Mostek

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Mostek was an integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by ex-employees of Texas Instruments. Mostek made a wide array of consumer, industrial, memory, and microprocessor chips. Mostek merged with United Technologies in 1979, and was later (1985) bought by Thomson, now STMicroelectronics.

Mostek's first contract was from Burroughs, a $400 contract for circuit design.

The first design to be produced in their newly set-up NMOS fab was the MK1001, a simple shifter chip. They followed this with a 1k DRAM, the MK4006. Mostek had been working with Sprague Electric to develop the ion-implantation to reduce the power requirements of the chip, while also eliminating the need for anything other than +5v power (NMOS required +5, +12 and -5 volt power supplies). This made the 4006 less expensive to use in computers, and it became extremely popular as a result.

In 1970 Busicom, a Japanese adding machine manufacturer, approached Intel and Mostek in order start a new electronic calculator line. Intel responded first, providing them with the Intel 4004, which they used in a line of desktop calculators. Mostek's device took longer to develop but put all of the needed circuitry onto a single chip, the MK6010. Busicom used the Mostek design in a new handheld line, the Handy LE-120, which went on the market in 1971 and was the smallest calculator available for some time. Hewlett-Packard also contracted with Mostek for mask development and production of chips for their HP-35 line.

Mostek co-founder Robert Proebsting invented DRAM multiplexing for their MK4096 4096 X 1 bit DRAM in 1973. Multiplexing of the addresses allowed a 16-pin chip design to address as much information as a 22-pin design, although only blocks could be accessed at one time. Pin count is a major driver of overall computer price, so the Mostek design was considerably less expensive in terms of overall design. Nevertheless there was a massive debate in the industry as to which approach was more useful, but the market slowly but surely settled on the 16-pin approach. This evolution would have had to happen sooner or later anyway, as a 64kb RAM would have otherwise needed more than 20 pins and a physically much larger package if it was not multiplexed.

In 1976 Mostek introduced their new POLY-II process, using it to produce the MK4027 (an improved version of the MK4096), and the new MK4116 16kb DRAM. From this point until the late 1970s, Mostek was a continual leader in the DRAM field, introducing 64k and larger sizes over time. At one time Mostek held 85% of the world market for DRAM, but massive foreign competition starting in the late 1970s led to heavy losses in the early 1980s.

With this start, Mostek became one of the better known "fabs" in the early 1970s. One of their more popular products was the Mostek 3870, which combined the two-chip Fairchild F8 (3850 + 3851) into a single chip, which they introduced in 1977. Fairchild later licensed the 3870 back from Mostek. They also produced ROM chips on demand, as well as the chips powering the Hammond electronic organ.

Mostek also acted as Zilog's fab while that company was first getting started. They produced all of their designs, including the Zilog Z80 and a series of Z80 support chips, until Zilog built their own fab. The Z80 eventually became the most popular microcomputer family as it was used in millions of embedded devices as well as in computers using the de-facto standard CP/M operating system, such as the Osborne, Kaypro, and TRS-80 models.

When Vin Prothro, President, and L. J. Sevin, Chairman of the Board, discovered that Zilog had modified the recipe for Z80 chips to keep the yields low, thereby buying Zilog time to build their own fabs, Mostek dropped the Zilog family in favor of the Intel 8086 chip set. When Sevin left to found Compaq, Prothro dropped the Intel family and switched the company focus to the Motorola 68000 and VME computers in 1989.

Mostek introduced the Poly 5 process in 1979, which is the first fully implanted process. In this process the chip wafers were sent into the ion implanter stage for every layer as it was being built up. This line was set up in a new building, their fifth line to be started.

Mostek merged with United Technologies in 1979 to prevent an unfriendly takeover from Sprague at the 10th anniversary of the company's founding, when a large block of stock options controlled by Sprague stock became vested. United Technologies spent hundreds of millions trying to keep the company going during the various semiconductor and videogame crashes of the early 1980s, and eventually gave up and sold it to Thomson Semiconductor in 1985 for a mere $71 million.

Thomson proceeded to lay off 80% of the workforce in an attempt to return the company to profitability. The next year they merged with SGS-ATES to become STMicroelectronics, based in Geneva, Switzerland. Although by this time most of Mostek's designs were no longer commercially viable, their DRAM patents turned out to be valuable and STM started a series of lawsuits to collect royalties. Between 1987 and 1993 STM made $450 million on these licenses alone.

Jerry Rogers founded Cyrix Corporation in 1988 to capitalize on the Mostek second source agreement that allowed any 80X86 processor to be legally copied, which Intel attempted to stop via lawsuits. Eventually, after losing many legal battles, Intel simply changed the name of the 80586 to the Pentium, thereby ending the agreement.