Frances and Bill Hugle founded semiconductor equipment maker Hugle Industries in 1966. They’d decided to use the knowledge they’d accumulated in the semiconductor industry, starting with Westinghouse in the 1950s and extending through their founding of Siliconix in 1962 and Stewart-Warner Microcircuits in 1963, to consult for other semiconductor companies and to build semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Back then, semiconductor manufacturing was so new that there was no equipment ecosystem to draw upon. Large semiconductor makers including Bell Labs and Western Electric, Fairchild Semiconductor, IBM, Motorola, and Texas Instruments had all developed internal resources for developing semiconductor processing lines … Read More → "The Semiconductor Company from Another World: The Siliconix Story, Part 5 – Semiconductor Equipment and SEMI"

In their 15 years of working together since their marriage in 1947, Frances and Bill Hugle accumulated all the technical know-how they needed to manufacture transistors and ICs. From their efforts to produce gemstones at Stuart Labs, they developed techniques for growing crystal ingots, annealing those ingots, and doping them with impurities. From their years developing optical encoder technology at the DH Baldwin Piano Company, they developed the technology for depositing semiconductor thin films and using photolithography to pattern images on circuit boards and optical disks. At Westinghouse, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, they participated in clean … Read More → "The Semiconductor Company from Another World: The Siliconix Story, Part 4 – Siliconix and Stewart-Warner Microcircuits"

After spending five years at the DH Baldwin Piano company developing photocells for optical encoders, Bill and Frances Hugle were ready for a new challenge. According to family records, Bill left for Youngwood, Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh in 1958 to help Westinghouse set up a new cleanroom at its semiconductor fab in that town. Frances followed with their four children in February 1960. However, the Hugles would not stay in Pennsylvania for long. By the end of 1960, they’d relocated to Thousand Oaks, California – putting them closer and closer to Silicon Valley.

Big things were … Read More → "The Semiconductor Company from Another World: The Siliconix Story, Part 3 – Molecular Electronics"

Bill Hugle and Frances Sarnat married in 1947 after each had earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Chicago. The two started a business making artificial gemstones in 1948, but the venture went bust by 1951 because of a patent infringement lawsuit brought against Bill Hugle by Linde Air Products, which had hired him as a plant chemist in 1947, just before he started his side business with his wife. The Hugles wanted to continue working together and, after receiving many rejections to employment inquiries, were able to secure employment with the DH Baldwin Piano Company of Cincinnati, … Read More → "The Semiconductor Company from Another World: The Siliconix Story, Part 2 – Starting the Optical Encoder Industry"

Starting in the 1940s, Bill Hugle and Frances Sarnat Hugle founded technology companies that drew them further and further into the semiconductor business. Together they kicked off the development of precision optical encoders, founded semiconductor makers Siliconix and Stewart-Warner Microcircuits, and developed semiconductor manufacturing equipment on both the east and west coasts of the US. Along the way, the couple endured many business reversals and enough legal and political intrigue to fill several lifetimes, yet their story is essentially untold. Until now.

If you look at the famous chart of early semiconductor makers … Read More → "The Semiconductor Company That Came From Another World: the Siliconix Story, Part 1 – Starting With Star Sapphires"