This just in from Jacques Laneuville

Hello Gord,

Got the link from LinkedIn Pulse.

I remember some of those stories. I remember the Calma (and it’s temperamental pen). I remember the entire plant being encircled by trailers (including Bennett’s rock) that were offices, conference rooms, library, etc... I remember a party at Melodie Lee’s where everyone wound up in the pool (helped by you in some cases).

Got some information from Luc Carrier about the missing names in your blog picture:

“A cote de Francois Tanguay c’est Paul Aubin, a la droite de Gord c’est Tino Varelas je crois et a la droite de Gord il ressemble a Pierre Codere mais je ne me rappele pas qu’il ait travaille a Bromont. »

For the purchase of the Bromont fab by Mitel, it was 1976.

Have a good day,

Jacques Laneuville

Ed. Note - These edits are now made. Bennett's rock is still there on the lawn in front of the old part of the building (I will take a picture if nobody has one), Ralph Bennett was responsible for the semiconductor division in its early days and when he heard how much it would cost to blast it and remove it he said 'leave it there' - an early example of lean management.

The trailers formed a maze both in the parking lot and in front of the building. I remember a group of engineers getting together in the far end of one series of trailers where they had set up a monitor for a micro-probing station with a TV tuner so we could watch one of the early shuttle takeoffs.

Concerning Melodie Lee's pool party - no comment... 

A challenge now and again....

We had a few tough periods... at one point we were having field failures from a variety of components and could not figure it out. They didn't fail if they were mounted in ceramic packages (expensive) but seemed to stop working after about two years in the plastic packages we wanted to use (cheap). We mounted a campaign called 'ISO in plastic' and studied everything we could think of: conformal die coatings, new package materials, new packaging techniques, sources of contamination in our fabrication line (even to the extent of firing off the halon fire extinguishers to see if they were leaking contamination). 

It was an incredible time in the industry, we were all just geeks working on cool problems and we instantly shared information if it would help someone else. The head of Process R&D, Jack Morris, asked a friend about this problem and he found out that we had been increasing the amount of phosporous in our passivation glass (PSG) to make it more resistant to cracking. At about 7% phosphorous we had reached the point where moisture coming through the package could leach it out and make corrosive phosphoric acid which was attacking the aluminum interconnect on the chips. The answer was to replace half the phosphorous with boron and make borophosphosilicate glass (BPSG). It had cost us millions to sort this out...

I remember the GPT

Test equipment for semiconductors was EXPENSIVE ( we were shocked at the idea of a MILLION dollar tester from LTX, Teradyne or Megatest) so people tried all sorts of workarounds; software on a PC controlling a rack full of benchtest equipment using HPIB or RS-232, multiple dedicated test stations (one for analog, one for digital, one for or RF) or custom standalone test boards using an on-board processor, etc.

The approach at Mitel was to take the chassis from an SX-200 PBX and to retarget it as a test system by developing custom cards for the power supplies, switch matrix, system controller etc. The hardware was the responsability of Russ Fields and the software was done by Brad Snoulten (sp?). It was a very cost effective system, programmed in a language called SEMTEL, but it had a personality.

Every few months when the new coop students came in Claude Auclair, head of test department operations would plunk down a box of 1 Ohm, 1 Watt resistors. These were the limit resistors for the 1 Ampere range on the power supplies and new programmers routinely blew them up. You could judge the quality of the new programmers by the smell in the test area.

One night, test engineer Gerry Ebata and I were sitting over a GPT working on a production problem. Gerry got really frustrated and, in his patented fashion (he destroyed many a keyboard 'Return' key), bashed down on the keys to spell out F*** YOU on the tester command line... the machine came back with 'Same to you fella'. We were completeley paralyzed with laughter for minutes, it turned out that Brad Snoulten had programmed SEMTEL to respond to the word F***. We spent quite a long time testing other phrases to see if we could find more 'Easter eggs'.

Mitel Semiconductor Product Engineering in 1981

Back L-R Colin Harris, Charles Morin, Andrée Girard, Paul Aubin Francois Tanguay, Andre Chartrand, Marcel DeGrandpre, XXX, Gord Harling, XXXX. Front Row L-R Steve Kruse, Andre Houde, Frank Lee, Pêter Perry

This in from Jacques Laneuville and Luc Carrier

Got some information from Luc Carrier about the missing names in your blog picture:

“A cote de Francois Tanguay c’est Paul Aubin, a la droite de Gord c’est Tino Varelas je crois et a la droite de Gord il ressemble a Pierre Codere mais je ne me rappele pas qu’il ait travaille a Bromont. »

Quel droit d'abord? and could Edouardo Gotti be one of those? (suggested by Jean Marcoux)

Little help?

Aaaah, the Calma

Keeping a semiconductor fabrication line full was a problem then, as it is now. Mitel took all sorts of contracts including, at one point, the manufacture and test of a car racing game for Magnavox. The two chip set was mounted (die-bonded) on a hybrid substrate but the design was so quirky (and process control so variable) that batch-to-batch the yield would vary from 0 to about 60%, if I recall. The solution was to bond up three or four and then test them,.. testing involved getting people (usually young women from the operations staff) to play the game several times and note down any anomalies. I remember seeing hybrids with notes scribbled on them like 'No sound', 'Left car doesn't work'...

The best tester was Monique Poulin, she was considered to have such a light touch with electronic devices that they made her the Calma operator. The Calma was a station for doing layout but at the time there were no colour screens so all layout was done in various shades of green differentiated by different dashed lines or cross-hatching. I did some manual modifications to the 8804 on it, a chip with fewer than 1 000 transistors it it took days of painstaking effort, not the least of which was the checking. The Calma computer was serial number 18 and it had been created using wire-wrapped components, It took up several large cabinets (each a bit smaller than a refridgerator), it used a digitizing pen and x-y tablet and came with a huge 6 foot by 6 foot by 4 foot high Xynetics 1100 plotter. When Mitel wanted to get rid of it I bought it at auction and kept it in my basement for years, I still regret that I sold it off for metal scrap when I moved to Calgary but I still have a few of the peripherals and a complete set of printed manuals.

Siltek to Mitel

In the 1970s there was a company called Siltek International with a factory in Bromont, Quebec. They were a very highly regarded supplier of 4000 series CMOS but didn't seem to be able to make a go of it financially. (Does anyone know why?)

Around 1976 Mitel was in a bind, the key component they used in their electronic Private Branch Exchanges (PBX), the 8804, was being obsoleted by Motorola. The 8804 replaced reed relays used on competing systems and so with no moving parts, very low power, and much higher reliability it was a key differentiator for the company. The component was an 8 by 4 analog switch array built in 9 micron metal-gate CMOS. They wouldn't be able to ship product without it! Fortunately around that time the Siltek foundry was up for sale at the ridiculous bargain price of $800k, It included the design tools (enormous Calma GDS-II machines), the complete semiconductor fabrication facility, test equipment, and a packaging facility. They bought it and redesigned the 8804 to solve their supply problem.

Some legendary semiconductor people were around at that time including Alan Aitken (the inventor of ISO-CMOS), Ralph Bennett (of whom many stories are told), Tam Nguyen, Peter Dakin, Peter Kung.

Welcome, and some background

As a result of a friendly dinner between semiconductor industry veterans/survivors we decided to record some of our stories of the semiconductor and microelectronics industry in Canada. If you have a good story, please pitch in (heck, give us the bad ones too), if you were involved in one of these stories, please comment, Pictures and links are welcome.