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Personal stories of the war from IEEE members
People clean-up the damage at an apartment complex after a rocket attack during Russia's attack on the Ukraine in Kharkivskiy District, Kyiv.
Over the past week, The Institute has made contact with some of the 400 members of the IEEE Ukraine Section to help them share their experiences during the war. This personal account, entitled “Real War,” was written by Hanna Porieva, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” and IEEE volunteer, who was forced to flee Kyiv with her family. “I believe in our victory,” Porieva told The Institute, “therefore I am not afraid to publish my name and photo. I am an ordinary woman who is afraid of the dark on the street and insects, but I am not afraid to tell the whole world that we are at war.”
My name is Hanna Porieva. I am an associate professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute,” and IEEE Ukraine Section (Kyiv) ED/MTT/EP/COM/SSC Societies Joint Chapter Chairperson. I want to tell you about the situation in Ukraine that I have seen with my own eyes.
24 February 2022, 5:10 a.m. In the morning, as a rule, sleep is strong for me. I dreamed something, I don’t remember what, but I remember that there were explosions in the dream. I wake up and am glad that it was just a dream, but after a few seconds, I hear the distant but powerful sound of an explosion and feel the vibration. I jump out of bed and run to the window. I can’t see anything, but I hear the sounds of planes flying somewhere close—definitely military planes, since this is a very distinctive sound. I live on the 9th floor of a 9-story building that is near the Kyiv International Airport. Previously, I had heard the sounds of such aircraft only during parades in honor of the Independence Day of Ukraine. Then I again hear distant explosions. I stop in the middle of the room and stand like that for probably a minute, not understanding what to do and refusing to believe what is happening. And then my mobile phone rings. It is my brother, who is in the hospital, he was operated on two days before. “Anya, quickly get ready, I will pick up our parents and then pick you up in an hour.” I still do not want to accept reality and stupidly ask: “Why?” My brother shouts in annoyance: “because THIS has begun. Pack your things!”
I freeze again. What things to pack? Yes, everyone has been saying for many weeks that you need to be prepared, that there may be a war, that Russia is going to go to war against Ukraine. But it seemed impossible. A full-scale war, especially in Kyiv? Maybe in the east of Ukraine, in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions—it’s been restless there for 8 years, where Russian troops are constantly trying to tear off an even larger piece of Ukraine. But not here, not in Kyiv! Nevertheless, I had packed all my documents and enough money for several days in one bag, just in case. And now as I stand and think about what else to pack, outside the window there is again a booming explosion.
I call my daughter Sonya—she and her boyfriend rent a room on the other side of Kyiv. Sonya says that my brother would pick her up soon, she is getting ready. Thank God! I can hear the neighbors talking anxiously through the wall, their children are crying, which means they are also getting ready to leave. I have to pack. The cat! It’s necessary to pack everything for the cat, this is important. But the main thing is to take a reserve of insulin for my daughter, who has had diabetes for 5 years now. I also have to make the bed so that the house is clean. So I start packing some warm clothes, a little food… And while doing this, I decide that I will not go anywhere. That for these couple of days, I will go to live with my friends, not far away. They have a private house, it’s not as dangerous there as it is here on the 9th floor.
7.00 a.m. My daughter calls and says that they are already approaching, her grandparents (my parents) are with them. I ask her to come into the house and help me carry out my things. My daughter comes in with tears in her eyes. Her boyfriend has decided to stay instead of coming with us, because he feels responsible for his two younger brothers, his mother, and his grandmother. I want to say that I will not go either, but I realize that I cannot say that, my daughter needs me. Since her boyfriend is staying in Kyiv, I can’t stay too. I look at my small apartment, only 40 square meters, but such a cozy home for me. I make sure that I have turned off the electricity everywhere, and I leave, confident that I will return in a couple of days.
I see on the news what the cities around Kyiv have turned into—they are practically destroyed. I see how houses in Kyiv are crumbling and I understand that if my house survives, it will be a miracle.
We travel to a village in the countryside, 150 kilometers from Kyiv. Here we have a small house that my dad built with his own hands. This is a summer house, it’s not adapted to life in cold weather. My parents usually come here in April and leave in September.
The house is not insulated, it can be heated a little by a gas stove. When we arrive, it is the same temperature outside and inside the house: 2 °C. We turn on the stove, and after a few days, it becomes “hot” in the house: 16 °C. The first night we sleep in damp beds wearing all the warm clothes we have, including hats. And we pray every day that the gas pipelines and electricity are not destroyed, especially since the weather forecast for the next ten days is between –9 and –5 °C. I can’t imagine how we will keep warm.
It took us a very long time to drive to this village. Even at 7:00 am, it was almost impossible to leave Kyiv. Many were trying to take their families away. After his operation, it was very difficult for my brother to drive for almost six hours. The doctor at the hospital apparently did not believe that things were this serious, and he did not want to let my brother out of the hospital. But my brother wanted to get us out of the city in time, so he left the hospital without the necessary certificates and medications.
While we were driving, I was thinking about the fact that I had three classes to teach at the university that day, and I must somehow inform my students if I cannot go to classes remotely. Many of my students wrote to me, asking if there would be lessons. Many, like me, did not understand the scale of what was happening. I was also thinking about how I was going to spend today and tomorrow reviewing articles for the ELNANO Conference that we hold every year in April and May. So much to do: lessons, conference, articles, teaching materials for lectures... How am I going to do all that in the village? But I thought I would be there only for three or four days, no more.
And just in November, my colleague Katerina, the vice-head of our chapter, and I were in Spain, where Katerina gave lectures under the Erasmus Program. We traveled, rejoiced, and made new plans. We planned that when the pandemic had ended, we would fly to the meeting of the MTT community in Milan.
My colleague Kateryna and I in Spain in November.
We so love flying to scientific conferences and participating in IEEE meetings in different cities in Europe, and walking around and seeing the sights. But there are practically no airports left in our country, and we don’t know when and where we will be able to fly. Now the challenge for all of us is just to survive.
25 February 2022. My brother’s friends make it to the village. Eight people, four girls and four boys, as well as a cat and a dog. And we also have my cat and my parents’ dog—13 people and four animals living in our small summer cottage. It’s difficult and crowded, but you understand that now is the time when you need to help each other. There is some reserve of cereals and potatoes that my parents grew, so we aren’t starving, but I’m so sorry that I didn’t take more food from my house in Kyiv. There are not enough basic things like butter, flour, meat, eggs, and cheese, and there is nowhere to buy it here. All that we have is our reserve, and we need to take care of it, because how long we will be here, no one knows.
We all watch the news all the time, reading on our phones. From time to time, the boys become sad, and some of the girls cry softly, because one of them is from Energodar, where the largest nuclear power plant in Europe is located, one is from Borodyanka near Kyiv, which was practically razed to the ground, one is from Kharkiv… No comment. And Sonya cries from time to time, worried about her boyfriend who stayed in Kyiv.
The boys want to take the girls to Western Ukraine, where it is safer, but the problem is fuel, it simply is not available. As a result, the boys have to take fuel from one car and put it into another, and then a group of them leave for the city, which is 200 km from us, where they are able to buy more fuel and then return for the others. Then, in one car, the guys make their way to Western Ukraine, find a place where the girls can stay. And now the boys will return to Kyiv to defend their city, to defend Ukraine, and defend the right to be called “Ukrainian,” because if not them, then who?
My cat Misa and dog Julie in the warmest place near the stove.
Sonya does not want to leave for the west without her boyfriend. And now I regret that I did not insist. She has a reserve of insulin for another month, or a month and a half. But the situation is worse for glucometer strips and sensors that measure sugar. Even in peacetime in Ukraine, it is not so easy to buy them, and now it’s basically impossible. Without them, we can’t measure her blood sugar levels, which means it’s unclear how much insulin to inject. After many years I got used to the fact that my daughter is now forever with this disease, gradually we learned to live with it. But now I’m scared again. Yes, everyone in Ukraine is scared now, but I am also scared that she will not be able to control her blood sugar. I’d rather not say anything about the consequences.
I am writing this in small parts, because there is something to do all the time. Even the simple things of ordinary life require effort. There is no toilet in the house, no shower, no water. There is sleet and icy wind outside. Cooking, washing dishes, doing the laundry—I do it all with my hands, often in cold water. I keep thinking, why didn’t I bring my creams, shampoos, and balms? My hands are chapped from the cold water, my face is raw, but then I realize that it is a shame to complain about my dirty hair or the toilet outside, when my colleagues, including those from the IEEE, are in Kharkiv or Chernihiv, which the enemy does not spare, but simply destroys. I am writing these words, and there are tears in my eyes and my teeth are clenched from hatred. Why do they do this?
Pulling water from the well and carrying it home.
My mother’s sister, who was born and raised in Ukraine, has been living in Moscow for many years. Until 2014, they came to visit us every year, we always welcomed them joyfully and had a good time. After 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, our paths parted. They rejoiced that Crimea was now Russian, and believed that they just had to destroy all the “nationalists” and everything would be fine. What kind of nationalists they had in mind, they could not explain. No one has ever offended them here, we all speak Russian, like them. I had to practically stop communicating with them, I ran out of arguments to make. But my mother still talked a little—after all, they are sisters. And so when we came here, to the village, my mother’s sister began to call my mother and say that Russia wished us well, so we should not be afraid, no one will touch civilians, only nationalists and military bases will be destroyed, and that they are praying for an end to the internecine war in Ukraine. What hypocrisy! They are praying? When my mother began to say that bombs were falling on Kyiv, her sister said, “This cannot be, this is not done by Russia, but by Ukrainian nationalists.”
Apparently she thinks that everyone who now lives in Ukraine is a nationalist! Even the people in Kharkiv and Sumy who speak Russian. In my everyday life, my family and I are used to speaking Russian. At work, or at official events, we of course speak Ukrainian, because this is the state language. But no one anywhere infringes on those who speak Russian! Not in Lviv, nor in Kyiv. The idea that the Russian-speaking population is being oppressed here is an absolute lie!
Regardless of nationality, place of birth, and the language they speak, we all love our Ukraine, we are proud of it! We love our cities and villages, our fields and forests, our rivers and our seas! Everyone is crying now, everyone, even strong men, turning away, crying, looking at what Putin is turning our beautiful, beautiful, beloved Ukraine into! Each of us loves every meter of our land. And how many of our soldiers and volunteers have died, who went out to defend their land, their mothers, children, and wives? Why did they have to die? We are on our own land! We are at home! We just want to live in a country called Ukraine, to be proud, as before, of our history. We want to live by democratic European values. What is wrong or strange about this? Yes, it’s not easy. Our country still has room to grow and something to strive for, but we have chosen a direction: to Europe, not to Russia.
There are things when you can’t just close your eyes and turn away and pretend that it doesn’t concern you, otherwise you will never be able to forget it and forgive yourself.
Just a few months ago, President Zelensky’s support among the population of Ukraine was no more than 25%. But now almost 90% of Ukrainians support him. Not because everyone suddenly fell in love with him or forgot about his mistakes, but because he, like all of us, wants Putin to take his hands off our beloved Ukraine, so that we can defend our right to be an independent country, equal among other European countries. Now we Ukrainians are united like never before towards that common goal. Yes, many of us will die, and no one knows which of us, because too many civilians die every day, but we will never kneel before Putin.
We know that there are Russian people who do not support Putin’s policies, and these people are ashamed, they ask for forgiveness before the Ukrainian people. We hear them. But we also know that the Russians could have prevented all that is happening now. If people came out to protest en masse, if thousands and millions of people did not remain blind and deaf, but went out to protest, they would be able to change the situation! But this is not happening, and hundreds of civilians and children continue to die in Ukraine. There are things when you can’t just close your eyes and turn away and pretend that it doesn’t concern you, otherwise you will never be able to forget it and forgive yourself.
I am so proud of our people who come out with bare hands in front of tanks, and say to the Russian soldiers at gunpoint, “Get out of here, this is our home, why did you come? Nobody invited you! We don’t need to be protected! We don’t need your bloody ‘peace’!” People are not afraid, they know that the truth is on our side. Ukraine is our home, and we are defending it. It’s so simple, but it’s so difficult, it is costing us thousands of lives, including our children.
It is as if Russia was trying to prove to everyone that the sun is made of ice. Everyone knows that this is not so, and yet you are faced with people to whom you need to find words to prove again and again that the sun is hot, not icy, to prove the obvious. But much of Russia believes Putin. And for them, the sun is made of ice.
5 March 2022. On the 10th day of the war, I recall that last look at my apartment. Every day I have less and less confidence that I will ever return there. Near my building in Kyiv there is the airport and some military warehouses, which are always being hit by rockets or airstrikes. I see on the news what the cities around Kyiv have turned into—they are practically destroyed. I see how houses in Kyiv are crumbling and I understand that if my house survives, it will be a miracle. Now I regret that I took so few things, because we need them so much right now.
Every person in Ukraine wants peace. We all want to return to our homes, and we hope that those homes are not destroyed. Thousands of people will not return to their homes, because they have already been killed by Putin. Tens of thousands of people will not return to their homes because their home is no more. And these numbers will grow every day. And we are bitter to hear every day from the TV screen that Europe “sympathizes” with us, but that this is our war, not theirs. But are you sure that if we, the Ukrainians, who are left to fight almost alone against such a strong and immoral enemy, if we do not win, that the war will not come to your homes next…?
This article is part of “Stories of the War in Ukraine,” a special collection from The Institute.
An almost Machiavellian plot pitted Fairchild against Texas Instruments
In one corner stood the defending champion, Texas Instruments. In the other stood the challenger, Fairchild Semiconductor. The referee, judge, promoter, and only spectator was Polaroid. In contention was the contract for the electronics of Polaroid’s secret project—a pioneering product introduced in 1972 as the SX-70, a camera eventually purchased by millions of people.
As the embodiment of truly automated instant photography, the SX-70 fulfilled a long-held dream of Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid Corp., Cambridge, Mass. Vital to this “point and shoot” capability was a new film—one that would develop while exposed to light and so eliminate the tear-away covers of previous Polaroid films. Also vital were sophisticated electronics to control all single lens reflex (SLR) camera functions, including flashbulb selection, exposure control, mirror positioning, start of print development, and ejection of print. These circuits were divided into three modules, one each for motor, exposure and logic, and flash control. At the final count, some 400 transistors were used.
This article was first published as "The battle for the SX-70." It appeared in the May 1989 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The diagrams and photographs appeared in the original print version.
Yet this complicated system had to fit in a package the size of Land’s jacket pocket, he decreed—a constraint that meant employing ICs. But as Polaroid could not fabricate ICs, the success of its SX-70 project lay in the hands of outsiders.
The flash control contract was given to General Electric Co. Then in 1971, when GE dropped out of the IC business, it was issued to Sprague Electric Corp., as well as to Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Texas Instruments Inc. of Dallas, Texas. Only Fairchild and Sprague ended up producing flash controllers.
Independent contracts to develop the motor and exposure control modules went to Fairchild and TI. The motor control module contained a linear control IC, an NPN motor drive transistor, and a discrete PNP dynamic braking transistor, and gave the designers little trouble. The exposure control module was a different story.
Included in the exposure control were three ICs (early Fairchild versions had four). The exposure timer used the current output of a silicon photodiode to regulate how long the shutter blades remained open. The delay-timing circuit generated four intervals: a delay of 40 milliseconds before the shutter opened; the time the shutter remained open before the flash was fired; the duration of the flash; and the maximum exposure time given certain ambient lighting. The power control IC drove the solenoids and motor control unit. And this all had to fit on a board that fit into a 27-by-95-by-2-millimeter space, minus a central hole for the camera lens.
Stopping an electric motor by placing a short circuit across the armature of the motor; the kinetic energy is then dissipated in wiring and short-circuit losses.
Automatic metering of the light entering the camera’s lens and striking the film. In the SX-70, adjustments to affect the amount of light were performed by just one pair of blades, which controlled both the aperture and the shutter speed.
Circuitry that automatically selects the next unused bulb from the flash bar and generates a pulse to fire the bulb. It is activated automatically when a flash bar is inserted, but is inhibited when the film counter reaches zero.
Circuitry that directs the cycle of applying power to the motor and motor braking in response to signals from the exposure control.
A camera viewing system that, by swinging an angled mirror temporarily between lens and film, allows a person looking into the viewfinder to seem to see through the lens, previewing the image that will be captured on film.
Electrical noise was a major stumbling block. The photocell, for instance, operating with as little as 15 picoamperes, had to maintain its state in an environment in which the motor, the solenoids, and the firing of the flash lamps drew amperes of current. Designers were to take steps like inserting a delay between the release of the solenoids and the start of the photocell-timed exposure; redesigning circuitry on the power supply line to reject noise from the motor; increasing the voltage difference between logic highs and lows, so noise spikes would no longer masquerade as bits; and including a low-pass filter.
As it was 1969, there were no semicustom ICs, gate array technology was in its infancy, and only primitive packaging was available—standard dual in-line packages (DIPs) were at least 0.125 inch thick—while logic and power transistors could not yet share the same piece of silicon. And Polaroid wanted to buy this exposure controller for US $5.75.
Polaroid chairman Land and TI chairman Patrick Haggerty were old friends. On a weekend trip decades before the SX-70 project, they had discussed how electronics might one day make a truly one-step camera possible. The idea was to work on this dream together as soon as the technology arrived. So it came as no surprise when TI was charged with developing the camera’s exposure control board. Land was counting on TI for a fail-safe design, based on analog circuitry and proven technology and therefore reliable, reasonably priced, and capable of being produced on schedule.
Polaroid also asked Fairchild, which it viewed as the country’s leader in IC technology, to tackle a design that would push the state of the art. Fairchild’s version was to be digital and highly integrated, even to combining power transistors with logic on one chip. To Polaroid the approach looked risky, but its engineers were excited by its possibilities. Still, some within Polaroid thought the Land-Haggerty relationship made nonsense of using anyone but TI.
The R&D contracts were awarded in 1969, and the competitors went to work, both with the same handicap: incomplete information. Fearing that Kodak Corp. might enter the instant camera business, Polaroid wanted no leaks—so much so that it mentioned neither the new film nor the fact that at one point the camera was redesigned as an SLR—and kept the design teams from seeing a prototype of the camera. (Although TI’s then executive vice president, the now-retired Fred Bucy, saw a demonstration of the early, non-SLR SX-70 in 1969, he said nothing about it to the company’s engineers.) Said Peter Carcia, an engineer on the SX-70 project and still with Polaroid: “They had very little to work with”—only stacks of specifications.
When it contracted with Fairchild and TI to develop the electronics for the SX-70 camera, Polaroid Corp. provided this timing diagram along with 30 pages of other design specifications, reliability requirements, and test information. It indicates sequences of events for the four different modes of operation a fully automatic camera required. Table 1 indicates functions for taking photographs in ambient light, Table 2 covers flash operation, Table 3 calls out the sequence of events that is triggered when a new film pack is installed and its protective cover must be ejected, and Table 4 describes the operations that occur when a pack of film is used up.
Polaroid engineers recall that loads on the electronics were described simply as inductive, and that details of the battery supply were vague because a new battery was being concurrently designed.
“We didn’t tell them whether a load on the electronics was from a solenoid or a relay, just that it was an inductive load,” recalls Seymour Ellin, now a senior technical manager at Polaroid.
“Since we were making our own battery [designed concurrently], we couldn’t tell them what the battery supply would be,” said Carcia. “I would tell them ‘I want you to design a circuit, but I won’t tell you what the power source will be,’ and they would look at me strangely.”
Polaroid wanted no leaks—so much so that it mentioned neither the new film nor the fact that at one point the camera was redesigned as an SLR.
Even worse was the “Y” delay—which Polaroid engineers told IEEE Spectrum came from the “why” response given Fairchild and TI engineers whenever they questioned one specification: the short delay before starting the exposure, after the user pressed the button. This pause was to allow the mirror (which in an SLR camera reflects the image seen through the lens to the viewfinder) to stop vibrating after it snapped out of the way of the film to be exposed. But that was more than Polaroid wanted to divulge. The sources of the noise problem were left obscure, and its extent understated, said Clark Williams, then a TI design engineer. “That motor pulled 3 amps of current and put out a rich spectrum of noise that played havoc with our circuits,” he said. (He is now a design manager at Dallas Semiconductor Corp. in Dallas, Texas.)
The TI team, unable to base a breadboard on Polaroid’s diagrams alone, sent two engineers and several technicians to Cambridge to work in a little private room there. Whenever they needed to test their breadboard, they would hand it over to Polaroid engineers, who would carry it to another room and eventually report back that, say, a certain signal needed adjustment or a certain section did not function. The TI engineers would make a few adjustments, then the breadboard was carried off for another test. This to-and-fro-ing went on for six months, whereas, said Michael Callahan, a senior TI design engineer who is presently executive vice president of engineering at Crystal Semiconductors Corp. in Austin, Texas: “We could have done the work in two weeks if they had let us sign nondisclosure agreements.”
A preliminary round had disappointed both IC teams. In 1969, before Polaroid had firmed up many SX-70 details, it started both TI and Fairchild developing simple exposure control chips. This early effort, said Polaroid engineers, was also used to develop and test their working relationship with Fairchild. But the SX-70 project changed so much, particularly with its redefinition as an SLR camera, that Polaroid decided to start over. Callahan and Ken Buss, now a senior member of the technical staff at TI, recall a meeting in Dallas at which the TI engineers proudly demonstrated the working circuits—only to have Polaroid ignore them and announce its new requirements.
“That made our chips instantly obsolete,” Buss said. At Fairchild, too, enthusiasm flagged. Coincidentally, both companies soon after underwent a corporate restructuring, but whereas the changes at Fairchild benefited its SX-70 team, those at TI nearly cost it everything.
The TI designers, instead of working directly with Polaroid, were told to report to the Assembled Functions Group. Lacking either chip development or manufacturing facilities of its own, the Group contracted with the IC designers’ department to develop three chips—a photocell amplifier to determine the correct exposure, a chip to control the motor and handle dynamic braking, and a chip to handle timing, count the film used, and serve other functions—and with another department to manufacture the chips. The arrangement further filtered the already limited information from Polaroid.
Three different designs for the SX-70 exposure control electronics were produced. Fairchild Semiconductor Corp.’s version (top) went into cameras in 1972 and 1973—notice the polyimide film used to attach the ICs to the board. Texas Instruments Inc. produced its ceramic board (center) during 1972, then redesigned, and won the manufacturing contract away from Fairchild with a circuit board that used miniDIP IC packaging (bottom).
That left the Group itself with the job of designing the circuitry that would tie the ICs together. Its engineers used 13 discrete transistors, 17 laser-trimmed thick-film resistors, and a photodiode, intending to mount them on a printed-circuit board. Management instead mandated a ceramic substrate essentially because, said one TI design engineer, the Group reported to the same manager as TI’s Hybrid Thick-Film Group, which had excess capacity.
“We knew we couldn’t meet the cost goals with a ceramic substrate,” he said. The ceramic, the precious metal conductors, and the labor all cost too much for the substrate to serve as anything more than a prototype “to let us get all the circuitry in a small area.” And when the design grew from 3/4 square inch to 4 or 5 square inches (from 5 to 25 or 32 square centimeters), the engineer recalled, he and the other designers predicted major manufacturing problems and urged doing a more digital redesign with a printed-circuit board. But management “wouldn’t listen,” he said.
TI’s ceramic-based design did, however, perform to Polaroid’s specifications, and it went into production in late 1972. But it was indeed a nightmare. First, at $100 a unit, it was nowhere near the $5.75 cost goal. And manufacturing problems were tremendous, especially with the gigantic and therefore fragile ceramic substrate. For instance, said TI design engineer Norm Culp: “We had to take a chip, alloy it to a Kapton film carrier [a high temperature plastic foil], then wire bond the chip to the Kapton carrier, then encapsulate the chip. The Kapton film carriers were then tested individually, then reflowed onto the ceramic substrate.”
Yield was about 1 percent, and that one in 100 sometimes cracked on its way to Polaroid.
Moreover, said Culp, reflow-soldering chip carriers to the substrate caused microcracks in the ceramic, and for a while TI inspected every part for the flaws. Then one engineer realized that heating the entire substrate instead of just the part to be reflow-soldered would reduce the microcracks, which, however, showed up in other parts of the process. Yield was about 1 percent, and that one in 100 sometimes cracked on its way to Polaroid.
Polaroid did order several hundred of these ceramic modules to get the SX-70 to market. But it wasn’t at all happy with them. Said Ellin, “TI, essentially, failed to meet the cost objective.”
Meanwhile, engineers at Fairchild were also running into difficulties, but technical ones only. Early in the design process, Fairchild’s corporate restructuring moved the R&D engineers out of their isolated laboratory into operating divisions, making for better communication with manufacturing, which “resolved a lot of problems,” said Howard Murphy, a senior member of the Fairchild research staff and the project director for the SX-70 electronics.
"We designed a die that had around 20 flip-flops on it, probably a new high in IC complexity at that time.”—Howard Murphy, Fairchild
One design problem was high temperature. Murphy recalled that the heat of the heavy currents drawn by the motors and the solenoids affected the control logic circuitry, which then had to be redesigned to work at higher temperatures—the specifications indicated 40 °C. Another hurdle was the photo circuit. It had to time out after 20 seconds, so that pictures could be taken in dim light of about 0.06 candela per square foot (0.65 candela per square meter), although the circuit design team wasn’t fully aware of the reason for this at the time. The circuit also had to be very small and consume just a few milliamperes. “So we designed a die that had around 20 flip-flops on it, probably a new high in IC complexity at that time,” Murphy remembered.
Frank Perrino, a Fairchild product manager, first became involved in the SX-70 project in May 1971, when he oversaw its move into manufacturing. He recalled that the designers were then working on four chips—a driver for the motor and solenoids, a timing chip, and the photodiode and photodiode amplification chips that later became one bipolar CMOS IC. The dice were to be mounted directly on an irregularly shaped 1-by-4-inch ceramic substrate previously metalized on both sides with state-of-the-art lines and spaces.
The costs involved, however, ruled the approach out for production, Perrino told Spectrum. “The ceramic and chips all had to be perfect,” he said, and there was zero “probability of this happening.”
He concluded a printed-circuit board was a must, but how to mount the chips to it? Fairchild’s plastic DIPs were too large and costly for the job. He had, though, read a paper by General Electric engineers on beam tape packaging (BTP), a forerunner of what is now called tape automated bonding (TAB). After investigating BTP, he told Fairchild and Polaroid management, “If we don’t do it this way, it’s not worth doing.” Both agreed.
BTP employed reels of film with copper traces laminated on it around preexisting holes. Chips with bumps of solder on their pads were centered under the holes and bonded to the overhanging copper lead frames. Individual die/film modules were then encapsulated, tested, clipped off the reel, and soldered to the circuit board.
Perrino laid out the double-sided printed-circuit board at home on paper spread across his pool table. He then visited several companies that made polyimide interconnect film, contracted with 3M as a supplier, and persuaded West-Bond Inc. of Anaheim, Calif., to build equipment for attaching the dice to the reel of laminated film. The final circuit board held three IC dice and two flip-chip, thick-film, laser-trimmed resistors.
However, yields were not following the expected learning curve on two of the three ICs, the power transistors because of high doping levels and the timing chip because, said Perrino, of design errors. For example, Jim Feit, another engineer on the project, recalls a parasitic device affecting the flip-flops, which was fixed with the addition of a delay.
Still, though the parts were not cheap, costing Fairchild approximately $20 or $30 each, they were manufacturable.
The SX-70 was introduced in April 1972, in conjunction with the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting. A year earlier, Land had teased the stockholders by pulling a prototype SX-70 out of his pocket and waving it in the air. That was a working model, containing one of TI’s first successful ceramic circuit boards. But for this meeting, Polaroid needed 20 cameras, and John Burgarella, now retired from the company, had to make several trips to Texas to hand-carry enough working boards back to Cambridge. About a month earlier, Land had brought Fairchild engineers Perrino, Murphy, and Will Steffe to his Cambridge office and demonstrated the camera to them. “It was obviously a technological breakthrough,” recalled Perrino, which motivated them “to go back and make the thing work.”
Edwin Land showed the first working SX-70 camera at a stockholders’ meeting in 1971. It was only a prototype, and contained one of the first working ceramic circuit boards produced by Texas Instruments. A TI engineer had installed it the night before the meeting, working with a camera that was shrouded to prevent him from learning anything more about it than he already knew.
The introduction went off without a hitch. About a dozen scenes, from a poker game to a child’s birthday party, were enacted in a large warehouse, and well-known photographers were shooting them with the new cameras while Polaroid stockholders circulated and examined the pictures. Polaroid engineers were also circulating, with extra cameras in their pockets in case anything went wrong.
So Fairchild won a contract to manufacture the exposure control modules along with the motor circuits and the flash control circuits. The trade press touted their victory. According to a January 1973 Electronic News report, for instance, this contract, “believed to be the largest ever issued by a camera producer to an electronics supplier,” was worth $19 million, and was “considered by some semiconductor executives as an omen of considerable future business.”
Fairchild disbanded most of its design team, pleased with their success. But the manufacturing engineers pressed on, since the cost of the product had to be reduced by three-quarters or more to meet Polaroid’s price target, and contract negotiations were to be reopened for 1974. However, said Perrino, two of the chips in the exposure control module were still in trouble.
C. Lester Hogan, who had recently left Motorola Inc. to take over the Fairchild presidency, blames Fairchild’s then-outdated manufacturing facilities. He started a modernization, but he said, “there wasn’t a lot of extra cash,” and it was not complete until sometime in 1974.
Perrino blames the IC designs as well. “The design rules used in these chips were touch-and-go with the technology,” he told Spectrum. Polaroid’s Carcia agreed: ‘‘We were pushing the fundamental technology.” Redesigning the chips was talked about, but management did not mandate it.
The TI design team was also disbanded in 1972. Some left the company, some moved on to other projects. The failure, one design engineer told Spectrum, was a black mark that hurt careers.
At the highest level of TI, however, the book was not being closed. TI chairman Haggerty reportedly called his old friend Land and said, “We at TI don’t fail.” He assigned the project about $540,000 from his own budget, and told his managers to do whatever it would take to succeed. The code name Project Alpha emphasized the importance of the fresh start, and Haggerty put executive vice president Bucy in charge of it.
The failure, one design engineer [said], was a black mark that hurt careers.
As the original TI team had been disbanded, Bucy planned to assemble another one from the semiconductor division, and to ensure that this one would communicate directly with Polaroid and also have manufacturing responsibilities.
Dean Toombs, engineering director of the semiconductor group, held a series of meetings and developed a proposal for the redesign that was another break with TI’s first approach: it relied not on proven but on state-of-the-art IC technology and packaging. A circuit board only 1/64 inch thick was to hold up to four digital (not analog) ICs and eight discrete components at most. The chips would be surface mounted to the board in a miniDIP package, a method of volume assembly then new and risky but cheap. (It is now called SOT, which stands for Small Outline Transistors.)
The plan was approved by Bucy, and Henri Jarrat (then Eljarrat) selected to head the effort. At first Jarrat objected to the assignment, but gave way when told it was TI’s top priority. Given carte blanche to assemble a team from anywhere in the organization, he kept the group manageably small—only 18 people. They quickly partitioned the circuitry into three ICs and presented a six-month schedule for the redesign to Fred Bucy and Polaroid president William McCune.
Then Jarrat had his first meeting with Polaroid engineers. He told them he could only integrate the exposure control function into three components if they waived some of their specifications. He began going down his list and to each request the Polaroid engineers said no. So Jarrat stood up, threw his papers down, and said, he recalled, “Now I know why this project is going nowhere. This will never work, and I do not want to have my name attached to a failure.” He charged out of the room. Toombs backed Jarrat’s threat. “We had to get the customer under control,” he told Spectrum.
The ability to negotiate was in part also due to the availability of working cameras to study and the construction of a prototype on which to test breadboards of the chips—luxuries denied the first TI team.
After a brief adjournment, the meeting was reconvened and from then on Polaroid negotiated specifications. For example, the 20-second time out, for taking a picture in a dimly lit room, had made the signal from the photodiode impossibly low for the first design teams and this time around was cut to 10 seconds. “The big reason for our success was Jarrat’s success at convincing them to ease the specs,” said Clark Williams, a member of the second team.
The ability to negotiate was in part also due to the availability of working cameras to study and the construction of a prototype on which to test breadboards of the chips—luxuries denied the first TI team. And when the first group did raise questions out of concern for manufacturability, recalled Buss, the only TI engineer to work on both the design and the redesign efforts, they were told, “Well, your competition can do this.” And, in fact, Fairchild engineers don’t recall that the specifications were problematical.
TI began producing the Project Alpha boards in quantity in mid-1973.
With the redesign, TI quoted Polaroid a price of about $4.10 a unit—well below the $5.75 target. Said former Fairchild president Hogan: “At the time, it cost us $10. We really believed we could get it to $6, but when TI bombed the price down to two thirds of the target price, we just had to drop out.” As for a redesign, said Hogan, “we didn’t have the money to invest that way—we had to invest in the generic fixing of the factory.”
TI created a special camera division with Polaroid as its only customer. The company made about 850 000 units in 1974 and continued to produce the design until the SX-70 and the SX-70 Model 2 were discontinued in 1977. It also spun off a few innovations, including packaging for TI’s watch displays. And the engineers on the Project Alpha team were rewarded with then substantial raises of $100 to $500 a month.
West-Bond and 3M, companies Fairchild had recruited to manufacture packaging equipment and film tape, continued to profitably produce them for other companies.
Fairchild used the BTP packaging technology it developed for the SX-70 on its high-volume plastic DIP products at several manufacturing facilities. It also took its camera control technology overseas on a tour of Japanese camera manufacturers, but after several unsuccessful months gave up and closed down the production line for the exposure control module. It continued to manufacture flash control modules for Polaroid for another year, however. Within six months to a year of losing the exposure control contract, at least half the people who had worked on the project moved to other companies, Feit recalled.
Could the design have gone more smoothly? Certainly better communications between Polaroid and the two semiconductor companies and among different divisions within TI and Fairchild would have eliminated some of the rough spots.
From Polaroid’s standpoint, the information it handed out was as complete as it could be. After all, several parts of the camera system were being developed concurrently, so that the system specifications could not meanwhile be finalized. Also, said one Polaroid engineer, unfamiliarity with photography impaired the IC designers’ comprehension of the data they were given.
In the eyes of the TI and Fairchild engineers, useful information was withheld, and Polaroid engineers do admit a preoccupation with secrecy.
Still, in the eyes of the TI and Fairchild engineers, useful information was withheld, and Polaroid engineers do admit a preoccupation with secrecy due to concern over competition from Kodak. Perhaps being told that certain design issues had yet to be resolved or a detailed explanation of how an SLR functions would have elicited more creative engineering from the IC designers.
Be that as it may, the SX-70 was a brilliant success. Polaroid sold some three million units of the leather-covered Model 1 with its chrome-plated trim and the plastic-bodied Model 2. (Model 3, introduced in 1975, was not an SLR.) So while the design problems both TI and Fairchild endured triggered tense moments at all three companies, their solution opened up a huge new consumer market in electronics.
For details on the SX-70 circuitry, see “Behind the lens of the SX-70,” by Gerald Lapidus, IEEE Spectrum (December 1973, pp. 76-83).
Both Time and Life magazines featured the SX-70 camera on their covers in 1972, and discussed it in “Polaroid’s Big Gamble on Small Cameras” (Time, June 26, 1972, pp. 80-82) and “If you are able to state a problem, it can be solved” (Life, October 27, 1972, p. 48). To understand how the development of the SX-70 fit into Polaroid’s Jong history, read The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience by Mark Olshaker (Stein & Day, New York, 1978).
Frank Perrino’s version of tape automated bonding is described in U.S. Patent #3,868,724, “Multi-layer connecting structures for packaging semiconductor devices mounted on a flexible carrier,” dated Feb. 25, 1975.