Gordon E. Moore
Co-founding two of the major companies manufacturing ICs today is just one major achievement that has distinguished Moore's career. In 1965, eight years after co-founding Fairchild Semiconductor, Moore noted in a magazine article that for the previous three years, the number of components on a chip had doubled every year. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for another 10 years, with chips doubling in complexity until they reached 65,000 components per chip. However, chip complexity continued to double long after 1975. To Moore's surprise, what he had postulated as a "rule of thumb" became "Moore's Law," the guiding principle that spurred the industry to deliver ever more powerful chips at proportionate decreases in cost. This principle has been the driving force behind the growth of Intel Corp., which Moore co-founded in 1968.
Robert N. Noyce
Noyce's career was closely interwoven with the IC evolution and the multibillion dollar industry that it created. Not only was Noyce responsible for key inventions that made the IC practical, but he co-founded and managed two of the major companies manufacturing ICs today: Fairchild Semiconductor Corp. in 1957, and Intel Corp. in 1968. At Fairchild, Noyce was responsible for the commercial realization of the double-diffused mesa and planar silicon transistors. In 1959, as general manager of the Fairchild semiconductor operation and a vice president of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., Noyce saw his IC-based inventions incorporated into a wide range of electronic products. He held 16 patents on semiconductor methods, devices, and structures, as well as the basic patent relating to metal interconnect schemes.
Robert A. Pease
A champion of common-sense analog design, Pease created the first adjustable negative regulator at National Semiconductor. After graduating from MIT with a BSEE in 1961, Pease joined George A. Philbrick Researches. In a 14-year tenure, he designed many leading-edge operational amplifiers, analog computing modules, and voltage-to-frequency converters. Pease joined National in 1976 and has designed several leading-edge analog ICs, including power regulators, voltage references, voltage-to-frequency converters, temperature sensors, and amplifiers. Currently staff scientist at National, Pease holds 21 patents. His definitive book on resolving analog design problems, Troubleshooting Analog Circuits, is in its 12th printing. Moreover, his column in Electronic Design, "Pease Porridge," received a Jesse H. Neal Certificate of Merit in 1992.
Donald O. Pederson
Pederson's development of Spice (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuits Emphasis) was the crowning point of an illustrious career that covered a half-century in teaching and research—with over half of it at the University of California at Berkeley. Beginning in the vacuum-tube era, Pederson devoted his efforts to the design and performance of electronic circuits that eventually evolved into transistors and, ultimately, into large-scale ICs. Spice was a landmark combination of software engineering, numerical analysis, and modeling of transistors for use in ICs. For more than 25 years, Spice has been the standard means of simulating circuits at the transistor level. At U.C. Berkeley, he became the inaugural E.L. and H.H. Buttner Professor of Electrical Engineering. Before his retirement in 1991, his research was reported in more than 100 technical publications.
George A. Philbrick
The father of both electronic analog computing and modern operational amplifiers, Philbrick began his distinguished career at the Foxboro Co. shortly after graduating in 1935 from Harvard's School of Engineering. He was teamed with Clesson E. Mason. In the course of their working out a complete mathematical analysis of process control, Philbrick developed what he called an "automatic control analyzer," an electronic analog computer hardwired to carry out a computation, or simulation, of a typical process-control loop. After World War II, he built a high-speed analog computer that spurred the formation of George A. Philbrick Researches. In 1952, the company introduced the first commercial full-differential, unstabilized op amp, the K2-W. Ten years later, G.A. Philbrick Researches and Burr-Brown Research Corp. introduced the first modular solid-state op amps.
Dennis M. Ritchie
Ritchie came to Bell Labs in 1967 from Harvard University, where he had completed undergraduate work in physics and a doctorate in applied mathematics. Soon, he began helping Ken Thompson create Unix for minicomputers. He later transported Unix to the Interdata 8/32. The foundation for this portability was a general-purpose language created in 1972 by Ritchie, who added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language and renamed it C. In 1978, Ritchie co-authored The C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan, introducing this highly efficient language to the world. Since then, C has become the most widely used language in computers of all sizes. The American National Standards Institute eventually established an ANSI standard for C.
Claude E. Shannon
As a graduate student at MIT, Shannon discovered the analogy between Boolean algebra and digital switching circuits. His master's thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, demonstrated the use of Boolean algebra to analyze and optimize relay switching circuits. In 1948, as a research mathematician at AT&T, Shannon published a ground-breaking paper in the Bell System Technical Journal, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." In it, he proposed a linear schematic model of a communications system in which pictures, words, and sounds could be more easily and quickly transmitted by sending a stream of 1s and 0s rather than electromagnetic waves. Shannon's discovery that the binary digit was the fundamental element of communication became the foundation for information theory and the springboard for the communications revolution.
Alan F. Shugart
The pioneer of floppy-disk technology began his career as an IBM field engineer in 1951. During Shugart's 18 years at IBM, he managed of a variety of programs, notably IBM's 2321 data cell drive, and was instrumental in the development of the first slider bearing head disk drive, the Advanced Disk File, which became the IBM 1301. After a stint at Memorex, he co-founded Shugart Associates. In 1979, Shugart founded Seagate Technology Inc., which became the largest independent manufacturer of disk drives and related components, as well as a leading developer of software tools and applications in the area of data management. In 1998, he left Seagate to establish Al Shugart International, a resource center focused on helping entrepreneurs transform great ideas into great companies with lasting value.
Reprints
