How Sony Mastered the Transistor

last highlighted date: 2024-11-09

Highlights

• In the wake of this ruin, an extraordinary company was founded. And through a series of fortuitous events, they came across an extraordinary technology.
• The discovery of the first transistor set off a race around the world to produce and use it. What can it be used for? How do we manufacture it?
• Ibuka was then 37 years old. Taller and heavier, he wore thick glasses and spoke with a working class accent. He was the chief engineer of a company supplying vacuum tube-based voltmeters and radar frequency control devices for the military.
• Morita was then 24 years old. Shorter, but thin and with an aristocratic side profile. He was then serving as a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy, a naval liaison officer.
• When the Allies started bombing Tokyo, Ibuka relocated the company to an apple orchard in Nagano. After the war ended, Ibuka brought his seven engineers back to Tokyo and set up a little lab in a room on the third floor of the Shirokiya Department Store.
• Ibuka - who long considered his greatest asset to be his team and worked hard to keep them engaged - paid his staffers out of his own pocket.
• Morita reached out and the two rekindled their bond. Ibuka wanted Morita to come to Tokyo and join him, but since that was risky, Morita thought to split that with a part-time teaching job.
• But then the American occupation General Headquarters or GHQ banned former military officers from teaching. That fateful decision let Morita go all in on working with his friend.
• Morita and Ibuka worked well together. Correction. They were absolutely perfect for each other.
• Both were extremely technical. I already established Ibuka to be a talented and creative engineer, but Morita was no chopped liver. He was a trained physicist who ghost-wrote a science column for the Asahi Shimbun in his early days.
• Ibuka was 13 years the senior. Quiet but impulsive. A dreamer type with an idealistic vision. Maybe a bit naive. His goal in life was to make electronics for everyday people, but honestly he lacked a good sense for what those people wanted.
  • Note: Me?
• Without Morita, Masaru Ibuka would have never sold any of his inventions. And without Ibuka, Akio Morita would not have anything to sell. They really were perfect for each other.
• And unlike another famous engineer-sales co-founder pair, people at Sony never recalled Ibuka and Morita fighting. It is a bond described as something like love.
• The team knew audio, and they felt that a tape recorder might be well received by the Japanese. They acquired a few patents, hired some engineers, and with the help of some nifty reverse-engineering, produced the G-type tape recorder.
• Tape recorder performance heavily depended on the quality of the tapes. But plastic was then still hard to come by. So the team made magnetic tape from paper covered in iron oxide powders and lacquer.
• The technology had to come from America, obviously. But from which American company? You can sign a patent licensing agreement with either RCA or Western Electric, Bell Labs’ commercial telephone device subsidiary.
• Soon thereafter, Bell Labs’ genius William Shockley announces the junction transistor, a more resilient and commercially viable transistor. RCA’s physicists immediately recognize it as the one.
• Patent licensing as a business model incentivized RCA to also sell agreements to teach people how to use their technology. This made them the preferred licensor of transistor technology - some 80 companies attended their first symposium.
• But while in New York City, he learns through a stockbroker friend Shido Yamada about the Western Electric transistor licensing opportunity. $25,000 US dollars paid upfront against future royalties for some transistor knowledge.
• Upon returning to Tokyo, Ibuka goes to MITI, Japan’s top industrial policy body, for the money and was ridiculed. A small company with no experience even in making vacuum tubes. Why do they deserve the foreign currency for this?
• But Ibuka is undeterred. He has now come up with something to use the transistor technology for: Radios.
• Thusly, Morita came back with a few sample transistors, Germanium crystal, and a copy of the book “Transistor Technology”, edited by members of Bell Labs.

• “We intend to move forward with or without you … but if you approve our deal with Western Electric and give us some development money, you will look smart!”

• A change in leadership shifted MITI’s opinion on the discretion, and they finally approved the funds in January 1954. Iwama and his team spent the time reading Shockley’s 1950 book “Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors”, and then the Bell Labs “Transistor Technology” book after that. Neither book was very useful.
• Western Electric originally thought Morita and Tokyo Telecommunications were going to use their transistors for hearing aids - a reasonable thought. Some of the first transistorized products were hearing aids.
• Upon learning that Morita wanted to use it for a radio, they told him that twelve other licensees were then trying to make transistors capable of the higher frequencies for radios. None had yet succeeded.
• Iwama had to decide which of the two existing variants of junction transistors to pursue: Alloy, which we discussed earlier, or grown junction transistors?
• The junction transistor is a sandwich of three components - the emitter, base, and collector with the base in the middle. The PN junctions or barriers in between these areas give the junction transistor its name.
• Some of Tokyo’s Telecommunications’ first alloy junction transistors were completed in June 1954. A few were inserted into a prototype portable radio, but failed to make the cut. High frequency was not achieved.
• During this process, a scientist named Tetsuo Tsukamoto - a Japanese born in Taiwan - tried phosphorous and antimony, which failed. He then tried phosphorous and indium, a weird combination.
• But amazingly, the resulting transistor had a higher frequency when tested. It was incredibly encouraging … except Tsukamoto could not replicate the result despite how many more efforts.
• The 1954 news of Texas Instruments producing the first miniaturized transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, spurred the team at Tokyo Telecommunications to work even harder. Now, they knew that a radio was possible.
• In early 1955, they completed their radio, the TR-55. It used five transistors, three were grown junction and two were alloy junction types. The grown transistors for the oscillators were still so unstable that factory workers had to pick the right one for each individual radio set.
• But in the summer of 1956, young people started warming up to the little device when they realized that the cost of its tiny battery was only a twentieth that of tube-based receivers. Improving transistorization resulted in smaller and more successful radios.
• Later, they realized that Tokyo Tsushin or Tokyo Telecommunications did not make much sense as a name, especially in the United States. So they coined a new name for the product - and later the company - Sony.