Career at Intel
Bill's career at Intel started in 1971. Noyce and Moore agreed to Jordan and Regitz' business plan. However, even though the invention of the 1103 revolutionized memory, production of the chip was slow and often came with a slew of issues. So they placed Regitz in the components division to characterize the 1103 and troubleshoot the chip for clients while they placed Jordan to set up the new memory systems division. They essentially told Regitz to “do whatever was necessary to get the 1103 into high volume production,” and that is exactly what he did. Using his system training from Bell Labs and Honeywell, Regitz was a key contributor in the high volume production of the 1103.
In 1971, Regitz helped develop the 4 Kb 2107 DRAM which has “many improvements including on-chip intermediate-voltage generation for simpler system interface”.
Regitz had the choice to either become a project manager “of a 4k part for use in Intel's Memory System’s IBM add-on memory products or move over to manufacturing set up and run the newly formed Product Engineering group”. He chose to become a project manager.
Regitz was split into the DRAM division with George Schneer and Larry Regis. He ended up becoming the manufacturing manager for DRAM.
In February 1972, Bill Regitz and Joel Karp presented Intel’s 2107 4Kb DRAM at the ISSCC.
As Design Engineering Manager for the Memory Systems Operation (MSO), Bill grew Memory Systems from its infancy to its peak. its end in 1982. After years of working with the Memory System Division, several of William’s colleagues and engineers left Intel to focus on personal projects. The division started to struggle, and the product lines produced by the Memory System Division were eventually sold to a start-up called Zitel.
He remembers the day he had to stand in the Sunnyvale High School auditorium and tell 450 MSO employees that the operation was shutting down and they would have to find a new job. It wasn't an easy thing to do, but Regitz and others in charge of MSO worked hard to find those employees new jobs.
After the Memory System Division was disbanded, William took a sabbatical before taking on another assignment from the company. He spent the rest of his career at Intel traveling and working with different teams on the development of new products.
The low-cost ROM invented by Regitz was officially patented in November 1973 under the number 3,774,171.
Regitz redesigned the 1103 and made the 1103A, the “only chip that [he’s] really designed personally and put into production” in 1978.
By 1998, Regitz was co-manager with Jeff Citta of Mobuild Module Manufacturing. They “ramped the Pentium II into production" and "went from almost 0 productions at the beginning of the year to about two million modules a quarter in Q4”.
Over the course of his career at Intel, Bill played a role in many aspects of the company including marketing, managing teams of engineers, and development of new systems. William also played a vital role in the development of several product lines that included Microprocessors, Static RAMS, EPROM’s, and DRAM’s.
|
|
Career Positions |
Patents based on Assignee
|
Description
|
|
Bell Laboritories
|
|
|
|
|
Honeywell
|
Project Engineer (Honeywell) |
Assigned to Honeywell:
|
|
|
Intel
|
DRAM Department Manager Project Manager Product Engineer |
|
|
