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"