Sarnoff Corporation
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Sarnoff Corporation, with headquarters in West Windsor, New Jersey, is the former RCA Laboratories. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of SRI International. The headquarters is the site of the development of color television, CMOS technology, electron microscopy, and many other important technologies since the cornerstone was laid just before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
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[edit] Building
The Sarnoff Headquarters, on the southeast side (northbound lane) of U.S. Route 1, includes a museum highlighting the important work which occurred at the facility over many years, and the important role of longtime RCA leader and labs namesake David Sarnoff as the impresario and entrepreneur bringing broadcast radio and television to the entire world.
[edit] History
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Although the facility existed under the name David Sarnoff Research Center for many years, the modern Sarnoff Corporation was created as a result of the purchase by General Electric (GE) of RCA in the late 1980s. A few years prior to the takeover, RCA had written off hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in videodisc technology. RCA's SelectaVision product was overtaken by the videocassette recorder, which allowed easy recording and could store an entire movie on one tape. This major product failure led to the failure of RCA and its purchase by GE.
In the deal, which was intended to gain ownership of NBC (created and owned by RCA), RCA was broken into pieces. The now-legendary guru of General Electric, Jack Welch, had the task of disposing of the RCA components he did not want. Lockheed Martin ended up with the government systems components of RCA, located in the Philadelphia area. Harris Corporation ended up with RCA's semiconductor division, located along Route 202 in New Jersey. Thomson SA, the French company, ended up with RCA's consumer electronics division with manufacturing activities in Indianapolis, IN and Lancaster, PA.
At first, Jack Welch and GE did not have a home for RCA's legendary central research laboratory located in Princeton. GE did not require an augmentation of already existing GE labs in Schenectady, and Syracuse, NY. At the time, New Jersey wanted to grow a "Silicon Valley" of the east coast around the Princeton area, and the Sarnoff Lab was to be a sort of flagship for that. So there was some pressure to not just close the Sarnoff Lab down.
SRI International was engaged to study the problem, and ended by suggesting that the David Sarnoff Research Center be donated to SRI itself along with funds to operate it for several years. While this might seem an audacious request, actually the patent licensing revenues associated with RCA having sold television technologies to manufacturing companies around the world and especially in Japan far exceeded the operating costs of the facility, and the SRI proposal was for GE to retain those licensing revenues and for the David Sarnoff Research Center to continue to provide support to ensure that they maintained their value; also extending inventions further into the future as needed. The proposal was accepted around 1987. Part of this was that approximately a third of the workforce of the Sarnoff Lab was to be canned. A nearby office site was opened under GE ownership as the licensing center for the RCA intellectual property.
[edit] Conditions
Another provision of the divestiture of the RCA Labs was that, should the organization not be profitable five years after it was emancipated from General Electric, the land on which it was situated (nearly 300 acres (1.2 km²) of valuable property) would revert to GE ownership. Sarnoff's management under the leadership of President James Carnes was able to attain profitability and the deed was transferred to Sarnoff Corporation around 1995.
[edit] Notes
Sarnoff Corporation is industry's longest continuously running R&D laboratory in semiconductor diode lasers. Millstone River Photonickers is an informal affinity group consisting of individuals involved in the development of diode laser and related technology at Sarnoff Corporation and its daughter or spin-off organizations.
