Mostek

Mostek was an integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by L. J. Sevin, Louay E. Sharif, Richard L. Petritz and other ex-employees of Texas Instruments. Initially their products were manufactured in Worcester, Massachusetts, however by 1974 most of its manufacturing was done in the Carrollton, Texas facility on Crosby Road. At its peak in the late 1970s, Mostek held an 85% market share of the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) memory chip market worldwide, until being eclipsed by Japanese DRAM manufacturers who offered equivalent chips at lower prices by dumping memory on the market.

In 1979, soon after its market peak, Mostek was purchased by United Technologies Corporation for $345M. In 1985, after several years of red ink and declining market share, UTC sold Mostek for $71M to the French electronics firm Thomson SA, later part of STMicroelectronics. Mostek's intellectual property portfolio, which included rights to the Intel x86 microprocessor family as well as many foundational patents in DRAM technology, provided a large windfall of royalty payments for STMicroelectronics in the 1990s.

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

The first design to be produced in their newly set-up MOS fab in Worcester, was the MK1001, a simple shifter chip. This was followed by a 1k PMOS aluminum-gate DRAM, the MK4006 that was manufactured in their Carrollton facility. Mostek had been working with Sprague Electric to develop the ion implantation process which provided a tremendous gain in the control of doping profiles. Using ion implantation, Mostek became an early leader in MOS manufacturing technology, while their competition was still mostly using the older bipolar technology. The resulting increased speed and lower cost of the MK4006 memory chip made it the runaway favorite to IBM and other mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers (cf. BUNCH, Digital Equipment Corporation).

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