At the same time he married Patsy Irene Derden, another North Texas student. Patsy and Don had a son in September of 1970, and they named him Robert Murry Tiffin. TI was a learning experience. Analysis of materials, devices and process stuff was interesting, but in the lab at TI there were only PhDs and technicians, nothing in between. So he returned to North Texas during the spring of 1973 and finished the Physics degree in December 1974.

He went to work for Siemens Electron Microscopy Division in Houston as a field service engineer on electron microscopes and lived in Houston 1975-1978. Travel all over Texas working on electron microscopes can get a bit tiring, so in June 1978, he took a job at Mostek Corporation in Carrollton, Texas. Mostek made DRAMs, as well as other semiconductors. Don started the lab at Mostek Process R&D and stuck around for 11 years while the company got bought out, first by United Technology, then by Thompson, then merged with SGS to form SGS-Thompson.

Don left in 1989 to form his own analytical consulting company that produced semiconductor company customers all over the USA (served 26 companies). One of the companies was Advanced Micro Devices in Austin. When they were going to start-up Fab 25 in 1992, Don went to work for them starting the Process Characterization and Analysis Labs there at AMD, a major lab. He also helped design the lab for AMD Fab 30 in Germany and left in 1997 to come back to Dallas to retire and do investments.

However, the stock market seemed to go down hill in 2000, so he put out resumes and ended up back in Austin at International SEMATECH, a consortium of a number of the major semiconductor companies. Sematech does research and works a few years out in time. He took over management of one lab and the consolidation of another lab to form Process Characterization Labs and then the Sematech Fab formed a "spin-off" corporation along with the labs. Don wrote the business plan and did the start-up of marketing for the new lab business. He left Austin July, 2004 to return to The Colony to do some marketing for other labs (the AMD lab had done a "spin-off" too and investments and sort of semi-retire.

When not doing these sorts of things, travel to UK, Ireland, France and Japan has been fun. He is a long time Amateur Radio Op (Ham Operator) and just worked to support that hobby anyway….no…."But it's nice to be back in the Dallas area anyway… Its been fun being in the analytical end of semiconductors, it's a knob twisting, electronic instrument kind of job…well except lately on the management end of it, but its close enough to amateur radio to be fun (sometimes when politics doesn't get into it)."