Intersil

Intersil Corporation is an international semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Milpitas, California. A wafer fab is operated in Palm Bay, Florida. The German office is located in Ismaning near Munich.

History

Intersil was founded in 1967 by Jean Hoerni to produce integrated circuits, digital watches. As published, the first commercial microprocessors in the 1970s, brought Intersil 1975 IM6100 out who had the unusual word length of 12 bits and is made as the first microprocessor in CMOS technology. He was able to process the instruction set of the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. In addition to digital circuits such as microprocessors and memories, such as for example 1K x 1 bit RAM IM6508 CMOS and CMOS EPROM IM6604/IM6654, Intersil analog ICs successfully brought out as the signal generator ICL8038. Many circuits of competitors sat Intersil CMOS to enable, for example, as was Signetics NE555 popular bipolar timer module ( TMS6011 Texas Instruments ) issued as ICM7555 and General Instruments PMOS UART AY -5- 1013A as IM6402.

Intersil 1988 was acquired by Harris Corporation, which produced himself at the time and had the semiconductor IM6100 made ​​, inter alia, as a second source. Harris combined these activities with the adopted semiconductor businesses of Radiation Incorporated, General Electric and RCA. 1999 Affiliate Harris Semiconductor, again under the name of Intersil. The product range then moved in the direction of the analog semiconductors; digital products have been largely discontinued.

In February 2008, Dave Bell followed the former CEO Rich Beyer; thereby also the previous five business areas were reduced to two. On March 22, 2010 Intersil acquired the semiconductor designer Techwell for 370 million U.S. dollars.

Products

In the range of products are mainly analog ICs. Their main applications are desktop and notebook PCs, mobile phones, portable media players, flat panel displays, fire control systems and control devices in space technology. Intersil's product families include 47 components and assemblies for amplifiers, analog front ends, communication interfaces, data converters, digital potentiometers, Displaysteuereungen, DSL solutions, optical network products and power equipment. The digital division comprises mainly processors and analog - to-digital converter, whose designs originate from earlier acquisitions. Some of the ICs are also available in radiation- proof design, with which they lend themselves to the application field of aerospace.