The i3101 Schottky TTL 64-bit RAM was Intel's first product
Courtesy of: Intel Corporation.

Since 1963 TTL (1963 Milestone) device complexity had advanced twenty-fold but switching speeds remained relatively unchanged at delays of 10-15 ns per gate. Speed is determined by how quickly charge stored in a transistor can be removed. Gold-doping (1961 Milestone) improved this but was difficult to control. A better approach is to reduce the amount of charge that is injected into the transistor in the first place using a Baker-clamp diode. In 1967 Ted Jenkins and Garth Wilson of Fairchild integrated such a device based on the Schottky diode (1931 Milestone). Concurrently Japan's Electrotechnical Laboratory developed similar technology. Jenkins used a Schottky diode in the design of Intel’s first product, the i3101 64-bit TTL compatible RAM. Introduced in 1969, the device was nearly twice as fast as earlier TTL products. (1966 Milestone)

In 1971 T.I. introduced the 74S Series TTL logic family using Schottky diodes to achieve 3 ns gate delays for high-speed applications. Low-power Schottky versions, designated LS, quickly replaced the original 7400 devices by offering the same speed at one fifth the power consumption. Chairman Mark Shepherd described 7400LS as “the single most profitable product line in the history of Texas Instruments.” AMD, Fairchild, Motorola, National, and Signetics also entered the market. Later generations, including Fairchild Advanced Schottky Technology (FAST), combined Schottky diodes with oxide-isolation processes for sub-2ns delays.

In the mid-1970s micro-programmable “bit-slice” processor families from AMD, Intel, MMI, and Signetics used Schottky technology to integrate LSI building blocks for very high performance arithmetic processing applications. (1979 Milestone)