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Historic Note
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Over a 36
year career at RCA, from July 1951 until retirement in 1987, Frank Wheatley
was responsible for a number of “firsts” in the area of semiconductor
research – his contributions are numerous, including 58 U.S. patents
granted and additional patents currently pending. In addition, he has
presented 57 professional papers and published an additional 91 papers over
the span of six decades. His most productive patent is the U.S. Letters
Patent No. 4,364,073, entitled “Power MOSFET with an Anode Region”. This
was filed March 25, 1980, and issued Dec 14, 1982 to Hans W. Becke and Carl
F. Wheatley, Jr.. This is the seminal patent of the Insulated Gate Bipolar
Transistor (IGBT), which led to 1999 world sales in excess of $500,000,000,
the most recent year of data availability. In 1994, the College of
Engineering of the University of Maryland cited Mr. Wheatley for his
invention of the IGBT and other contributions by awarding him their Centennial
medal. This medal was given to the 100 most distinguished engineering
graduates during the college’s 100 year existence. Five years later, the
University of Maryland recognized Mr. Wheatley as one of their most
esteemed alumni innovators by naming him to the Hall of Fame of the A.
James Clark School of Engineering. Other recognitions include three awards
from RCA, four from Harris Corporation, and five from the IEEE, including
the honor of Life Fellow.
Mr. Wheatley
retired from RCA in 1987. At that time he was manager of the Rad Hard
Power and Advanced Device Design Group. He continues his work as a
consultant to Intersil Semiconductor (successor to RCA, GE and Harris) and
to Mission Research Corp.
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Oral History – C. Frank Wheatley
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This
History was provided by Mr. Wheatley
in
January, 2001.
Following a
two year and one half year commitment to the Army during WWII, I obtained a
BSEE from the University of Maryland, graduating in 1951. I joined RCA in
July, 1951 and started right away in the Corporate Training Program, which
consisted of several six week assignments at various RCA facilities, in
order to see what different types of work was being done. I had four
separate training assignments. Two of these assignments were directed
related to early transistor/diode research and development at the Harrison
plant Tube Division. I’ll provide details later. The other assignments
were involved with Pickup and Phototubes (Lancaster Tube Plant), a Fire
Control Computer (Camden) and a tape duplication amplifier the Record
Engineering facility at Indianapolis. I served as a production engineer on
early transistors at Harrison in 1953 and 1954, and then moved to the new
Somerville facility Semiconductor products Division, starting in 1955 as an
Applications engineer.
In 1955, I
designed and reduced to practice a monolithic power integrated circuit,
which combined a power transistor and a “Barton” compensation diode upon a
common germanium die, resulting in one of the world’s first integrated
circuits. This was done to improve thermal coupling between the devices.
In the early 1960s, I designed two noteworthy all-transistor circuits,
including an auto radio (Automatic Radio Corp) and a high fidelity stereo
amplifier (Heathkit AA-21). These were world firsts when measured by
performance, production capability and reliability.
NOTE:
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