, solid state reactions, as in semiconductors. My work, which again, was a part of physical chemistry, was oxidation. Physical chemistry involves chemical reactions, and anything in support of that was, of course, important to my work. I think the most important thing that I got out of Iowa State, however, was my training in doing experimental work, and this is where Professor Svec provided an outstanding example, because he was an experimentalist. He built some of the first mass spectrometers that were built in this country, and was very well known, later on, in that field, mass spectrometry. He then used the mass spectrometers to help analyze a lot of the materials that were being developed at the laboratory. But he was a great experimentalist and really taught me a lot of what I was able to do later.

Lowood: Were you involved in that particular work?

Deal: No. I was in a separate laboratory, doing the gas-metal reaction studies, and he had a separate laboratory. He then had some other undergraduates working there, and later had graduate students in that area too. He had sort of a double life, almost, going on in that sense. He had two separate laboratories.

Lowood: Did the laboratory you were in have a particular name? It was within the institute, right?

Deal: It was called the Research Building for the Institute of Atomic Research, and it was next to the chemistry building, where he was located. So I was even in a different building than he was.

Lowood: The work that you were doing, these were surface reactions?

Deal: Surface reactions, studying the oxidation characteristics of radioactive materials. But the radioactive part of it was not a factor. We were interested in these particular materials and how they would react with moisture and with oxygen. Would they corrode and so on.

Lowood: What defined that interest?

Deal: Well, because of the interest in these materials. There were other groups that were working on physical properties of these metals, such as you would have in a metallurgy laboratory. Stresses and strains and defects and so on.

Lowood: How were you led to the problem that you worked on?

Deal: I'm not really sure. This was something that Professor Svec was either assigned to get involved in or wanted to get involved in. I think he may have been asked to do that, because they needed someone working, to study some of these corrosion properties of these metals.

Lowood: The assigner would have been, what, the AEC?

Deal: Yes. The director of the laboratory, who was Professor Spedding.

Lowood: So, he would have been assigned, in a sense, to start a project on this.

Deal: In this general area. I believe that's probably the way it was done.

Lowood: And then, particular parts of that would have been farmed out to graduate students, you being one of those.

Deal: Right.

Lowood: You mentioned, it was thorium and uranium that you looked at.

Deal: Thorium, uranium, and lithium. Lithium was used in part in some of the reactors, I believe, to control or modulate the atomic reaction. So that's why they were also interested in lithium.

Lowood: But you had no particular interest in the reactor, the chemistry of it.

Deal: No. No different than the work we would be doing today for semiconductor oxidation. Almost an identical project, just two different materials. One a radioactive material, as it turns out, coincidentally, and another a semiconducting material. But if you were to put on the table a cylinder of uranium and a cylinder of silicon, it would be very difficult, looking at them, to tell them apart.

Lowood: So how did the dissertation project go along for you? About how long did it take, what kind of steps did you take in working into that?

Deal: We had to develop methods of following the oxidation rate, and we used two steps. One was to measure the hydrogen that is given off in the reaction of water with these metals--that was what we called a volumetric study, and you measure the amount of gas given off. We also then established a weight gain method in which you measure the gain of weight of the sample. This was done by building a microbalance, a quartz microbalance, within the system, and following the weight gain. The interesting thing is, the first studies, later, that I did on silicon oxidation, I used the weight gain method, and then later switched to thickness, which is, really, a better way to do it, although it's remarkable how close the early work we did in silicon oxidation using weight gain method matched the thickness method.

Lowood: How was your early work at Iowa State was related to your later work in the industry?

Deal: Very, very closely.

Lowood: So there was a very close connection?

Deal: Very close connection. Later, after we had developed the mechanisms and the reaction kinetics for silicon oxidation, I went back and looked at the data for uranium, and it turns out that the mechanism and the relationship we developed for silicon probably worked better for uranium than the one we had arrived at in the thesis work. I knew more at that point.

Lowood: Sure. Looking back on this work, you've described some things about Iowa State, your advisor, and so forth, and the work in general. Was there anything, do you think, besides the topics, that was special or different about that experience that you had there? Were there contacts, for example, that you made, or was there a particular way of doing things there that you think was different and useful for you?

Deal: No, I think it was just a training situation, and as I said before, it gave me the background and the experience in conducting research, and that's really what Ph.D. work is supposed to do, and in this case it did a great job, I think. I've kept in contact with some of the people that were in graduate school there over the years. Few of them went into semiconductor work, but I'll mention later how people really got into semiconductor work in those days. We were not trained for it, and so we got in sort of in the back door, at that point. For that reason, not too many people, especially, went into solid state, from that particular time period.

Lowood: Have you run across many people from your generation, you know, plus or minus five years or so, with degrees in chemistry as opposed to physics or electrical engineering? Are there quite a few people with chemistry degrees?

Deal: Oh, yes. In fact we've hired a number at Fairchild over the years, because semiconductor processing is chemistry.

Lowood: Was there another completely different area you pursued as a graduate student besides the ones you've been talking about. Was there some side interest that you had, other scientific interest?

Deal: No, we never had time for any side interest. It was strictly, you had to put in half-time during the school year doing the research related to the institute and full-time in the summer.

Lowood: Plus the dissertation.

Deal: Yes. And Iowa State seemed to have had more required courses than many other schools that I have run across.

Lowood: So what options did you have open to you when you finished your degree in '55?

Deal: Many of the people, in 1955, were going into industry, because industry was building up at that point, and was recruiting quite heavily at Iowa State. But typically, most of the people went east. A very popular company for many of the students from Iowa State to go to was Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan. And I interviewed there and got an offer. If I hadn't got the offer that I accepted with Kaiser, I probably would have gone to Dow. I also had an offer at Westinghouse and a couple of offers teaching. However, my wife wanted to go to California. Her family had moved out there in the meanwhile. There was nothing available, as far as the type of work I wanted to do, in California, and the closest was Spokane, Washington. And I saw an ad in a chemical journal, Chemical Engineering News, for a job in Spokane. Spokane is not on the coast, it's 400 miles inland, and it turned out it was a good place to work. Just this last week I got a letter from my old boss who hired me there, who had later moved down to Pleasanton with the laboratory, Kaiser Aluminum Laboratory, and then he had retired there about eight years ago and moved back to Spokane. Hadn't seen him for quite a while.

Lowood: Who was that, by the way?

Deal: Professor Gerry Kissin. He was head of one of the departments at the laboratory, called Surface Finishing Department, and I was hired to do studies in anodic oxidation of aluminum. And again, very similar. The only difference between this type of oxidation and the other oxidation that I did at Iowa State and was to do in silicon, was that it had an electric field associated with it, and done in solution. It was not gaseous. But the measurements and the evaluation of the oxides formed and so on were very similar. So, I went from the oxidation of uranium, thorium and lithium to the anodic oxidation of aluminum, and spent four years in Spokane.

Lowood: Then you had been interested in what is given off in the reaction, or the actual surface properties of the metal?

Deal: The main property of anodic oxide is that it's got a unique structure and that it's porous, very regular pores on a micro scale, and these pores can absorb dye, and so you're probably familiar with colored aluminum tumblers and this sort of thing was very popular then, more than now, I think. The reaction allowed you to incorporate, during the oxidation of the aluminum, impurities that are part of aluminum alloys. Impurities such as chromium, titanium, other things which give different colors to the coating if you did it under certain conditions. And this was the basis for the so-called Kalcolor, which was a aluminum anodizing process for colored coatings. The process was very nice. We got patents on them, and I think over the years, Kaiser's made a lot of money on that process. At that point, Kaiser Aluminum, or Henry Kaiser, owned the Hawaiian Village in Honolulu, which is now the Hilton Hawaiian Village, but that initial building used Kalcolor to get some of the colors on the building. We were there this last year, and I wasn't able to tell if any of that original aluminum Kalcolor was still there or not, because they'd done so many modifications of the original building, and built new ones. Of course, Kaiser sold that many years ago, anyway.

Lowood: When you were hired, that was the product?

Deal: No, we were not hired to develop that particular product, that was an accident. One of the things that happens during this kind of research is that you make modifications. We were trying to make what's called a hard anodic coating to be used in automotive cylinders, and so on, which is abrasion resistant, and in developing these hard coatings, we came up with the colored coatings. We went to a different electrolyte. Normally, for these types of coatings you use sulfuric acid electrolytes, and we took a derivative of aspirin, sulfasalicylic acid, and they ended up in giving this type of coating.

Lowood: You mentioned, in your article about the drawing off of certain gases. At any rate, you were speaking of some process involved in semiconductor technology where you were talking about it being essentially recipes without necessarily understanding mechanisms. I wonder, in this kind of work, something like this, when the decision to try this or try that, are those based on hunches or are those based on pretty good guesses.

Deal: Well, as I said, we were trying to change the anodizing process, increase the voltage that would be applied, and to do this you have to change the electrolyte And we used various things. We used coffee and tea as the electrolyte and came up with interesting results.

Lowood: Why did you choose those? Just on a hunch?

Deal: Those two on a hunch, probably. I can't remember why we used the sulfasalicylic acid at this point. There's something that I had read about the properties of that as an electrolyte.

Lowood: But still there was a strong component of art to it.

Deal: In that case, yes, that's right.

Lowood: Is that something that's been pretty much constant?

Deal: Not as much as that. That was more art, in that case, than you would [see] in the semiconductor work. In the semiconductor work, we were trying to control passivation properties of these oxides which were used to protect sensitive junctions of devices. In that case, we were trying to develop coatings on aluminum for decorative and abrasion-resistant purposes. We were trying to develop different types of coatings. Here, in semiconductors we're worried more about the device itself. It's a little different.

Lowood: You were hired as a research chemist.

Deal: Right.

Lowood: What were the job responsibilities that that involved, generally?

Deal: Well, it was essentially to study aluminum oxidation, from a more fundamental point of view. The work that had gone on at Kaiser before was strictly empirical, and even very little of that as far as anodizing. As I recall, I was only the first or second Ph.D. in that area to be hired. Before that, they had used other people that didn't have the technical background.

Lowood: So they were essentially setting up a new lab, then?

Deal: A new area. It was within a department that existed. That same department developed porcelain enamel coatings. Another fellow worked on electroplating of aluminum for applications such as automobile bumpers. Aluminum bumpers with chrome plated on it. Someone else worked on protection of aluminum to be used in TV dinner trays. There's a whole series of ways that you can treat the aluminum surfaces for its particular application. But they decided they better get in a little more basic research, you might say, on a technical basis.

Lowood: Can you say a little bit about the facilities in Spokane, where you worked. I guess, in the mid '50s, Spokane must have been a fairly isolated .

Deal: Very isolated. In fact, that's one of the reasons that I ended up leaving, because from a technical standpoint, there was no one else. In addition, when you mention the facilities I have to smile, because the research lab was a converted bathhouse for the aluminum plant that was built during the war by Henry Kaiser. We did not have separate offices, we were right in the laboratory, with the anodizing solutions, which was a pretty dangerous situation, really, because of the vapors. OSHA and everyone else would have fits today if they were to see people working under those conditions. But that was the way things were done then.

Lowood: So you didn't particularly enjoy the work there, would that be the right way to put it?

Deal: I enjoyed the work. The biggest problem was that Kaiser was a somewhat provincial company and did not want to seem to get involved in such things as publications and so on. As a result, we were not able to publish our work. Whereas, Jerry Kissin, Dr. Kissin, was quite involved in the Electrochemical Society and he introduced me to this society. However, when it came to publishing papers, we were not able to do much of anything. I recall the one piece of work that I did in conjunction with a professor at the University of Idaho, which was about thirty miles south of Spokane. Very outstanding work, and even today, as I look back at some of the work that he did with the transmission electron microscope, it would hold up very favorably. We were not allowed to publish that. It was especially bad from his standpoint because he needed that publication to get an advancement, because he spent a year or two years on this work, could have been an outstanding piece of work from his standpoint. We were not allowed to release the information. Very tough.

Lowood: That was one thing that I had noticed, looking at your publications list, was that there was this period, certainly in contrast to your later record of publication where there just didn't seem to be very much that was coming out. I did note that there was one paper on aluminum coatings, was that a particularly important piece of work?

Deal: No, it was sort of a sideline, and they didn't consider it any threat to their security and proprietary image. Kaiser, of course, was an upstart in the industry as compared to companies like Alcoa and even Olin. Those were the two competitors, primarily. And Alcan in Canada. They were very jealous of giving out anything. You might have thought that the development of the Kalcolor, which was quite a significant development, would have allowed a little bit more publishing, but it seemed to even close it up more, because they were afraid that this information would get out.

Lowood: Probably three years after you got there you were already beginning to look around for something else.

Deal: Both for that reason, but also, Spokane is a very provincial town, and we had a son at that point who should have started kindergarten, but in Spokane you had to be a certain age by earlier than his birthday. I think he had to be five by September, he was born in October, and they wouldn't change that. And my wife still wanted to come to California. Starting in about '58 I started to notice write-ups in the journals and papers about the solid state industry, transistors. I read about Shockley starting the laboratory in Palo Alto in 1955, and then later read about Fairchild being formed in '57, and so I think, in 1958 and into '59 I started to contact companies in this area. Fairchild had an ad in a journal. Rheem had been formed as the first split-off of Fairchild. They advertised. I knew about Hewlett-Packard. And so, in about three months periods of time, I came down on three successive weekends to Palo Alto and interviewed first at HP with Barney Oliver, then Fairchild with Gordon Moore, and then Rheem with Leo Valdes. There didn't seem to be any possibility of getting a job with Hewlett-Packard; Barney Oliver didn't seem to have any openings and nothing came of that. Fairchild seemed interested, but they dragged their feet quite a bit, and Leo Valdes was very much interested in getting people. I was more interested in going to someone who seemed to want me, and that was the case at Rheem, more than Fairchild, where they even lost the paperwork. I like to tell the story here at Fairchild, especially when the personnel people are around. They lost the paperwork and I was never able to join them at that time. That was 1959. And then, four years later, as it turns out, they found the paperwork, and I did join them.

Lowood: Is that really what happened?

Deal: Yes. It took all sorts of phone calls and letters to even get reimbursed for my expenses from Fairchild. In those days, unlike today, the applicants, when they go on an interview trip, would have to buy all of their tickets and make all their own arrangements. Then they would submit a bill and be reimbursed. I know in the case of graduate students, it was really an imposition, because most graduate students certainly didn't have any money to do this sort of thing, and I think at Iowa State they had a fund, they would loan the money to do this.

Lowood: Was it really the case that they found it in '63?

Deal: No. They certainly lost the paperwork initially, didn't seem to be in any great hurry or interest in getting people hired. They were right in the middle of developing the planar process and the integrated circuit at Fairchild, and I think they were just thinking of other things.

Lowood: So you think that would have affected the whole company in such a way that even personnel records and things like that would have gotten lost?

Deal: I think it had to do with the personnel manager himself. In those days there were still no solid state semiconductor courses in the universities. And the people that they got into the semiconductor companies, like Fairchild and Rheem and later AMI and so on, Signetics, came from three sources. The first source came from Bell Laboratories, and many of the leading people here were Bell Laboratory scientists like Barney Oliver and John Moll and Leo Valdes, a fellow that I worked with at Rheem is Charlie Bittmann, and many others. They all seemed to come out here to California. They would help get these companies started from the technical standpoint. They wouldn't, especially, be the financial supporters and organizers, but they would be hired as the technical people. So that was the first source. Next, they would get a few people out of the schools, not especially Ph.D.s but maybe Bachelors or Masters, to do a lot of the work that needed to be done. And finally, they would get people like myself, from other industries, many of them chemists, because the semiconductor processing is chemistry, and that was more important in those days than electrical engineers. As it turned out, there was not a lot of design work. We had discrete devices. If you look at some of those early transistors, there wasn't much design involved.

Lowood: And the integrated circuit wasn't as complicated, for a while.

Deal: That's right. It initially wasn't even there, and then when it was, it still was very simple, that's right. Many of the people that I knew and worked with were chemists that had come from all sorts of areas. They might also be chemical engineers.

Lowood: It's interesting what you said, of course, about Bell Labs. That would have been true for Stanford, as well, and still in the late '50s, Stanford hadn't really gotten its solid state program far off the ground and was still hiring people like Gerald Pearson and even Shockley who had retired from Bell Labs and then came to Stanford. I guess Jim Gibbons probably came from Bell Labs, I'm not sure.

Deal: He may have. I don't remember if he did or not. Les Hogan did, for instance, came from Bell. A whole series of leading people of that day, of the technical people, were from Bell.

Lowood: You said you'd set your sights on this area and you'd set your sights on this industry, pretty much, from reading the technical press.

Deal: The reason that I got into this industry is because that was what was available at that point in this location. The only other thing was the oil industry. Several of the people, like Harry Sello, came from the oil industry. Shell, for instance, in Emeryville, and Chevron Research, and so on.

Lowood: So it was the area first, and then the industry as a corollary effect.

Deal: Unfortunately, we picked the area. That's not supposed to be a good way to do things, but we did that. We decided we wanted to come down to the Bay Area. We did not want to go to Los Angeles, especially, because I didn't want to be too close to where my wife's relatives were. This was a good compromise. Obviously, San Francisco and the Bay Area had a good reputation, even in those days.

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

Lowood: You came to the area, you interviewed with HP, Fairchild, and Rheem. Was HP specifically interested in solid state when they interviewed you?

Deal: Not especially, and that was part of the problem. It was difficult for me to tell at the time what they were doing, as far as this particular area. I don't think they were doing that much. hp Associates was really a spin-off of Rheem, later, and also from Bell, John Atalla came out to help form that, along with some people from Rheem, in about 1963 or '64, I think. But before that there was not much solid state work of that sort.

Lowood: I talked to one other person in this series who also interviewed with Barney Oliver, and I think he did in 1958. That was Doug Englebart, the inventor of the computer mouse who worked at SRI. He interviewed with HP around the same time. He was interested in getting into computers, and in HP terms I guess that meant digital devices, and actually went, talked to Hewlett and Packard, they were very enthusiastic. Talked to Barney Oliver and actually got very close to accepting the position when he then found out, at a rather late stage in the negotiation, that they really weren't interested in doing digital devices after all, and so he decided, eventually, to go with SRI, which was kind of interesting to me, because it indicated that, on the one hand, HP was talking to people from a variety of areas but in another sense, the company may have been kind of reluctant to get away from the things that they knew quite well.

Deal: Which was primarily instrumentation at that point.

Lowood: Instrumentation.

Deal: I think they were sort of looking to try and decide what they should be going into, and one of the ways to do this would be to talk to various people. But I didn't have really the background to discuss much of anything with them. I was more interested in the type of research I was doing. I remember when I talked to Gordon Moore about the work that I was doing, I thought that oxidation, and even anodic oxidation, might be an appropriate thing for them, with the silicon. Whether he thought so or not, really, we didn't get much further than that. It seemed to me he didn't think that there was much use for that, and, yet, here they were, right in the middle, or maybe not quite yet, of the planar process, very interesting. If you think back, it's hard to remember or know just where they were along those lines. And it wasn't until one or two years later that we heard about that Fairchild development at Rheem, which I think really did Rheem in. I think both the planar process and the integrated circuit were very significant developments, and Rheem, then, was never able to catch up after that.

Lowood: The planar process, I guess, because of all the interest in the surface effects and things like that, would have been down your alley, so to speak.

Deal: Exactly. That's the whole thing. It's the oxidation of silicon and the stabilizing of the silicon surface.

Lowood: Incidentally, was Moore the only person--was Noyce involved in the interview at all?

Deal: No, the other person was Worden Waring, who was one of my predecessors in the job, then, that I ended up getting here, as far as manager of the Materials and Process Department. He was manager of the Chemistry Department. He was in this office. He was succeeded by someone by the name of Harry Sello, who was working for Fairchild at the time, but he was sent over to set up a facility at SGS, in Italy, and when I ended up joining Fairchild he was over there. Then he came back, pretty soon, and then, later, when Noyce and Moore and Grove left to form Intel, the new manager had Harry step up and take a staff position and I took his job. He is currently a consultant in Menlo Park.

Lowood: OK. Let's talk about Rheem then a little bit, and you've already mentioned the other companies that you applied to. Can you tell me what you knew about Rheem at the time, say in 1959, as a company?

Deal: Nothing.

Lowood: Absolutely nothing?

Deal: I knew the name Rheem as a manufacturer of water heaters. As a matter of fact, we had a Rheem water heater. I found out during the interview, and later, working there, that Rheem wanted to diversify and get into solid state. Everyone thought they should at that point. Ed Baldwin, who was the general manager at Fairchild, not a founder, decided that why shouldn't he make some money. He saw the eight founders make some money on the stock that they had originally been issued as part of the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation itself and then it was bought out by Fairchild itself. So they made some money. By today's standards it was very little, but it seemed like a lot then. So he talked the Rheem people into setting up a semiconductor company, and he took a couple of other people over there from Fairchild, and was going to be another Fairchild.

Lowood: So Rheem then, was it independent from the former Rheem, or partially owned?

Deal: No, it was a subsidiary. It was owned, and I don't know what arrangements Ed Baldwin had as far as his interest in the company. But to my knowledge it was completely owned by Rheem Water Heaters.

Lowood: So it was not the kind of start-up that we think of nowadays, a garage company or anything like that.

Deal: No, but neither was Fairchild. They were the same, I should say. Fairchild was started by the eight founders and was financed by Fairchild and then bought out, as part of Fairchild Camera and Instruments. Rheem was the same. Rheem Semiconductor Division was a division, or a subsidiary, whichever it was, of Rheem.

Lowood: And the Shockley Lab too, for that matter.

Deal: Shockley was too. It was initially owned by Beckman, then Clevite, then I.T.T. That was a different mode of starting in those days than it is now, where they get the money and start as an independent company. That's exactly right.

Lowood: Rheem was located in Mountain View, is that right?

Deal: Mountain View, on Castro Street.

Lowood: On Castro. So in the middle of town then.

Deal: That's right, it was right near the railroad tracks on Castro and Moffett. The address was Moffett, it was on the Moffett side, towards Bayshore, from the railroad tracks. There were two buildings that they started in. As I got there, or the next year, I believe, they built a new building over on Ellis Street, which turned out to be next door to the Fairchild headquarters on Ellis Street. Fairchild's original buildings in Mountain View, for production, were on Whisman Avenue, which is about a half a mile north of Ellis.

Lowood: So you didn't move very far when you moved from Rheem to Fairchild.

Deal: Yes, when I moved from Rheem to Fairchild I moved back to Palo Alto, because the research lab was here.

Lowood: Were there a lot of companies in that area of Mountain View already, or was it pretty much Rheem and Fairchild?

Deal: That was it. I think Lockheed probably had some buildings around in there. There was a cabbage patch next to Rheem, as I recall.

Lowood: So two buildings and maybe, two hundred employees, or something like that, or was it even that?

Deal: I would guess that would be about it. Right.

Lowood: What were the circumstances? I'm interested because, this being a kind of a new company and I doubt much has survived in terms of records or anything, I'm interested in a description of what the buildings were like, how things were organized, that sort of thing.

Deal: Our building, which was the headquarters and the research and development part of it, were divided into two. One was offices in the front part, and in the back was a fab, and it was an open fab, and of course, no one heard of clean rooms in those days. We had a very tough time keeping people from smoking in the lab, which not only was bad from the contamination point of view, but from the safety point of view, because we used hydrogen, initially, in fabrication of these semiconductors, for annealing. I remember two or three of the people insisted on smoking in there.

Lowood: And this was transistors.

Deal: Transistors, that's right. And possibly some diodes were also being fabricated. The thing that really turned us around a little bit, or should have turned us around, was the announcement from Bell Laboratories of the epitaxial process. Shortly after the integrated circuit and the planar process were developed, then Bell Labs and a couple of others in the east announced the epitaxial process for epitaxial transistors. And this enabled one to make a much better transistor. You could have a sharp junction between a lightly doped layer over a heavily doped substrate, and so most of the research effort was on that point. It also allows you to lower the substrate series resistance in the device. I hadn't been doing that much, as I recall. I had not started on oxidation yet, and I guess I was just learning the processes. Most of the research people, then, were put on to this problem of developing epitaxy. We decided this was the way to go. So I was given the responsibility for trying to develop an epitaxial process in a regular furnace tube, whereas the Bell process called for a bell jar--coincidence in the names, there--and the vacuum system. And so someone else was given that job, to duplicate the Bell process. We were supposed to develop what was called the hot tube method. And we did develop a hot tube method before our counterparts at Rheem reproduced the Bell method. There were problems in doing it, and it turns out that it was finally decided that we would stay with the Bell method. We did get a patent and it turns out that, even today, people are still going back and trying to develop the hot tube method, for various reasons. Someone just told me this morning that there's some work out now, using that same exact process. The same process was also used later with silicon nitride deposition.

Lowood: And was that used in production at Rheem, or did it stay in the laboratory?

Deal: We decided before we got into production to stay with the Bell process, although at that time, I do recall getting phone calls from many of the companies like Motorola, and Sylvania and a lot of the eastern big establishments who were the first ones in the semiconductor work, asking if I was interested in a job, because we did report the work at an Electrochemical Society meeting in 1961.

Lowood: So that meant they were interested in the technology?

Deal: They were interested in getting someone who would help get epitaxy going at their laboratory and they were interested in this as a possible way of doing it.

Lowood: Now, was this the patent for the chemical reactor, or was that something different?

Deal: Yes, that's that patent. The patent was issued in '63, but the work was first reported in '61, I believe it was, and the patent applied for at that point.

Lowood: Since you were so close to the fabrication end of things at Rheem, physically close, can you say anything about the workforce that Rheem employed? What kinds of people were they? Were they women?

Deal: Pretty much all of the, I guess they were called assemblers in those days, even though they were process people, were women. I would say very similar to what we still have today. I don't think there's been much change in that. And the technicians were typically people with at least two years of college, in the research part, and some of them even had college degrees.

Lowood: How many would there, what, about a half dozen or so Ph.D.s, or how many people were there?

Deal: As far as R & D?

Lowood: Yes.

Deal: We probably had more than, we probably had about a dozen.

Lowood: Lots of Ph.D.s

Deal: Not a Ph.D., with a Masters from Stanford, was Bob Lorenzini, who was later president of Siltech. He was there. Working under Leo Valdes was someone by the name of Charlie Bittmann, who was one of the early people at Bell; Sol Miller, another Bell person; Al Gorum, who later got a fairly high position at SRI, he was in the materials end of things. Sol Miller was in the research and Charlie Bittmann the development, and then the rest of us worked for those people. Those people were the section managers, and we were working under them.

Lowood: And which section, what was the name of the section that you worked in?

Deal: In the research one, under Sol Miller. That was called the Research Section, in the Research Department.

Lowood: And what were the other two sections called?

Deal: One was Materials and one was Device Development.

Lowood: Materials was Gorum?

Deal: Gorum. I don't know exactly where Al Gorum came from. I don't know what his background was. He was a metallurgist in materials science.

Lowood: What was the atmosphere of work in the company like? Was it hectic or was it reasonable?

Deal: No, I would say it was very similar to what it was at Fairchild and even at Kaiser. I do remember meetings of the administration and management about the developments as they would come out of Fairchild. Fairchild was certainly the leader, and next was Bell. So they'd be paying a lot of attention to what Fairchild was doing and what Bell was doing, and when any new announcement came out, why, then everyone would get all excited about that and then want to get something started to duplicate it, like the epitaxial deposition. About that time, however, was when, I think, Rheem had gone for two, three years now, and I don't think they were making any money. And that was when Raytheon decided that they were starting to lose out, and indeed, many of the leading companies, like Raytheon, General Electric, Sylvania, Westinghouse, all of the big conglomerates in the east. It was obvious to them they were not going to be successful as compared to Fairchild and TI and maybe some other of the smaller companies. So one of the ways of doing something about this, in Raytheon's case, where much of the early semiconductor work was done, back in Waltham, was to buy Rheem and then, you might expect that Rheem would be transported back there. However, they moved all their semiconductor people out to Rheem. This really irritated some of the more senior people, that they would have to move and would be put into California. Most of these people were New England-raised. It ended up that there was considerable friction between the two groups of people--the Raytheon people and the Rheem people, and within a year, as I recall, or two years from then, I think that was in about 1961, '62, most of the people on both sides were leaving. When I left in 1963, I couldn't even find anyone around at that particular time to resign to, to hand in my resignation to. I finally ended up handing it in to a clerk in the personnel department, and I didn't know it right at that point, but Leo Valdes was also looking for another job, and he ended up going up to Watkins-Johnson.

Lowood: So the company was falling apart, really?

Deal: It was sort of falling apart. But the interesting thing is that they were able to keep it going, brought in new people, and then instead of selling on the commercial market, it was just a captive company for Raytheon's own needs. And so they have continued to this day in that mode of operation. They haven't grown a lot, they have not expanded, they have kept the same building that they built on Ellis, and there's a former Fairchild person that's now vice president of that operation who I used to work with, Dave Deardorf. It is now Raytheon Semiconductors.

Lowood: OK.

Deal: In fact, it was changed to that when they bought Rheem.

Lowood: One interesting thing that you said was the executives coming out here. Of course, one way of writing about things like the Rheem takeover and other major companies that set up labs here, in the Industrial Park and so forth, is to look at them as being sort of satellite companies that were kind of keeping an eye on things. But in this case, the pull was so strong just to be here that the whole company, basically, was moved out. It wasn't a satellite company, it was the company, at that point.

Deal: That part of Raytheon.

Lowood: Yes. That part of it.

Deal: Raytheon is the largest employer in Massachusetts, and they have a lot of space-related government contract type work going on back there, and this is really just a support operation for them. I think I showed you before the listing of the ten top tube companies in 1960 or '55 and how all of those companies, then, were gradually replaced from the solid state and semiconductor area by the new companies, and so they all had the same problem. None of the large companies were able to compete with the newer semiconductor companies.

Lowood: So Raytheon maintained a solid state division on the east coast as well?

Deal: They still have something back there. I think they built that back up. They have a semiconductor research group, as I know, although they're not really a force at all. From a technical standpoint, you never, very rarely run into anyone from Raytheon at technical meetings.

Lowood: I did want to ask you about one thing. Maybe you weren't aware of it or didn't know much first-hand about it. This whole legal battle that I suppose was still going on when you got to Rheem about the amount of information that Ed Baldwin supposedly brought along with him when he left Fairchild, this "cookbook" for the transistor line.

Deal: At that point, I didn't know much about it. I wasn't in a position to really know what was going on there, and I've only read about it afterwards. I know that there was a lawsuit of some sort, that was not successful, and was the start of many unsuccessful lawsuits for companies splitting away.

Lowood: So that was par for the course, in a way. There was a lot of litigation like that in those years. What was the general atmosphere like, as far as talking among people from different companies talking among themselves about developments? You mentioned that people waited for the latest announcement from Fairchild.

Deal: These were official announcements.

Lowood: A press release or something like that?

Deal: Right. In those days, because you didn't have that many Fairchild people going to all these companies, so that everyone knew someone at another company, it wasn't quite the same, as I recall. It was more a division between the companies. We did have technical meetings, and I was involved even at that point in The Electrochemical Society, and people from Rheem or Raytheon would go to the meetings, and the Fairchild people would go, and so on, but we didn't really talk to each other that much. I didn't know that many people at Fairchild until I got here.

Lowood: Just the people that, maybe, you'd interviewed with, and not much beyond that?

Deal: People like Gordon Moore wouldn't be involved in these particular meetings, I don't think. Worden Waring was, though, come to think about it. But it was sort of a formal association. It certainly wasn't on a personal basis.

Lowood: You mentioned the epitaxial process. While you were at Rheem, what other main research and development efforts were you associated with?

Deal: After the epitaxy phase, and it was decided to go with the other process, and my assignment was then oxidation. It was decided because of the planar process. Here again we had to keep up with the other companies, and so it was decided we better be studying oxidation, and because of my background in oxidation, I was the logical one to study it, and that's where my work in silicon oxidation really started. I presented a paper in 1962 in Los Angeles, at an ECS meeting, and got acquainted with a fellow that was doing similar work here--two people. One by the name of Phil Flint and one by the name of J. Sandor. It was the start of some interesting things that happened in Silicon Valley. For one thing, I interviewed a person by the name of Bill Shephard at Raytheon, who was from Plessy. And then a couple of weeks later I came to Fairchild and he had already joined Fairchild and he interviewed me at the same time. Furthermore, J. Sandor, who was working on oxidation here at Fairchild, joined Raytheon and we traded offices. We actually went into each other's office. The same day he went to Raytheon I came to Fairchild. He didn't stay at Raytheon that long. These things come up over the years, you know, where you will interview for a job, and then the person that interviews you with may end up working for you somewhere else.

Lowood: Is the pace of that, has that changed, or was it particularly crazy then?

Deal: No, I think it's remained crazy.

Lowood: So, you went from, the epitaxial process, then, to the planar process..

Deal: Thermal oxidation.

Lowood: . . . to thermal oxidation. That's pretty much where you were when you left Rheem?

Deal: Yes, that's right.

Lowood: You mentioned that the company picked up on some of these developments. What happened with things like the integrated circuit or the metal oxide semiconductors? Was Rheem at all involved in that?

Deal: That hadn't been developed. The MOS transistor had just been reported and not really developed yet. That was not until late '62-'63, and that development is why I came to Fairchild, because they were looking for a team, here, to work on the MOS transistor technology.

Lowood: So that was at the very end of your tenure at Rheem.

Deal: Right. The interesting thing is, I don't remember anything at Rheem about the integrated circuit. I don't remember that much about it from the Fairchild end or any announcements or anything. I just don't remember.

Lowood: Is that possibly because you weren't involved in devices as much?

Deal: That's part of it, but I can't remember if we had gotten started in the development area. We must have gotten started in integrated circuits. But I wasn't directly involved in that. Again, that would have been the device development, and I was working more in the technology, the oxidation technology.

Lowood: In a company like Rheem/Raytheon, would it have been Baldwin or the management that succeeded him, the Raytheon management, that determined, which areas to go into when the latest development comes along.

Deal: I suppose that was through Leo Valdes and Ed Baldwin initially. Later, after the purchase, it's a little hard for me to know, or I don't remember, where those decisions were made, and how much Ed Baldwin had to say about it. And I also can't remember right at this point when he actually left the company. I think he left before I left, and then, someone from Raytheon was sent out and was in cHRGe of that part of the company.

Lowood: In your case, obviously, you worked on materials and processes more than devices. How would the company, as a whole,--I'm talking about Rheem now--how would they handle that? You said you were in the research group. Was it all mixed in together or was there a fairly discrete group, one working on devices?

Deal: Well, as I said, Charlie Bittmann had the device development end of things, another person the materials and Miller the research, or we might call it technology. I think technology would have been a better term. Those three groups were all in the same area. The materials part of it had a separate laboratory, and most of our work was done in the same general area as the development line, except we had the separate equipment, and that's typically been the case at Fairchild, too. You have a fab and then you have special equipment where you're studying individual processes, that might well be in the same area, the same room, almost, in those days, as the fab itself.

Lowood: And did that mean that communication was pretty good?

Deal: Communication was pretty good, yes.

Lowood: What about between device people and somebody in your group? Was communication also good?

Deal: They were in the same room. The device people and the technology people were in the same fab there. The materials people were in the next fab but it was very close, and the offices were all together. The production was in the next building, where they had another line over there. And then later, it was moved half a mile away, and that was production.

Lowood: The separation of production and R & D, that strikes me as being quite typical, going back to Varian Associates and HP, for quite some time, that those would be physically separated.

Deal: R & D would generally be in a separate building.

Lowood: Did that cause any problems?

Deal: Not when we're only talking about six or eight blocks away, to production, that was not a problem. The problems have been when the company was forced to move the production out of the Bay Area, across the country. Then your R & D would be separated by 3000 miles, as it was with Fairchild and their main production plant initially in Portland, Maine.

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

Lowood: So, what would happen in a situation like that, if production is separated by those kinds of distances? Would some sort of mini-research group form at the plant?

Deal: Typically, the way that Fairchild and other companies in a similar similar situation have done, is to establish a pseudo-R & D group at the outlying plant. Those people, then, would be in touch with the R & D back at the central location. So in the case of Fairchild, for instance, we got facilities in Puyallup, Washington; Portland, Maine; for a while we had some in Ship Rock, New Mexico. National has got production in Utah, Salt Lake City, and Arlington, Texas. Each of those have some sort of an R & D or a development group associated with the production facility. And the key thing is to have communication, and that's the biggest problem, is communication between the various groups. Typically what happens is that each group will have similar problems but they will develop their own solutions. They may be working on exactly the same problem and not know it, if they don't have good communication.

Lowood: So what happens is the kind of situation like you had at Rheem, where everything is in relatively close physical proximity and people are talking to each other, moves into a situation where there's a central lab, which serves a very general function within the company, and then the individual labs associated with the different production facilities, that come up with very specific solutions.

Deal: Supposedly, they are working on day-to-day problems and solutions to those day-to-day problems, and the research laboratory should be working on problems, processes that would be used two, three, five, even ten years down the road.

Lowood: Speaking of products, what product lines did Rheem bring to market while you were there?

Deal: Transistors and diodes.

Lowood: It didn't expand beyond that base.

Deal: To my knowledge, I don't think we got much beyond that. If we were doing anything in integrated circuits. It was too early, really, I think, on that.

Lowood: It sounds like things, in a way, didn't really get very far during those four years.

Deal: No. They were trying to establish themselves, and then the purchase by Raytheon really cost a year's time or more, trying to merge those two groups, the semiconductor people from Raytheon and Rheem itself. It was very disrupting, with people leaving and so on. I think it was over a several year period there that not much happened.

Lowood: Can I ask you about just a couple of the people that you mentioned at Rheem, just to ask you to describe them a little bit, or tell something about them, or anecdotes, or whatever. First, Leo Valdes, who hired you, and managed R & D at Rheem. What kind of a manager was he, and what impressions did you have?

Deal: He was a very personable person, and as I said, that was the primary reason that I went to Rheem and didn't get with Fairchild or some other company down here, because he was so friendly and willing to bring someone like myself in from the outside and train me. Leo was quite emotional, and he got along with most people a lot. But I know that he had differences of opinions on how things should be done in certain cases. Then he left, got out of the semiconductor area completely. He went down to Hughes for a number of years, and then was back at Ford, I understand. But the interesting thing is, I haven't seen him since he came back here several years ago. I was planning to try and get in touch with him, and something happened and I never did. But, he was a very pleasant person to work with. I think some people, maybe, had a harder time getting along with him than I did.

Lowood: Was Ed Baldwin was somebody that you formed any particular impressions of?

Deal: Not really. I didn't have that much to do with Ed Baldwin.

Lowood: What about Sol Miller?

Deal: Sol Miller was interested more in the financial aspect of things, and when he left Rheem, or Raytheon as I recall, he got into financial advisory work here, and I haven't seen him since.

Lowood: Even though he was head of the research? What was his background in?

Deal: He was technical but he was interested in other things, rather than that, apparently.

Lowood: So he was in a transition to other interests?

Deal: That's right. The person that I kept in touch with the longest and worked with the longest was Charlie Bittmann, who was the third manager. He came to Fairchild and I think he was the one that convinced Gordon Moore and C.T. Sah, to hire me at Fairchild, to come here. Charlie Bittmann was device development manager here for a number of years, and finally retired. But I still see him occasionally, keep in touch with him. In fact, he lives about three blocks from here. He went to HP from here, actually, then retired.

Lowood: So he went to HP?

Deal: He went to HP. Many of our people here went to HP.

Lowood: And you've already mentioned you didn't know very many other people in the industry during that period.

Deal: Not really. I was just getting acquainted with them, but didn't know them really well.

Lowood: What about Stanford? Was there anything going on at the University?

Deal: We had one consultant, a person by the name of Mort Mandel, that I believe was at Stanford in those days. Leo had got him to consult, and help give some of the Bell secrets, so as to speak, at Rheem. I don't know whatever happened to him, but he was our only contact, that I know of, with anyone at Stanford.

Lowood: And he was in the Electrical Engineering Department?

Deal: He must have been. I don't know exactly what his position was. He didn't stay there very long. He maybe was an instructor, or, I don't know what he did. But he helped set up a number of the so-called processing curves, data curves, fusion curves, which are used in basic data handbooks, which was later developed at Fairchild. Bell has their own version of the basic data handbook. A lot of these curves, based on data from Bell, were given to us or shown to us or calculated by him.

Lowood: Was Rheem, was Rheem a contributor to the Solid State Associates Program at Stanford?

Deal: I don't think there was any Solid State Associates Program at that time. When did they start?

Lowood: Actually, that started in '58-'59, in there.

Deal: As it was, I didn't know anything about it, and I sort of doubt if they were.

Lowood: Because they were beginning to have, that's about when things really began to roll for Stanford. I guess that's when Gerald Pearson came as Bell's contribution to the program, and they began to have these annual meetings.

Deal: I know that Fairchild was, fairly early, and we had a number of consultants from Fairchild in the early '60s. People like Jim Gibbons and Jim Angell. C.T. Sah, who hired me, was a graduate student at Stanford.

Lowood: So that the Stanford connection was much stronger, then, to Fairchild. .

Deal: Plus, we were over here. We were in the Stanford Industrial Park. It was just closer.

Lowood: So that made a difference, then, being in the Industrial Park?

Deal: Oh, no question.

Lowood: Is there anything else about Rheem that you think should be said, or about your own circumstances during those four years?

Deal: No. I really have felt, in looking back, that I was probably better off going to Rheem first, and then to Fairchild, than if I would have gotten a job at Fairchild. Because I was able--it was a smaller company, and you weren't put in such a small area right away. I had more flexibility, to see more of what was going on. Whereas, if I'd have come to Fairchild, I'd have been stuck in one area, and who knows what it would have been, I don't know. It might not have been oxidation, for instance.

Lowood: And for you, it was also a period to get used to the problems.

Deal: I was able, then, to learn about the semiconductor technology, in general. I may have had more opportunity at Rheem than I would have at Fairchild to do even that.

Lowood: Incidentally, in addition to just being at Rheem and working out the problems, in that period around 1960, were there particular texts or other sources that you recall as being particularly valuable for getting up to speed in the semiconductor field?

Deal: No, I don't think--we used the Bell, there was a Bell series, and we used it completely. By far the most valuable. It was a series of books edited by a fellow by the name of Frank J. Biondi. Everyone in the industry used those. It was really the authority of semiconductor technology at that time. And then we used the various published papers. There was some work done by Irwin, who developed the original resistivity curves for silicon. A fellow that I know even today, very well, Forrest Trumbore, developed a lot of the solubility data for silicon. It all came from Bell.

Lowood: It wasn't like, probably by the late sixties there would have been an abundant technical literature.

Deal: By the late sixties, yes. A lot of books written.

Lowood: But at that time, you still were pretty much dependent on Bell Labs and personal . . .

Deal: Bell Labs, a little bit coming out of some of the other companies. Raytheon had some internal texts or reports we also used, that we were able to get a hold of.

Lowood: The Fairchild reports, the series that you just gave me for Stanford, were those things that you had access to then, at Rheem?

Deal: Well, the ones that were published as technical papers, although I'm sure that a lot of that was used by some of the development people. Those early ones, the first batch that I gave you, there was not much technology in there. They were more applications.

Lowood: The internal reports would not have gotten out?

Deal: No, the internal reports did not, but the ones that were published in the papers did. And we used the IRE journal, which was the forerunner of the IEEE. And I do remember reading several special issues of the IRE journal in the early sixties, while I was at Rheem, which would give a lot of the background. And a lot of that, again, was from Bell, some from Raytheon, Sylvania, and so on.

Lowood: So by '63, when you moved over to Fairchild, you felt you had gotten your apprenticeship under your belt and you were ready to go.

Deal: I don't know if I felt that. It turns out, it's probably the case.

Lowood: OK, I think we can stop here, and then pick up next time with Fairchild, OK?

[END OF INTERVIEW #1] [an error occurred while processing this directive]