Signetics

~ the obituary ~

The first chip I was ever handed in a lab was a 555. Eight pins pushed into a breadboard next to a couple of resistors and a capacitor, and an LED blinking at whatever rate the arithmetic said it should. Nobody in the room said the word Signetics and it is not printed on most of the parts you can buy today, because a dozen companies have made them since 1972. The number survived. The company that put it in a catalog stopped being a company on the first day of 1993.

Signetics was incorporated in Mountain View on 12 september 1961 by four engineers who had resigned from Fairchild the month before. Fairchild was making its money on discrete transistors and its management was afraid that integrated circuits would eat into the customers it already had, so the people who believed in the integrated circuit had to leave to build one. Signetics was the first company in the world founded for that single purpose and nothing else. Lehman Brothers put up the first million dollars.

It nearly went under twice in five years. The original plan was custom circuits designed to order, which nobody wanted enough of, and the money was almost gone by late 1962 when Corning Glass Works bought 51 percent for $2.25 million. Then the Defense Department decided in 1963 to move to microelectronics, the military contractors came looking, and Signetics was one of very few firms selling what they needed. By 1964 it was the largest maker of integrated circuits in the valley and had a new fab in Sunnyvale. Fairchild then copied its parts and undercut its prices until the market came back the other way, and Corning used its controlling stake to push most of the founders out for having lost it.

What came after the founders left was the run of parts people actually remember, starting with the first commercial phase locked loop line in april 1970 and the 2650 microprocessor after it. Then in 1971 an outside contractor named Hans Camenzind, working alone with borrowed equipment rather than accept a fifty percent pay cut during the recession, designed a general purpose timer that fit in an eight pin package. Signetics marketed it in 1972 as the IC Time Machine. It has been in continuous production ever since and is still made by the billion, and it is probably the only integrated circuit whose part number is known by people who have never worked in electronics.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

In 1972 an engineer named John Curtis wrote a fake datasheet for a fake part, the Signetics 25120 fully encoded 9046 x N random access write only memory. It has a proper block diagram and a set of characteristic curves, one of which plots number of pins remaining against number of socket insertions. Signetics bought a two page spread in Electronics magazine for it in april and then put the thing in the actual catalog, where it sat looking exactly like every other part.

Customers rang up asking for pricing and delivery on the write only memory. Management found out about the joke from the sales calls. Fifty years later the phrase is still in every programmer's dictionary as the standard term for code or a file that gets written and never usefully read again, which is a longer run than most real parts get.

~ what replaced it ~

Philips announced the merger in march 1975 and closed it on 5 june at $8 a share, then kept the Signetics name on the door for another eighteen years while quietly wiring the company into the rest of its semiconductor business. The Utah operation, which had started in 1966 in a converted bowling alley in Provo and grew into a fab at Orem, shut on 15 december 1992 with 900 people still in it. Two weeks later the name changed. In 2006 the division was sold to private investors and became NXP, which is what the surviving fabs answer to now.

There is a live company called Signetics today, in South Korea, and it is not this one in any sense that matters. Signetics Korea was registered on 14 september 1966 as an assembly plant, the first integrated circuit assembly plant in the country. Philips spun it off in 1995 and the Young Poong Group has used the name since 2000. The Sunnyvale buildings went the other way. The 811 Arques site, where the whole thing was designed and where the solvent tank leaked into the groundwater in 1984, was demolished in 2004. The old timers held a reunion in the building that july before the machines came for it.

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