Presentation: Bipolar Transistors/ICs in the Lehigh Valley and Beyond: October 20, 2016
Abstract
Many of you have worked at or have heard about the Western Electric
Semiconductor Plants at Allentown and Reading, or the associated
Bell Labs branch laboratories. Before Silicon Valley, some believe
the birth place and youth home of military and commercial transistors
and custom IC’s was in eastern Pennsylvania. In 1961, starting with
a single PNPN transistor that could switch 8 KW in 100 ns for military
radar up to 1995 when Reading/Allentown Western Electric/ Bell Labs
made the front page of Electronic News with a full chip set for GSM
cellular, Reading and Allentown WE/BL have been among the leaders in
semiconductors. This talk, by Paul Davis (in Reading/Allentown since
1962), will include a partial listing of major semiconductor and
learning projects, and some anecdotes about them. In 1962, RF
amplifiers above 1 GHz were being built with Reading transistors.
In 1970, 30 years before smart phones, Picturephone © (using Reading
IC's and light detector) was transmitting and receiving TV type
pictures in real time over Bell System transmission systems.
Included will be some old pictures of Reading people (some passed),
list of major development projects, and a list of educational
projects (such as conferences and in-hours courses). Also included
will be a brief history of the BCTM Conference, which emphasizes
bipolar transistors and IC's.
Biography
Paul C. Davis received the B.S. Degree from West Virginia University,
the M.S. degree from MIT, and the Ph.D. degree from Lehigh
University. He worked for Bell Telephone Labs and its successor
Lucent Technologies from 1962 to 2001.
Paul was recognized as Bell Labs' expert on architectures and
circuit topologies of bipolar ICs, particularly of complex systems
such as transceivers. His bipolar GSM cell phone architectures
from the late 1980's were the industry standard from 1995 until 2000.
He provided both marketing and technical contributions in
negotiating specifications with prospective customers, defining
chip architectures, and specifying subcircuit performance requirements.
He has also made major contributions to clock recovery circuits
for fiber optics data transmission, line feed telephone circuits,
single-chip telephone IC design, and T1C repeater circuits.
Paul has given nine graduate seminars at major universities in the
US and abroad. He has 20 publications and 18 US patents.
He is truly a major participant in ISSCC, where he has: given 7
ISSCC papers, one of which received the 1981 "Best Paper Award",
served on ISSCC's Technical Program Committee for 11 years, and
attended every ISSCC since 1962 – 56 consecutive years and counting!
Paul was named a Bell Labs Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
in 1982, and an IEEE Fellow in 2011.