Career at Intel
William Regitz had a passion for engineering and working with computers. During his career, he worked extensively with several companies. He worked with Bell Labs, as well as Honeywell. During his time at Honeywell, William collaborated with Intel on several projects before ultimately deciding to move to California and further his career with Intel.
Bill's career at Intel started in 1971 as a manager that focused on designing memory systems. He and another colleague from Honeywell set up the Memory System Division for Intel. The first projects that his team focused on producing better MOS and RAM memory systems for Intel. 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.
1970 was a phenomenal year for Bill Regitz at Intel. The Intel 1103 MOS DRAM, an invention that competed with the Magnetiv Core Memory, was invented in part by both Regitz and Joel Karp in 1970. Intel 1103 was the first commercial DRAM chip and by 1972 it was the bestselling semiconductor memory chip in the world.
This was a huge step for computing technology. The chip contained a 3-transistor cell which was priced at 1 cent/bit. The chip would soon replace the magnetic core technology and became a champion for computer memory.
For the first time in history, it became possible to store a significant amount of information on this small chip as compared to the static RAM. Although this invention revolutionized memory, production of this chip was slow and often came with a slew of issues.
By March 1970 when Regitz read his “A Three-Transistor-Cell 1024-Bit 500nS MOS RAM,” paper at the IEEE Solid State Circuits Conference, the whole industry was reeling with the possibility of this product revolutionizing the field. That summer Regitz and Bodio successfully demonstrated at FCO a 516-computer operating with an 8K MOS memory using the F30 devices. An improved version of the F30 is now marketed by Intel Corp. and is rapidly becoming an industry standard part.
Many of the engineers that Bill worked with at Intel had also been colleagues of his from Honeywell. Each engineer was given a task to focus on, and William allowed them the freedom to design the task how they saw fit. This allowed them to develop many difficult projects while Bill worked for Intel.
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. 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.
