17 Facts About Mostek

Mostek was a semiconductor integrated circuit manufacturer, founded in 1969 by L J Sevin, Louay E Sharif, Richard L Petritz and other ex-employees of Texas Instruments.

In 1979, soon after its market peak, Mostek was purchased by United Technologies Corporation for.

Mostek had been working with Sprague Electric to develop the ion implantation process which provided much better control of doping profiles, especially in lowering transistor threshold voltage.

Mostek's device took longer to develop but was a single chip calculator solution, the MK6010.

In 1976 Mostek introduced the silicon-gate MK4027, and the new MK4116 16K double-poly silicon-gate DRAM.

Related searches

Mostek enjoyed many years of mastery of the international market for telecommunications products.

In 1974 Mostek introduced the MK5065, an 8-bit PMOS microprocessor, with 51 instructions whose execution times range from 3 to 16 µs.

Mostek produced ROM chips on demand, as well as the chips powering the Hammond electronic organ.

Mostek cut a deal with a startup, Zilog, in which Mostek provided fab resources to manufacture the Zilog microprocessors in return for second source rights to the Zilog family.

Mostek made and sold the MK3880 and a series of Z80 support chips.

Mostek supposedly discovered that Zilog had modified the recipe for Z80 chips to keep the yields low, thereby buying Zilog time to build their own fabs.

Mostek sought new microprocessor partners snd negotiated deals with Intel to gain second sourcing rights to the Intel 8086 microprocessor family and future x86 designs and with Motorola for rights to the Motorola 68000 and VME.

Mostek thus had secured the rights to every microprocessor family that would be important for the next 25 years.

However, as with its telecomm business, Mostek chose not to aggressively follow-up its entry into microprocessors—instead increasing its concentration on the highly competitive DRAM business.

Mostek was bought by United Technologies in 1979 for US$345M to prevent an unfriendly takeover from Gould at the 10th anniversary of the company's founding, when a large block of stock options controlled by Sprague Electric became vested.

Mostek was unable to match the Japanese extremely aggressive pricing, and succumbed during a particularly brutal price war when Korean firms tried to beat the Japanese at their own game.

Micron Technology was a very successful spinoff founded by a handful of Mostek employees, including Ward Parkinson, Dennis Wilson, and Doug Pitman.