Submitted by: Submitted by ewoul023
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Category: World History
Date Submitted: 09/02/2016 08:16 AM
Freescale history
Freescale was one of the first semiconductor companies in the world, having started as a division of Motorola in Phoenix, Arizona in 1948[3] and then becoming autonomous by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. In 1955, a Motorola transistor for car radios was the world’s first commercial high-power transistor. It was also Motorola’s first mass-produced semiconductor device.
In the 1960s, one of the U.S. space program's goals was to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. In 1968, NASA began manned Apollo flights that led to the first lunar landing in July 1969. The Apollo program was particularly significant for hundreds of employees involved in designing, testing and producing its electronics. A division of Motorola, which became Freescale Semiconductor, supplied thousands of semiconductor devices, ground-based tracking and checkout equipment, and 12 on-board tracking and communications units. An "up-data link" in the Apollo's command module received signals from Earth to relay to other on-board systems. A transponder received and transmitted voice and television signals and scientific data.[4]
Also that year, Motorola’s technologies were used to introduce the first two-way mobile radio with a fully transistorized power supply and receiver for cars.[5]
Motorola has continued its growth in the networking and communications sector in later years, providing the tools behind the radio transponder that delivered the first words from the moon in 1969, and going on to develop the first prototype of the first analog mobile phone in 1973.[6]
The company’s first microprocessor (MC6800 8-bit) was introduced in 1974, and was used in automotive, computing and video game applications.[7]
Motorola’s next generation 32-bit microprocessor, the MC68000, led the wave of technologies that spurred the computing revolution in 1984, powering devices from companies such as Apple, Commodore, Atari, Sun, and...