The Don Liddie papers on Signetics contain the professional records of Don Liddie. The records span 1961 through 2006 with the bulk of the collection spanning 1975 through 1992, when Lidde was Vice President of Corporate Services and then Vice President of Human Resources and Administration at Signetics. Signetics merged with Philips in 1975, from that date forward in the collection Philips material appears. Items of note include a nearly complete run of Probe, the Signetics newsletter, as well as a series of scrapbooks, which Liddie created to document the history of Signetics. The scrapbooks contain especially unique material related to Signetics' international plants. Of special interest to engineers are data books and failure analysis handbooks.
Biography / Administrative History
Signetics, a contraction of Signal Network Electronics, was founded in 1961 in Mountain View, California by former Fairchild employees David Allison, David James, Lionel Kartner and Mark Weisenstein. It was the first company in the world established expressly to make and sell integrated circuits (IC). Within a year of its founding, the company's first family of bipolar digital diode transistor logic circuits had gained market acceptance and were finding initial application in military and space systems. Signetics was the first IC company to receive both Minuteman approval (1967) and NASA line certification 1970). Among the company's early innovations were the 555 timer, Dolby circuits, and the programmable read-only memory.
One of the scrapbooks contains two pages of 35mm color slides. These images have been attached as still images, although this record is for text documents.
