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Cherry Semiconductor

Cherry Semiconductor Corporation, Cherry’s semiconductor line of business, was obtained with the acquisition of Micro Components Corporation in Rhode Island in 1977. Micro Components Corporation had previously purchased the Cranson, Rhode Island plant from Amperex. Production was later relocated to East Greenwich, Rhode Island. When Walter Cherry was interviewed for a Waukegan newspaper in January 1982, Cherry Semiconductor provided “integrated circuits for cameras, communications devices, and computer peripherals”.

By the year 2000, the focus of Cherry Semiconductor was “heavily weighted toward power semiconductors for automotive applications”, according to an interview with Peter Cherry reported in the EE Times in December 2000. A failure to find sufficient prominence in the market, as well as dissatisfaction on the part of the shareholders, high operating costs and recruitment trouble led to Cherry selling off its semiconductor division in the spring of 2000 to ON Semiconductor.

For the most part, it appears that Cherry Semiconductor was entirely unrelated to Cherry’s keyboard production. By the time that Cherry acquired Micro Components Corporation in 1977, microcontroller-based encoders had just been introduced, and Cherry adopted this technique rather than implement its own LSI encoders. However, in May 1979 Cherry announced capacitive keyboards in Electronics magazine, said to use a “custom LSI circuit from American Microsystems Inc. and a read-only memory from Cherry Semiconductor”. This is the only known instance to date of Cherry silicon in one of their keyboards.

Documentation

All material was scanned by or for World Radio History unless otherwise noted.