29) Birth of Micro TV with Adoption of Epitaxial Technology

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Photo: Five inch micro TV "TV5-303" produced by Sony Corporation

Two process technologies, "Epitaxial" and "Planer" played important roles as driving force for rapid shift from Germanium to Silicon. Both technologies were developed in the US, in the 1960fs, the dawn of Silicon era.
The name of Epitaxial came from the combination of two Greek words, Epi (on top of) and Taxis (an ordered manner). Epitaxial technology is literally the technology of growing a thin film of high purity single crystal on top of a silicon single crystal substrate, with the same crystal axis as the substrate. By adopting this technology, the active area of device itself is formed in the thin film layer, realizing dramatic improvement of device characteristics.
Tetsuo Tsukamoto of Sony Corporation, by knowing that this technology was developed by Bell Telephone Laboratory (BTL) and that it was applied to telecommunication transistors, quickly understood by intuition that this technology would be useful for the performance improvement of transistor TV, which had been their long time subject.
At that time, Sony developed high frequency, high power transistors using silicon crystal made by Sonyfs own pulling equipment which they developed. And they produced the world first 8-inch transistor TV, by using these transistors. But the TV products had several problems, like unclear and dark picture images, weak sensitivity when only using rod antennas, high failure rate, etc., and the market reputation was not so good.
Tsukamoto, knowing that these problems were caused by the silicon transistors, headed the "Operation Micro TV." He decided to adopt epitaxial technology, and carried out this development confidentially. Fortunately, in August, two months later, he succeeded in establishing the fundamental process, and in October, he completed the development of high frequency high power transistors using epitaxial wafers. There is a famous story that the engineers of BTL, inventors of epitaxial process themselves, were surprised at the high level of completion of the devices.
Photo: Five-inch micro TV "TV5-303" using these transistors (By courtesy of Sony)

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