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"