Artifact Details

Title

Lathrop, Jay W. oral history

Catalog Number

102702095

Type

Document

Description

Physicist, Jay W. Lathrop was born in Bangor, Maine in 1927 and grew up in Orono, Maine. He received BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1952 he joined the National Bureau of Standards, which later became the Army's Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory. There, together with James Nall, he worked on transistor fabrication techniques to enable miniaturization of solid-state circuits for the Department of Defense. In 1947 they presented the first paper on using photographic techniques in the fabrication of transistors and coined the term 'photolithography' to describe the process.

In 1958 Lathrop joined Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas, Texas where he worked on integrated circuits with, among others, Jack Kilby, primarily as a member of TI's Research and Development Lab. He joined Clemson University as a professor of electrical engineering in 1968, where he was instrumental in establishing a well-respected semiconductor engineering curriculum. He retired from Clemson in 1989.

In this oral history, Dr. Lathrop also discusses the contributions of many of his fellow pioneers in the semiconductor industry and the differences between working in industry vs. academia.

Date

2009-05-07

Contributor

Lathrop, Jay W., Interviewee
Remacle, Rosemary, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, California

Extent

27 p.

Category

Transcription

Subject

Lathrop, Jay; semiconductor history; Buckbee-Mears; Clemson University; Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories (DOFL); Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation; Motorola; National Bureau of Standards; Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI); Adcock, Willis; Haggerty, Pat; Kilby, Jack; Nall, Jim; Noyce, Robert (Bob); Phipps, Charles; Shepherd, Mark; Teal, Gordon; fuzes; Germanium; masks; photolithography; planar circuits; planar process; resist; semiconductor; silicon; silicon crystals - formation; silicon wafers; silicon technology; transistors; transistor fabrication techniques; wafers

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Lot Number

X5313.2009