Self-Teach Past Every Gatekeeper

"Self-studying semiconductors, gradually standing out At the same time, I began to teach myself semiconductors. My textbook was Shockley’s (one of the inventors of the transistor and a Nobel Prize winner) classic work, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. For a beginner, this is quite a difficult textbook. The feeling of first reading Homer’s epic poems when I had just arrived in the United States six years earlier appeared once again."

"Of course, relying solely on myself was absolutely not enough, because the book often contained passages that I read again and again, thought about again and again, and still did not understand. At those times, I had no choice but to ask someone. Ask whom? At that time I worked in Ipswich. Ipswich is a very small town, about sixty or seventy miles from Boston, and driving back and forth took more than three hours. Living in Boston was very inconvenient for me, but my wife was still working in Boston, so we were not in a hurry to find a home in Ipswich. For the first two months, I lived in the only hotel in Ipswich. Staying at the same hotel was a colleague who was recognized within Sylvania as a semiconductor expert; he became my first semiconductor teacher. I remember the hotel room was not comfortable, but it did have a decent restaurant. My “teacher” loved to drink. Every evening from 6:30 p.m. until the restaurant closed at 10 p.m., he spent all his time on alcohol. While drinking, he would also order a dish, to give the meal some meaning. My habit was to sit with him at dinner every day. At that time I still could not really drink, so I ate my dinner while he drank his alcohol, but when I asked him about parts I could not understand, he patiently explained them to me. Although he drank a lot, I never saw him truly drunk, and he indeed was a good expert—he could answer most of my questions. Every night, after I finished my meal and asked my questions, I went back to my room to continue reading. But sometimes when I encountered new questions, I would still go back to the restaurant to find him; as long as it was before the restaurant closed, he was almost certainly drinking alone."

"My time at Sylvania can be said to have been the beginning of my fervent learning of semiconductor technology. After spending the first few months focusing on Shockley’s Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors, most of what I learned came from academic papers published at the time or from my daily R&D work. Fortunately, my new boss held a Harvard PhD and was quite proficient in transistor theory, which benefited me greatly. Starting in 1956, I began attending semiconductor academic conferences at least two or three times a year. In December 1956, I published my first semiconductor paper, and in 1957 I published two more papers. In hindsight, these papers were insignificant, but they helped quite a bit in raising my standing inside and outside the company."

"The director who had hired me had found another position and left the company. After he left, few people mentioned production-line automation. In fact, talking about semiconductor automation at that time was at least ten years too early, because the process changed frequently—as could be seen from the fact that I changed the soldering method within just a few weeks. With a process that changed so often, how could it be automated? I was no longer worried that the purpose for which I had originally been hired no longer existed, because over several months my confidence in my own semiconductor skills increased day by day, and I even felt that within the production engineering department, I knew more than the other engineers. My supervisor—the production engineering manager—valued me quite a bit, and I gradually drew the attention of supervisors in other departments as well."