Trace the Broken Bond Wire Accident That Led to the Insight

# Trace the Broken Bond-Wire Accident That Led to the Insight

## 2. An Accident, Followed Up Rather Than Discarded

The specific circumstance behind Frohman's insight was mundane: a test die had a broken bond wire, so Frohman could not electrically access it to run the planned measurement. Rather than discard the unusable part, he set it aside and, days later, measured it anyway out of curiosity about whether the trapped charge had decayed on its own. It had not. The die, with no electrical connection at all, should have been inert either way — but its behavior under a later test pointed Frohman toward a different question entirely: if electrical access was not what discharged a floating gate, what did? He recalled that ultraviolet light was known in semiconductor process work to generate photocurrent in silicon dioxide, and tried exposing a charged floating-gate die to a UV source. The trapped charge drained away. That single bench test, not a planned research program, is the actual origin of erasable programmable read-only memory.