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Sunday, October 22, 2023

Reticon-PerkinElmer-Excelitas Documentation

This entry covers the progression of products originally developed by Reticon through its acquisition by EG&G (retaining the Reticon name) then EG&G's acquisition of part of PerkinElmer and the PerkinElmer name (Reticon was still applied sporadically as a brand) and finally the spinoff of PerkinElmer's optoelectronics businesses as Excelitas. Throughout this process, many of the original Reticon products retained their original part numbers as can be seen in the data sheets. 

Four items of note:

1 - Documents issued under "EG&G Reticon" are in the Reticon folder since the Reticon identity was maintained.  There is not yet an EG&G folder but this will be added when the amorphous silicon flat-panel products developed by EG&G are covered. The EG&G Amorphous Silicon facility was in the same building as Reticon in Sunnyvale, California, but operated independently. That business was later sold by PerkinElmer to Varex, formerly Varian Medical Systems.

2 - Excelitas no longer sells any Reticon-originated products. These became difficult to source when the fab Reticon operated in its own building was closed in the late 90's. Moving from a 3 micron process to 180 nm was quite difficult, especially while the selection of fabs who could make CCDs was rapidly shrinking. Excelitas still sells products originally made by some of the other optoelectronics companies EG&G bought, like thermopile arrays.  Those are included in the Excelitas folder but their history will be told later.

3 - Reticon, up through the PerkinElmer days, made many custom devices including a 20,000 pixel long three-color TDI sensor that flew on the U2 and an ultraviolet CCD for i-line semiconductor mask inspection. If the specifications or evaluation reports for any of these turn up, they will be posted.

4 - Reticon started by making bucket-brigade devices to be used as delay lines and switched-capacitor filter chips. These aren't imagers but they are in the folder to provide some background.

Reticon & EG&G Reticon document archive

PerkinElmer document archive

Excelitas document archive

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