Mostek

~ the obituary ~

There is a line in every PC BIOS memory menu called CAS latency. Anyone who has ever tuned a machine has looked at it and either changed the number or decided not to. CAS stands for column address strobe, and it exists because in 1973 an engineer at a Texas chip company decided to send the row and the column of a memory address down the same set of pins one after the other, instead of giving each its own. Every stick of RAM since has been talked to that way. The company that made the call was Mostek and it has not existed since 1985.

Mostek was founded in 1969 by L. J. Sevin and a group of Texas Instruments colleagues who walked out with him. Its first contract was worth four hundred dollars. The early chips were built in Massachusetts with Sprague Electric, which had put up money and had a fab, and by 1974 the manufacturing had moved to a converted warehouse on Crosby Road in Carrollton, outside Dallas. What set them apart early was ion implantation, a way of controlling exactly how much dopant went into the silicon, which let them run MOS parts faster and cheaper than competitors still working in bipolar.

The MK4096 arrived in 1973 with Robert Proebsting's multiplexed addressing and the sixteen pin package. Competitors ran a campaign against it, on the grounds that two extra pins were cheaper than the complexity. Proebsting's argument was about the next twenty years rather than that quarter: with multiplexing, every fourfold jump in memory size costs one more pin instead of two. By 1977 the MK4116 16K part had more than three quarters of the world market, and by the end of the decade Mostek had 85 percent of DRAM. The company also second-sourced the Z80 as the MK3880 and shrank the die by a fifth while doing it, which is how a Zilog design ended up inside a very large share of the CP/M machines of that era.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

United Technologies bought Mostek in 1979 for 345 million dollars, largely to block a hostile approach from Gould. A conglomerate that built jet engines and elevators now owned a memory company, and it made the decision that memory companies keep making: it dropped the telecom and microprocessor lines that were quietly profitable and put everything into DRAM, which is the most brutally cyclical product in the industry.

The cycle then did what it does. Japanese producers took the 64K generation and the price fell from about 3.50 dollars to 35 cents inside eighteen months. Mostek's own 256K part was late because the design was too ambitious for its process, so the company had nothing to sell into the recovery. The US Commerce Department ruled in favor of the dumping complaint on 4 december 1985, seven weeks too late to matter. United Technologies had already closed the company on 17 october and sold it to Thomson-CSF days afterward for 71 million dollars, less than a quarter of what it had paid.

~ what got buried with it ~

Mostek held second-source rights to the Intel x86 family and to the Motorola 68000, which is to say rights to both processor lines that mattered for the next twenty-five years, and it let both sit while it fought over memory prices. Jerry Rogers founded Cyrix in 1988 specifically to use those x86 rights, and spent years in court with Intel over them. Micron was started by a handful of Mostek people and is still one of the last American memory makers standing.

Thomson called back roughly a fifth of the workforce, ran the operation as Thomson Components-Mostek, and in 1987 merged it with Italy's SGS-ATES into what is now STMicroelectronics. The patents turned out to be the most valuable thing in the box: between 1987 and 1993 the licenses brought in 450 million dollars, six times what the whole company had sold for. Some of the survivors still meet for lunch every february in Texas under the name MostekLives.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »