Steve Byrne:  

Hi All, here's a short blurb on my life so far. A little dry as it focuses more on career than family and life lessons, but gives you an idea of what I've been up to. After high school, I worked at my Dad's aircraft plant, General Dynamics, on west side of town for a year. The summer after high school, I dated a girl in our old neighborhood and , of course, thought I was in love for awhile only later to find out she was not the one. A painful experience, but part of growing up and a lot of fun. Then I was fortunate to get a job in Keller with Communication Appartus Corp , a company that built telephone equipment. I hired in as a buyer and expediter trainee. (FYI: Tom Gaither also had a job there in the engineering development lab ). Well it wasn't long before I was placing 10-15 purchase orders a day and having lots of fun being wined and dined by suppliers (mostly at lunch). I was going to school full -time in the evenings for about two of the 3 years I had this job ('69-'71). Although the job was fun at times, it didn't pay much. So I looked around and found some openings at Texas Instruments in Richardson. Funny, but my experience as an 8th grade photo lab assistant at school, is what got me that job and lauched my career in semiconductor electronics manufacturing in Texas Instruments photomask operation which used a lot of photography processes. I worked in TI's photomask manufacturing clean rooms for 3 years before I got bored and took a voluntary layoff that funded my running off with a girlfriend to Portland, Oregon. She had some ex-band member friends of hers that managed an apartment complex there that gave us an apartment free for 6 months to help us get started there. Long story short, they restarted their band, she was hot, liked to flirt, and eventually strayed. Yet, again, I wouldn't trade the experience. It taught me what I wasn't looking for in a woman. I was about 26 when I finished that relationship. Luckily, the last year I was in Portland, I took some electronics courses at a community college, and that was enough combined with my TI experience to get me a job 85 miles south in Corvallis, Or with Hewlett-Packard as a Process Technician. They were opening up a new semiconductor clean room for manufacture of CMOS integrated circuits. Since TI was in the same industry, my trips while at TI over to their Learning Center on graveyard shift to watch videos on semiconductor circuit and process design really helped me grasp the concepts that would be thrown at me in this role. I worked at HP for 7 years (12/76 to 1/84) during which time I met my current wife, dated for year and half, got married in Sept '79 at age 29, and had my son in '82. Let me just say briefly, that I was very apprehensive about my odds of staying married a long time as divorce seemed to run in my family . So I waited a long time to find the right woman to marry at 1 week before my 30th b-day, but she has been perfect for me. I needed an even-keel woman with a very positive outlook on life with a kind heart and that's exactly what I got. I really liked Oregon in the summers. Had lots of fun white water rafting, fishing, hiking, and canoeing down miles of meandering rivers. It was the rain that lasted all fall, winter, and spring that eventually made me move. I wanted my son to grow up in sunshine like we all did in Texas. Anyway, on with history: while at HP, I got into Production mgmt for 3 years, but I had done mostly process and equipment technician work before that. As an equipment tech, I worked with toxic gasses that could kill you in 30 seconds, chemicals (HF) that could eat through flesh to the bone and back, 200,000 volt ion implanters, high current furnaces that would french fry you quick, and more. It was exciting, but I was too naive to demand hazardous duty pay :-) It was the 3 years of management experience that got me an offer by a friend from HP that went to Xicor in Milpitas, CA to hire on with them as Equipment Engineering manager in Feb'84. We had worked together as technicians and knew each others strengths and weaknesses well. It turns out career opportunities are often about relationships. We had a lot of fun there starting up a new semiconductor wafer processing line. I stayed with Xicor a year and then decided I wanted out of Silicon Valley which was a bit too crowded for me after living in rural Oregon. By the way, my daughter was born in Sept'84 in Livermore, CA. She is now married and a very sucessful oil artist / teacher in Laguna Beach, Ca. So in Feb'85, I took a job with Intel Corp as Equipment Engineering Manager to start up a new semiconductor clean room processing plant in Folsom, CA. This was more rural , just outside Sacramento in foothills of Sierras. I worked with that group for 6 months before they cancelled the project. At that point, I transferred to an Intel semiconductor fab in Livermore (east of SF) and moved to Pleasanton where I raised my kids through their high school years. We lived in Pleasanton, CA from about 85 thru 03 and I was with Intel that whole time. Although in '91, they shut down the Livermore site, and I began commuting 30 miles each way to Santa Clara Intel site which I did until '03. My kids graduated high school in 2000 and '02. My son went off to college at Cal Poly Pomona just east of LA, we moved my in-laws to a retirement community near Palm Springs, and my daughter went off to art school in Laguna Beach. So most of our family was in Southern California and we decided it was time to join them in '03 when I was able to get a position in Customer Quality Engineering (CQE) in a new Intel division in San Diego that made printed circuit boards that allowed laptop PC's to communicate with wireless transmitters and receivers. This was just the reverse of what I had been doing as a Supplier Quality Engineer for a for semiconductor test equipment a few years before this. In the CQE role, I had to listen to customer complaints about product quality and help solve their problems by working with other engineers in our division to investigate the issues and get the customer answers. Everything was going fine for a few years here in San Diego until i...Expand for more