The Reticon Corporation was incorporated in January 1971 in Sunnyvale CA. It is one of several semiconductor companies formed in the '60s and '70s by former employees of Fairchild Semiconductor. Intel, another one of these companies, was an early investor, holding a 22% share in the company.[1]
Reticon LC600: Early digital camera (1974) with linear photodiode sensor array of from 64 to 1024 elements. Used for noncontact measurements, process control, and position measurements in industrial applications.
Co-founder Gene Weckler started Reticon after several years at Shockley and eight years at Fairchild Semiconductor. He served as VP from 1971 until 1997. He states that Reticon developed and marketed the first solid state imaging devices, the first digital imaging cameras, and the first computer-controlled vision systems marketed in the USA. They also introduced the first commercially available switched-capacitor filters, and a variety of discrete-time analog signal processing.[2] Other founders included Ed Snow and John Rado.
The company is known as a pioneer in certain technologies including the BBD (bucket-brigade device) and CCD (charge-coupled device). This included creation of such integrated circuits as the SAD512, SAD1024, SAD4096, R5101 and R5601. These were popularly used by companies such as MXR, Boss Corporation, Electro-Harmonix, A/DA and others in various electric guitar effects such as analog delay, chorus and flanging devices through the 1970s and 1980s. [3]. Reticon also made very steep analog filters useful for audio measurement.
In June 1999, EG&G purchased Perkin-Elmer Analytical Instruments for $425 million.[4] Reticon then became part of the new Optoelectronics division.
Weckler went on to form Rad-icon Imaging Corporation in 1997, where he continued to work in semiretirement until 2009.[5]
The former Reticon group was shuttered by PerkinElmer in the mid 2000s, with some employees and assets transferring into the Amorphous Silicon division. PerkinElmer Optoelectronics was then spun off into Excelitas Technologies.
Robert Norton Noyce, nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He is also credited with the realization of the first monolithic integrated circuit or microchip, which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County and Santa Clara County. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States; other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world, according to the Brookings Institution, and, as of June 2021, has the highest percentage of homes valued at $1 million or more in the United States.
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications.
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of integrated circuits. Schlumberger bought the firm in 1979 and sold it to National Semiconductor in 1987; Fairchild was spun off as an independent company again in 1997. In September 2016, Fairchild was acquired by ON Semiconductor.
Gordon Earle Moore is an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corporation. He is also the original proponent of Moore's law.
Eugene Kleiner was an Austrian-American engineer and venture capitalist. He is considered a pioneer of Silicon Valley. He was one of the original founders of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm which later became Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company was an early investor in more than 300 information technology and biotech firms, including Amazon.com, AOL, Brio Technology, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Genentech, Google, Hybritech, Intuit, Lotus Development, LSI Logic, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems and Tandem Computers.
The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. William Shockley had in 1956 recruited a group of young Ph.D. graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular. This was accentuated by Shockley's research focus not proving fruitful. After the demand for Shockley to be replaced was rebuffed, the eight left to form their own company.
An opto-isolator is an electronic component that transfers electrical signals between two isolated circuits by using light. Opto-isolators prevent high voltages from affecting the system receiving the signal. Commercially available opto-isolators withstand input-to-output voltages up to 10 kV and voltage transients with speeds up to 25 kV/μs.
Jay Taylor Last was an American physicist, silicon pioneer, and member of the so-called "traitorous eight" that founded Silicon Valley.
Julius Blank was a semiconductor pioneer. A member of the so-called traitorous eight, he left Nobel-winning physicist William Shockley's company to form Fairchild Semiconductor.
Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation was a company founded by Sherman Fairchild. It was based on the East Coast of the United States, and provided research and development for flash photography equipment. The technology was primarily used for DOD spy satellites. The firm was later known for its manufacture of semiconductors.
Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), also known simply as Analog, is an American multinational semiconductor company specializing in data conversion, signal processing and power management technology, headquartered in Wilmington, Massachusetts.
EG&G, formally known as Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, Inc., was a United States national defense contractor and provider of management and technical services. The company was involved in contracting services to the United States government during World War II and conducted weapons research and development during the Cold war era. It had close involvement with some of the government's most sensitive technologies.
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, later known as Shockley Transistor Corporation, was a pioneering semiconductor developer founded by William Shockley, and funded by Beckman Instruments, Inc., in 1955. It was the first high technology company in what came to be known as Silicon Valley to work on silicon-based semiconductor devices.
PerkinElmer, Inc., previously styled Perkin-Elmer, is an American global corporation focused in the business areas of diagnostics, life science research, food, environmental and industrial testing. Its capabilities include detection, imaging, informatics, and service. PerkinElmer produces analytical instruments, genetic testing and diagnostic tools, medical imaging components, software, instruments, and consumables for multiple end markets.
A corporate spin-off, also known as a spin-out, or starburst or hive-off, is a type of corporate action where a company "splits off" a section as a separate business or creates a second incarnation, even if the first is still active.
Onsemi is an American semiconductor supplier company, based in Phoenix, Arizona and ranked #483 on the 2022 Fortune 500 based on its 2021 sales. Products include power and signal management, logic, discrete, and custom devices for automotive, communications, computing, consumer, industrial, LED lighting, medical, military/aerospace and power applications. onsemi runs a network of manufacturing facilities, sales offices and design centers in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions. Based on its 2016 revenues of $3.907 billion, onsemi ranked among the worldwide top 20 semiconductor sales leaders.
A bucket brigade or bucket-brigade device (BBD) is a discrete-time analogue delay line, developed in 1969 by F. Sangster and K. Teer of the Philips Research Labs in the Netherlands. It consists of a series of capacitance sections C0 to Cn. The stored analogue signal is moved along the line of capacitors, one step at each clock cycle. The name comes from analogy with the term bucket brigade, used for a line of people passing buckets of water.
Resistive opto-isolator (RO), also called photoresistive opto-isolator, vactrol, analog opto-isolator or lamp-coupled photocell, is an optoelectronic device consisting of a source and detector of light, which are optically coupled and electrically isolated from each other. The light source is usually a light-emitting diode (LED), a miniature incandescent lamp, or sometimes a neon lamp, whereas the detector is a semiconductor-based photoresistor made of cadmium selenide (CdSe) or cadmium sulfide (CdS). The source and detector are coupled through a transparent glue or through the air.
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