Talk:Energy Conversion Devices

Subsidiaries Missing from Article

ECD held several other companies. Any particular reason these are not mentioned?

Two that come to mind are Ovonic Imaging Systems or OIS, later Optical Imaging Systems, which produced flat-panel, diode-switched, multi-color displays. From personal recollection, OIS entered chapter 11 and was required to fulfill certain government contracts sometime around 2000.

A second was Ovonic Synthetic Materials, Inc, or OSMIC, a maker of diffraction gratings and optics for x-ray imaging. I believe their technology is still in production by Rigaku under the Osmyx brand.

See, for external references, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA233759.pdf and https://www.laserfocusworld.com/detectors-imaging/article/16547599/diffractive-optics-bend-shape-and-filter-xray-light 148.61.55.102 (talk) 13:44, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

First-person account

This counts as original research, but maybe it can survive in the Talk section…

My father, James C. Thompson, was a physicist at ECD for 11 months during 1969-1970. (While on sabbatical from the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.) In 2003 he wrote some of his recollections about his time there.

ECD got a big boost from a mid-winter Phys. Rev. Letter claiming switching. The stock did a delta-function leap to about $160 and then back down to the starting point of about $10 within one trading day-the day the PRL issue came out. Unfortunately my Post-Doc entered an open buy order and bought near the top and has yet to recoup his losses. But the boost also caused an infusion of capital and expansion of the work and facilities and my hiring along with several others.

I was technically the "research" lab manager but was in no sense superior to [name] and [name]. We hired some technicians including xx (sic) who came to his interview on a motorcycle wearing a stovepipe hat and wearing jeans. Not a good visible impression but one of the best lab guys I've encountered and later a top man at the Kurt J. Lesker high vacuum company. None of us stayed very long at ECD though I was certainly the first to leave

Recollections about Ovshinsky and research:

Stan was an inventor in the classic mode with only a high school education and training as a machinist. His wife, Iris, had a PhD in some sort of biology. He was supposed to be looking for some sort of switch to use in machine tool control mechanisms and was led by an imperfect understanding of the spiral of DNA to Te or Se which also display spiral structures of a sort. He mixed in a lot of other things, willy nilly, and got a material that sometimes exhibited switching between low and high conducting states during an upward current sweep.

There have been lots of arguments over the years as to the mechanism and problems of reproducibilty. The major source of interest was that the switch was made of an amorphous semiconducting material with the potential to avoid the complex and expensive processes needed for crystalline semiconductor devices. There was also a time when the amorphous nature of the material made radiation hardness a possiblity before the presence of Te was recognized to make that less probable.

Still the money flowed. The alloys had five or more components with the roles of each not always clear. We finally decided that Al was used because it was in effect a getter for O2 during the melting process and compensated for the imperfect vacuum. The vacuum, however, meant that much of the rather volatile materials went away during processing and the final composition was not all that close to the original.

So there were problems. Stan's approach, always, was to detour around each problem by suggesting an entirely new material or an entirely new device. So we flailed about quite often and things never quite came together.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with the culture of magic, showmanship rather than science, and unrepeatable results so could not see a future in that enviroment. I also was uncomfortable in being unable to discuss with anyone outside the company the work that was most interesting to me.

Some stories:

Stan and Iris were never shy about spending money--investors money. They had a beautiful home on a glacially-formed pond that was the beginning of the Rouge river that sometimes flamed up as it flowed past the main Ford Motor Co. plant.

I had always worked on Saturdays from graduate school onwards. At ECD anyone working on Saturday got a free lunch brought it from a nearby, excellent deli.

The Christmas party was held at a Greek Orthodox church with a wonderful buffet of middle eastern foods.

The excellent tech mentioned above came in one morning to clean out some vacuum pumps used on the ovens that made the alloys. As soon as he opened up a warm pump and smelled the fumes he realized that he had a big dose of Se or Te. It took us a bit to find an authority on what to do. The authority asked: "is he still alive?" yes! "that is a good sign". The advice: drink a lot of beer to flush it out.

The public, main entrance led to a tiny waiting room, perhaps 10x10 but no more; behind the sliding glass window was a common room for the 4-5 secretaries and bookkeepers. When an incomming phone caller asked for, say, Stan, the person who had answered would say that Stan's secretary would be called and hand the phone to the next desk, pretending there was another office.

KKelvinThompson (talk) 21:59, 8 April 2026 (UTC)