Semiconductor manufacturers who's who (historical reference)

changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has never heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

not know the answer. It would help to have a cheat sheet.

Aside: is IR the only really old semiconductor company, dating from the tube days?

changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has never heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

did not know the answer. It would help to have a cheat sheet.

Not from the tube days, maybe, but Fairchild is pretty old. From the

Fairchild disappeared completely for a while after National bought it. Today's Fairchild is just the Fairchild name attached to a spin-off from National.

On and Fairchild are both doing much better than I had expected -- I thought that Motorola and National were both just spinning off unprofitable old commodity stuff. In the case of FreeFall Semiconductor it appears that what was spun off was the good stuff!

It's not the same outfit, though. The old Fairchild Camera & Instrument became part of National long ago.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I have a collection of Sprague logic IC's.. I don't see them very much any more..

Btw, I found matched pairs of RCA transistors in my collection not to long ago, still sealed in their paired packages. Maybe that will become an Ebay grab one day! :)

Jamie

urer changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

er will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has ne ver heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

t I did not know the answer. It would help to have a cheat sheet.

RCA started in 1919, definitely exploited tubes (or valves in my dialect)

Philips - now NXP was founded in 1891 to make filamenent lamps.

Ferranti was even older, founded in 1885 to make big alternators

You like some of their transistors, including some of the avalanche- breakdown parts they have made in Russia.

Plessey was originally founded in 1917. Phil Hobbs liked some of their IC's. I worked for them for a while, in Australia

Sprague was bought by Allegro. Allegro is really the US arm of Sanken.

While we're at it, Cherry was bought by On.

I think you could make a list of who begat who by reading the wikis of the present day semiconductor companies and looking at the acquisitions.

changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has never heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

did not know the answer. It would help to have a cheat sheet.

All their chips got sold off to GE, iirc, then GE's s/c business went to Intersil and maybe Harris, at which point I sort of lost track.

Ferranti also made some interesting early nonvolatile displays, iirc, and maybe MNOS memory. (MNOS, not NMOS!)

I really liked the 11C90 prescaler, and especially their cute saturating amps, which had a gain of about 10 dB until saturation, at which point they rolled over cleanly to an incremental gain of 0 dB. That was a pretty good trick, and made it easy to build excellent DLVAs--you just cascaded a string of them into a diode detector, and you were done. The laser heterodyne confocal microscope that I built for my thesis project used those.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has never heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

did not know the answer. It would help to have a cheat sheet.

Toshiba (parent companies founded in the 19th century), Sony, Panasonic, NJR, Rohm, Nichia, Fujitsu...

cturer changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun o ff as a separate company or whatever.

omer will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" an d I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has never heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

hat I did not know the answer. It would help to have a cheat sheet.

Come to think of it, even Texas Instruments - nominally founded in

providing geological information to oil companies, and build sonar- based submarine detection gear for the US Navy during WW2

That crowdsourced semi database website from the Netherlands with the slightly risque name had good company histories and logo data as I remember. (Maybe somebody with less brain fade than I do can remember the name).

If it went the way of all things net (evaporating or going commercial), it might be archived somewhere like "the wayback machine" site.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has never heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

did not know the answer. It would help to have a cheat sheet.

it's not the same as the original fairchild.

TI pretty darn old and the same company. The

EDI in NY has been around since 1951, and there's probably other small specialty companies from around the same era still in operation.

Sanken is pretty old too. They claim founding in 1946 and their lab opening in 1937.

rer changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

r will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I 'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has nev er heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

Next some company will change name to "OFF". ON sounded stupid when the bra nded the new name, but now its rings fine and is hard to forget

Cheers

Klaus

changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

will say something like, "ON Semiconductor? Who the heck are they?" and I'll say, "They used to be Motorola." and the customer who obviously has never heard of ON but has heard of Motorola is comfortable with that.

the new name, but now its rings fine and is hard to forget

Back when I was with Cadence, I saw this one chart that listed all the companies that had merged/been acquired/been assimiliated to become Cadence. It was on a legal sized sheet of paper, and listed a couple of dozen companies...

Charlie

BUT..the Fairchild of now is NOT the original Fairchild (which used to be a fair-sized conglomerate). Hell, they do not even have anywhere the semiconductor breadth of the original company.

rangerssuck schrieb:

changing names, either because they were acquired by another, spun off as a separate company or whatever.

Hello,

a lot of history is found here:

Bye

I've always called it "O-N", since it's capitalized.

So did I.

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

Fairchild made VHF business radios, back in the '60s. I converted one to a two meter repeater, in the early '80s.