Charles (Charlie) Sporck, a former CEO of National Semiconductor, died in October. He was a true semiconductor pioneer – a contemporary of Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore – who started working at Fairchild Semiconductor as a production manager in 1959 when he knew virtually nothing about semiconductors. Sporck’s claim to fame is transforming National Semiconductor from a failing enterprise into a chip-making powerhouse and analog IC leader during the 1970s and 1980s. National was the first semiconductor company to reach $1 billion in annual sales, during Sporck’s tenure as CEO. That was in 1981. A mechanical engineer, Sporck focused on efficient semiconductor manufacturing, starting with Fairchild and then continuing with National. His efforts helped to transform the entire semiconductor industry from a US-centric cottage industry focused on small-lot military contracts into the worldwide commercial behemoth we know today.
Charles Sporck. Image credit: Computer History Museum
Sporck came from a small town named Saranac Lake in upstate New York. He attended Cornell University and graduated with a BSME in 1950. While studying for his engineering degree, Sporck worked at several co-op assignments at General Electric (GE). After graduating, he joined GE full time and entered the company’s manufacturing training program. That program steeped Sporck in the many aspects of large-scale manufacturing, including production equipment, building materials, and plant management. His mechanical engineering degree provided a great foundation for Sporck’s growing manufacturing knowledge, but he never worked as a mechanical engineer.
He gradually grew disenchanted with the East Coast, believing that union rules and agreements interfered with efficient manufacturing techniques. Sporck had been developing manufacturing improvements for large power-factor-correction capacitors for two years, and after GE rejected Sporck’s manufacturing process improvements because of the terms of a local union contract, he decided that he’d had enough. On his way home after GE rejected his improvements, Sporck bought a copy of the New York Times, saw a recruiting ad for Fairchild Semiconductor, and went to New York City for an interview.
When he arrived at the hotel for his interview, Sporck found the Fairchild representatives – the VP of manufacturing and the VP of human resources – with a large stash of alcoholic beverages. He hit it off with the people from Fairchild, went to lunch with them with additional alcoholic lubrication, and then readily accepted their offer to become Fairchild’s manufacturing manager at nearly double the salary he’d been making at GE. Sporck then went home to his wife to tell her that the family was moving from upstate New York to Mountain View, California. Sporck sold his house, packed up the family, and moved across the country.
When he reported to Fairchild, Sporck discovered that the VPs who’d made the job offer to him had entirely forgotten that they’d hired him. In the interim between offering Sporck a job and his arrival in California, Fairchild had hired another person as its manufacturing manager. The company’s solution was to put both manufacturing managers in one office, leaving the people in manufacturing to sort things out. Sporck stuck it out and, in a week or two, the rival simply disappeared, and Sporck assumed the role.
He discovered that semiconductor companies had no concept of mass production. They’d been chasing military contracts with relatively low production volumes. As a result, their manufacturing methods and production tools were frozen at the cottage-industry level. Everything was hand-made, from the diffusion furnaces to the transistors themselves. To break into the commercial markets, production volumes needed to increase, processes needed to change, and costs needed to drop. Those needs drove Sporck’s efforts for the next three decades, at Fairchild, and, later, at National Semiconductor.
At Fairchild, Sporck discovered the consequences of working at a company founded by immensely talented physicists and chemists. The R&D group originally developed processes, and because the R&D fab was the production fab, there was little problem transferring a product to production. When the R&D fab separated from the high-volume manufacturing fab, problems started to appear, because people operating the manufacturing fab were not so highly trained. The solution was to eliminate the separate R&D fab and to develop processes in the manufacturing fab so that the process was immediately ready for volume manufacturing when the product was ready.
As production volumes ramped, a new problem arose: manual assembly represented a larger and larger portion of the manufacturing cost. You may have seen early photos of Fairchild’s production facility, populated by rows and rows of women sitting at tables and looking into microscopes as they bonded gold wires between the transistor die and the device’s terminals. The initial solution to this production problem was to move assembly out of Silicon Valley – first to Portland, Maine and then to Hong Kong – where production worker salaries were lower.
During this period, Sporck recalls that the famous Silicon Valley watering hole, the Wagon Wheel, served as the Valley’s pre-Internet information nexus. Engineers, marketers, and managers from many semiconductor companies met, informally shared information, solved problems, and drank more than a few beers. Consequently, the Wagon Wheel also provided a target-rich environment for recruiters, always on the hunt for technical talent who had been trained by competing companies.
By the mid-1960s, Fairchild was bleeding talent to newer semiconductor startups. Fairchild Founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were already planning their escape. Many others left before and after Noyce’s and Moore’s departure. Sporck also started to wonder about finding greater fortunes elsewhere. After some discussions with the UK’s Plessey, which went nowhere, Sporck zeroed in on National Semiconductor, a failing chipmaker based in Connecticut. National’s board recruited Sporck, and he joined as President and CEO in 1967.
In his first week at National, Sporck went to the company’s plant in Danbury, Connecticut and reduced headcount from 600 to 300. National became instantly profitable. Sporck used the income and profits from National’s discrete semiconductors business to finance a foray into analog ICs and to focus on making National the low-cost leader in IC manufacturing. Sporck had a not-so-secret, ultimate weapon in his quest to lead in analog ICs: the alcohol-fueled Bob Widlar, who was the industry’s eccentrically brilliant and most successful analog IC designer.
Widlar had proven his unique design capabilities at Fairchild and had ended up at National by way of its acquisition of Molectro in 1965. Molectro was a semiconductor startup in California founded in 1962 by two other ex-Fairchild employees. The Molectro acquisition gave National quite a technological boost that allowed the company to start manufacturing ICs. Widlar churned out a string of commercially successful designs for National, including one-chip voltage regulators and improved op amps.
Ironically, Widlar had left Fairchild to seek his fortune after arguing with Sporck about compensation. Now that he had Widlar as an employee once again, Sporck gave him plenty of National Semiconductor stock options to ensure that he stayed put. In his oral history, Sporck recalls that Widlar would spend several months working night and day on a new IC design. He’d create the circuit, the device layout, the spec sheet, and the application notes. Everything would be perfect. The design would function as designed, and the English in the data sheet would be flawless. Widlar would then transfer the product to production and disappear for a long alcohol-soaked bender.
However, the 1980s were not kind to National Semiconductor. Widlar, along with Bob Swanson and Bob Dobkin, founded Linear Technology in 1981, which ripped a big chunk of National Semiconductor’s analog heart out. In addition, while National had become the low-cost leader of IC manufacturing in the US, it could not withstand the onslaught from semiconductor makers in Japan. The same economic forces that drove Intel out of the semiconductor memory business in 1985, a business that Intel had essentially invented, sapped National’s sales as well. Worse, National’s best-selling chips proved easy to copy, and the company’s sales sagged even further. Sporck, a manufacturing guy at heart, wasn’t strong when it came to marketing or design, and National’s new product introductions and sales suffered as a result. When semiconductor companies in Taiwan and South Korea started getting into the market as well, National simply couldn’t keep up.
Sporck recognized the threat that Asian semiconductor makers presented to US chipmakers, and he labored to reverse these fortunes. In 1977, Sporck and four other American semiconductor leaders – Robert Noyce, Wilf Corrigan, John Welty, and Jerry Sanders III – created the Semiconductor Industry Association to lobby the US government on behalf of the semiconductor industry. In 1982, the SIA created the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) to foster long-term, pre-competitive research in advanced semiconductor processing. Sporck was on the SRC’s original Board of Directors. Then, in 1987, the SIA and SRC convinced the US government to join with the industry to fund the creation of Sematech, with the mission of reinvigorating US semiconductor manufacturing prowess. Sematech was successful in creating an environment where US semiconductor companies could collaborate on IC manufacturing technology.
In the end, these moves weren’t enough to save National. However, Sematech continued as an industry-funded research operation from 1996 until 2015, when it was absorbed into the SUNY Polytechnic Institute on the University of Albany’s campus, which is now home to the College of Nanotechnology, Science, & Engineering that continues research into advanced semiconductor manufacturing with a significant educational component.
Sporck retired in 1991. In his oral history, Sporck explained that Robert Noyce’s early death in 1990 made him reconsider his life’s direction. He turned the company’s reins over to Gil Amelio, but neither Amelio nor his successors – Brian Halla and Donald Macleod – were able to reverse National’s fortunes. The company started to sell pieces of itself off. It spun Fairchild Semiconductor back out and sold off manufacturing facilities that Sporck had acquired or built. Texas Instruments acquired what was left of National Semiconductor in 2011.
Sporck published a book in 2001, titled “Spinoff: A Personal History of the Industry that Changed the World.” He also became very active back in his hometown of Saranac Lake. He invested his money, time, and sweat equity to build an admissions and recruitment building for nearby Paul Smith’s College (The College of the Adirondacks), where he’d studied for a semester before attending Cornell. The admissions building carries his name. Sporck also lobbied for and became involved in the construction of the town’s river walk, after being inspired by the extremely successful Riverwalk in San Antonio. In 2010, a gift from Sporck created the Excellence in Analog Circuit Design Graduate Fellowship Endowment Fund to support PhD students in Cornell’s ECE department.
Charlie Sporck passed away on October 12 at the age of 96. He’s remembered as a big man, both physically and especially for the imprint he left on the semiconductor industry.
References
National Semiconductor Oral History: Charles E. Sporck, Computer History Museum, November 21, 2014
Interview with Charlie Sporck, Silicon Genesis, Oral Histories of Semiconductor Technology, Stanford Libraries, 2000 February 21
