Synertek

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American company Synertek, Inc. was founded in 1973 as a masked ROM house, whose semiconductor product range branched out into a fairly broad offering of MOS/LSI chips (static RAMs, ROMs, EPROMs, dynamic and static shift registers) and then, sometime before 1979, second sourced versions of MOS Technology's successful 6502 8-bit microprocessor.

At some point Synertek acquired Microcomputer Associates, essentially consisting of engineers Manny Lemas and Ray Holt, after which the company was renamed Synertek Systems, Inc. In 1978 Synertek Systems released a 6502-based single board computer/evaluation kit called the SYM-1, a derivative of MOS Technology/Commodore Semiconductor Group's KIM-1. Sometime after 1979, Synertek was acquired by Honeywell.

Synertek's semiconductor fabrication plant in Santa Clara, California operated from 1974 to 1985. There was Superfund attention to pollution at the Synertek factory site.

[edit] References

• NPL Site Narrative for Synertek, Inc. (Building 1), Santa Clara, California – Federal Register Notice: October 4, 1989
• Public Health Assessment, Synertek (Building 1) – ATSDR and California Department of Health Services (CDHS)