Birth of the 8804 SuperSwitch

I received this from Graham Neathway, employee # 15 at Mitel...

Birth of the 8804 SuperSwitch

The following is a section from my memories.

Graham Neathway

About this time I convinced Bob Durance to join Mitel and he worked with me on the development of the first series of pbx hardware. Albert Hum also joined from Consolidated Computers as the first software engineer in Mitel. Albert’s task was to write programs so that we could prove out the hardware that we were developing.

The Motorola 6800 was the heart of the system; however it was not fast enough to look at all the tasks in the PBX. In order to monitor all the modules I developed a scanner, which was, in fact, a variant of the keyboard circuit that I had developed at Consolidated Computers. We now built the first system. It was called the SR80 and was capable of servicing up to eighty internal telephone circuits. A total of three systems were built; one for the RCMP and one for the Canadian Navy and one unit to keep at Mitel.

When the first systems were completed and operational, there was a great feeling of satisfaction. We had developed, in less than a year, a system that Northern would have taken many years over. Our elation was soon to be short lived. I remember Bob and me sitting down and looking at the finished unit and asking ourselves, “Who would buy an eighty line PBX from an unknown company such as Mitel, when they could buy a Northern system?” Our cabinet was six feet high and was therefore no smaller than Northern and I doubt whether it would have been much cheaper. Its only benefit was that it was software controlled compared to the hardwired Northern SG1. How could we reduce its size and cost?

Most of the integrated circuits in the SR80 were of the CMOS family. This provided us with ICs that operated at voltages up to fifteen volts and low power; also there was an analog switch circuit, the 4016, which we used for controlling the speech paths. For each of the line circuits we used a block of fifteen CMOS ICs.

One of our potential suppliers of these ICs was a company called Siltek, which operated out of Bromont, in Quebec Province. Siltek were having a hard time to keep going and there was talk that they were about to go bankrupt. Their major shareholder was the Quebec government. Mike Cowpland met with the government and the outcome was that Mitel, in 1976, took over the ownership of the company and it became known as Mitel Semiconductor. We now had our own IC design and manufacturing group and in turn, an answer to the problem of how to reduce the size of the SR80.

Bob and I met with Frank Dea, the engineer from Siltek and it was decided that it would be feasible to develop an IC that would contain all of the fifteen ICs into the one package. The new IC was named the Mitel 8804 SuperSwitch.

A rush was now on to redesign the PBX, using all the ideas that we had developed with respect to reducing its size and cost. We started in September 1976 and the target was to have a machine ready for an important Telephony show in April 1977. This was a major project and the tasks were split up between several engineers. Bob and I did the common control and the digital portion of the line circuit. Pat Beirne developed a solid state line circuit that got rid of the bulky transformers in the line and trunk circuits. Bill Kiss, who had joined us from Consolidated Computers, designed the main power supply. By April we had the first SX200, which had twice the capability of the SR80 and was in a cabinet half the size. We now had a product that could compete with Northern.

We had achieved the goal of providing a system for the Telephony show in April 1977 and to celebrate this event, Mike and Terry arranged for the whole company to go on a trip to Florida. A DC10 was just big enough to accommodate the whole company at that time.

OK, a little to the south, but still pretty close to Silicon Tundra

Pissing away a million dollars

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/pissing-away-a-million-dollars-2015-12/

Serendipity and HCL

This contribution from Ian McWalter of CMC

In the 1970s there was a company in Ottawa called Microsystems International, essentially a research wing for Northern Telecom (Nortel for anyone under 30). They had great technical successes but were eventually shut down... this closure and the severance pay that came with it led to a tech boom in Ottawa a decade later and still today.

Semiconductors were plagued by contaminating mobile ions like sodium (Na+) which were especially problematic in the growth of transistor gate oxide. To try to reduce contamination HydroChloric gas.(HCL) was used to flush the quartz tubes in which the gate growth (oxidation) was carried out. One night a technician forgot to turn off the HCl source during a gate oxide growth and the result was spectacularly good transistor performance! Within a short time every foundry used HCl during gate oxidation,

The paper is here http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/119/3/388.abstract

and the patent is here http://www.google.com/patents/US3692571

And more challenges

Short delay while two of my old start-ups get exited and I launch two new ones, sorry

In the early 80`s we had replaced our barrel plasma etchers with more modern Tegal planar etchers. All of our production was converted over and soon after yields dropped drastically (especially on the 8870 DTMF tone decoder), once again everyone went into frantic overtime, weeks and months went by and our entire work-in-process was in peril. After millions of dollars in losses Stuart Boyd was able to measure definite short circuits between polysilicon lines on the wafers. He determined that there were fine 'stringers' left after etch along the edges of any 'steps' in the underlying topography. Polysilicon lines which went over a step were thicker in the vertical direction and since the reactive species in the planar etchers only travelled vertically and not anisotropically they never got completely removed.

A few months later we invited Alan Reinberg, a senior scientist at Perkin Elmer, to come and speak to us. He gave a fascinating talk on plasma etch in general and then came to he subject of the challenges of planar etchers. When he said 'obviously you have to adjust for some anisotropy in the etch to eliminate poly stringers' we all got very interested in our shoes.... if only we had invited him a few months earlier.

Bennett's rock... and Colin Harris (guess which is which)

Colin Harris came to Bromont this week so we had a quick tour around. This is his last week at PMC-Sierra, he is retiring and will be working with a number of start-ups in and around Vancouver.

Colin reminded me of a story from the early days...

One of the HR Directors from Kanata came down for a celebration we were having and, coincidentally, he was thrown in a swimming pool (an astonishing number of bars had adjoining pools at the time). He made the mistake of taking off his wet clothes and piling them on a chair. Needless to say, his clothes disappeared instantly and he never found them. He drove back to Kanata at 3 in the morning, arrived at 6 am and had to run into the house in his wet underwear. Try explaining that to a loving wife.

Just for closure - the clothes were on the floor in the back seat of his car..

This from Peter Gillingham

I too remember the Calma. I joined Mitel in 1983, a little bit late for those helicopter trips from Kanata to Bromont. I remember long nights in the Kanata Calma tents putting together analog sections of the BLIC (later renamed DNIC) and the BPhone. I think there may have been a third chip for the Bullet system but can't remember what it was. We'll have to track down Ken Buttle or Pat Beirne to find out. Also remember fun days in the lab with massive coils of twisted pair tracking down transmission dropouts in the DNIC and SNIC. I think I achieved the record for the tallest stack of equipment actually used in a test. The one piece of equipment I could not use was a weird box with toggle switches and screwdriver adjusted potentiometers that Gregg Aasen purchased to test the DDX. It was only later after I joined MOSAID that I understood what the SRT-1 memory tester did.

The invention of the STM

The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was invented in 1981 and resulted in a Nobel Prize for Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer of IBM in 1986, That must be some sort of record, usually Nobel prize winners have to survive many decades to be recognized. It uses vacuum tunneling of electrons from a sharp metal tip to a surface and can obtain precision to the level of single atoms When they first submitted their paper it was refused as being preposterous, they had glued together pieces of thick cardboard which they had cut out after tracing single scans on them and then taken a Polaroid picture of the resulting 3D surface, 

I was at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal in 1988 and they had a guest speaker from one of the IBM research labs involved in STM development. He showed astounding video of real-time scans of cleaved graphite surfaces, identified lattice defects, and even demonstrated perturbations caused by single gas atoms when the vacuum was broken. At the end of his talk he said 'I have brought a few microscopes along to show you' and picked up a shoe box that had left on the counter! He pulled out little blocks of teflon with stacked piezoelectric devices glued to them and a metal probe tip with wires hanging off. I had been envisioning room-sized ultra-hightech equipment... How many more simple but powerful inventions are out there to discover?