MICROELECTRONICS NEWSLETTER
August 7, 1976

NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
National's efforts in add-on memories should provide them some super background in solving important systems problems and, based upon IBM's price structure, should be profitable. Although competition exists from Intersil/AMS, that organization will be pretty busy and probably will not make any important new market pushes in plug-compatible field. National's watch difficulty has been fairly well reported and ICE believes that none of the problems thus far uncovered should be long-term; i.e., more than a few weeks long. Although this does put a niche in quarterly revenues, it should not affect National for very long. ICE still harbors some concern that hybrid and assembly problems on a broader scale exist.

FAIRCHILD
Fairchild will have difficulty in retaining its better personnel based on the present salary schedule and it's likely that some adjustments would have to be made.

AMI/PRESIDENT PENISTEN
Penisten should have quite an impact on AMI's mode of operations, since it's vastly different than Texas Instruments. His semiconductor background was primarily gained at Texas Instruments.

SECOND SOURCING - FAIRCHILD, MOSTEK
Second sourcing will become more important for some of the complex circuits such as 4K RAM. More and more, effective second source and even a third source is a requirement for a major purchase order. The large system houses have been flexible in using different parts compatible at the board level, but they are tiring of the extra bother and expense.

KAPTON
Kapton is fairly well known in the industry and is the basis for many of the gang-bonding procedures such as the one developed by General Electric, and now utilized by TI. Previous techniques bonded the punched Kapton to a copper foil with an epoxy adhesive.

MONOLITHIC MEMORIES
It is difficult to see how a semiconductor house could absorb very many systems people, although the microprocessor bit-slice products need lots of applications help. The MM systems business (minicomputer) has been advertised very little, and the industry is generally unaware of the effort.