Edward S Bumgarner ©2009
I came from a small southern Oklahoma city known as Davis, Oklahoma in September of 1966 to hire on at Texas Instruments, Inc. in the large city of Dallas, Texas.
Overwhelming to say the least, however I had several friends, also from Davis, who I lived with for a while, and they taught me Dallas, Texas.
I hired on in the Materials Building in Richardson, Texas on 12th day of September, 1966. I admit I was somewhat awed by what I saw when I was led into the area of my assignment. I was beginning to wonder what I had gotten myself into.
I saw machines with quartz tubes mounted in them with small silicon bars situated inside of the quartz tubes with the rod being zoned at 2000°. An operator wore dark green lensed glasses to be able to get close and read the zone of the bar being zoned.
These bars had slits cut at a 45° angle down one side, and each slit was loaded with a dopant in order to bring the silicon into a certain resistivity, such as 45 to 55 ohms.
This was early day or the forerunner of today's chips made with silicon. Silicon is one of the hardest substances created by man. If dropped onto a hard surface, it will shatter, but it takes a diamond bladed saw to cut through it.
The float zone working area had lots of different kinds of gases in the radius of the shop. We used gases such as: nitrogen, argon, phosphene, and chemicals such as sulfuric acid and HCl.
This was my first job with Texas Instruments.
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