Intermetall
| Intermetall
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|---|---|
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| legal form | GmbH |
| founding | 1952 (under the name Intermetall - Gesellschaft für Metallurgie mbH ) |
| resolution | from 1997 |
| Reason for dissolution | Merger as Micronas Intermetall GmbH with its parent company |
| Seat |
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| management |
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| Number of employees |
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| Branch | Electrical engineering |
Intermetall was an electronics company in Freiburg im Breisgau . When it was founded in Düsseldorf in 1952, it was one of the first German companies devoted to the development and marketing of semiconductor components in electronics. The company was merged into Micronas Holding in 1997 , which in turn has been part of the Japanese group TDK as TDK Micronas GmbH since 2016 .
Company history
In the initial phase, Intermetall's activities had a strong focus on research and development, which was given up after the first change of ownership. Nevertheless, the company played a pioneering role in the further company history with the introduction of new products, whereby it also achieved development-intensive innovations.
Foundation and development phase: pioneer of semiconductor technology
In May 1952 the Intermetall - Gesellschaft für Metallurgie mbH was founded by Jakob Michael in Düsseldorf, the owner of the German Family Department Store (DeFaKa). The purpose of the company was stated in the commercial register to be research, manufacture and sale of products in the field of metallurgy and related fields. The share capital amounted to 20,000 DM ; 14 employees were initially employed. DeFaKa provided funds for research laboratories and production facilities .
Herbert Mataré was entrusted with building up the company . He brought scientific and technical experts with him from his former employer CFS Westinghouse in France , who had been mass-producing diodes and transistors from germanium for some time .
After the production facilities and development laboratories had been set up, the workforce was increased to around 50 in early 1953. By summer production could be increased to 20,000 germanium diodes per month. These and the germanium transistors produced at the same time were initially manufactured with tip contact. The prices at that time for diodes were three or six DM, depending on the type, for transistors 12 or 15 DM. In addition to the Süddeutsche Apparate-Fabrik (SAF), Intermetall was the only German manufacturer to show series-produced transistors at the Düsseldorf radio exhibition in late summer 1953 could. The presentation of transistor radios equipped with components from their own production - one year before their market launch by Texas Instruments - caused a sensation .
The research questions that Intermetall pursued related to the development of new electronic components, the suitability of germanium and silicon for different applications, as well as processes for the ultra-pure representation of these semiconductor elements . Part of the activities of the new company focused on researching so-called III-V compound semiconductors , i.e. intermetallic compounds of elements of III. and V. main group of the periodic table , such as aluminum antimonide . These connections were the origin of the company name Intermetall . At the beginning of the 1950s, III-V compounds were considered promising alternatives to germanium and silicon in semiconductor research, but they did not find practical applications until the 1960s.
The high financial outlay for research, combined with low income on a still limited market for semiconductor components, made the company a subsidy operation. Although five years had been estimated for achieving a stable profit, Intermetall's research spectrum, which in addition to product development also included basic questions, was so broad and cost-intensive compared to the weak sales sector that fears arose about the preservation of investments. After damage to stored transistors occurred in 1954, Intermetall was to be dissolved. In this situation, Mataré succeeded in convincing the American Clevite Corporation of the high quality of the germanium junction transistors from the latest series and in 1955 initiated the sale of Intermetall to Clevite .
In the Clevite Group: Consolidation, early focus on silicon
After the transition to Clevite , Mataré left the company, now Intermetall Semiconductor Plant Düsseldorf . Research into III-IV semiconductors was discontinued, production capacity expanded and the workforce doubled; initially there was a loss of quality. Karl Seiler came from the Süddeutsche Apparatefabrik (SAF), also a pioneer in transistor technology, as the new managing director in 1956 . In the same year, Intermetall again played a pioneering role with the first German transistors made from silicon, which is harder to process but has superior semiconductor properties to germanium. The new transistors were offered from September 1956 for DM amounts in the middle double-digit range and thus cost five times as much as germanium transistors. At the end of the 1950s, Intermetall was the German market leader for silicon transistors. The company was able to benefit from synergies in the group to which the American silicon pioneers Transistor Products and Shockley Transistor Corporation belonged. The Zener diode , which it offered from 1957 as the first German manufacturer, was a great success for Intermetall .
When production capacity was to be expanded at the end of the 1950s, Seiler initiated the move from Düsseldorf to the then low-wage area of Freiburg im Breisgau, which was completed in 1960. At that time the company employed 730 people. As the only established company in Germany that had specialized in semiconductor components, Intermetall offered the widest range of products in this field in the early 1960s and sent representatives to the technical standards committee and the committees of the Ministry of Defense.
In 1965 the Clevite Corporation was restructured and the subsidiary Intermetall went to the American conglomerate ITT .
In the ITT Group: Innovative with integrated circuits
The company traded under ITT as Intermetall - Semiconductor Factory of Deutsche ITT Industries GmbH . Despite its connections to the American market, Intermetall initially only slowly found a connection to the new technology of integrated circuits . From the 1970s, however, the company drew attention to itself with innovations.
A microchip from Intermetall was the basis for the world's first inexpensive quartz movement from the Staiger company from St. Georgen in the Black Forest . A first trade fair model presented by Intermetall in 1970 is now in the German Watch Museum in Furtwangen .
In 1983 Standard Elektrik Lorenz (SEL) , also part of the ITT Group, presented the first television set with digital image processing. This was preceded by a seven-year development phase in close cooperation with the Freiburg sister company Intermetall , whose engineer Lubo Micic had already developed the basic principles of the new technology in the early 1970s.
In cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits , Intermetall developed decoder chips for MP3 files. Intermetall presented a first music player without moving parts at the Tonmeistertagung 1994 in Karlsruhe - four years before portable MP3 players came onto the market. A single-chip decoder for MP3 files from Intermetall from 1995 can be seen in the Bonn branch of the Deutsches Museum .
In 1997, the ITT group sold Intermetall to Micronas Semiconductor Holding AG from Zurich , Switzerland . With around 1500 employees, Intermetall was the largest private employer in Freiburg at the time. The turnover of the new subsidiary exceeded that of the parent company taking over the year before by several times. For a short time, the new acquisition was named Micronas Intermetall GmbH . Only a little later, however, the legal independence ended and the company was merged with its parent company.
successor
Since the holding company Micronas was taken over by the Japanese TDK in 2016 , its shares have been taken off the stock exchange and the name and the legal form of the production companies have been changed to TDK-Micronas GmbH . The operational headquarters of TDK-Micronas was set up at the Freiburg location.
literature
- Kai Handel : Beginnings of semiconductor research and development - illustrated by the biographies of four German semiconductor pioneers . Dissertation at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen , Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, 1999
Web links
- Literature by and about Intermetall in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ Johannes Graf: From one hundred to zero in 40 years. The German clock industry in the post-war period , in: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Chronometrie. Jahresschrift , Vol. 50, 2011, pp. 241–262, especially p. 254
- ^ Eduard C. Saluz: German Clock Museum . In: Furtwangen University - Annual Report 2013/2014.
- ↑ The hidden advantage . In: Der Spiegel , No. 41/1983 of October 10, 1983, accessed on August 2, 2017.
- ^ Georg Küffner: Top technology in Germany. From research to application , business management publisher Dr. Th. Gabler, Wiesbaden 1987, pp. 80-85.
- ↑ Single chip decoder MAS 3507D . Website of the Deutsches Museum Bonn , accessed on August 2, 2017.
- ↑ Jörg Buteweg, Bernd Kramer and Ronny Gert Bürckholdt: New Perspectives for Micronas . In: Badische Zeitung , December 18, 2015, accessed on August 2, 2017.
- ↑ Micronas buys ITT Intermetall , In: Computerwoche , September 26, 1997, accessed on August 2, 2017.
- ↑ Business directory Germany . In: Exxact New Media . Retrieved July 30, 2017.