Engineering A Hall Of Famer

Once a year we at Electronic Design ask our readers to stand up and recognize those who have made major contributions to the electronic engineering world. Our “2008 Electronic Design Hall of Fame” is primed to hoist another class of engineer superheroes onto your proverbial shoulders. So, whether you’ve worked with the engineer and shared ideas at the bench; for the mogul in launching a major technological innovation; use the candidate’s technology every day; are in sheer awe of his body of work; or if you just want to see someone in your industry win, we want to know what the engineers think a hall of famer is made of.

Here are the 2008 candidates:

Bob Adams: Invented log-domain filters. Designed the first monolithic asynchronous sample-rate converters for digital audio, and developed ground-breaking multi-bit sigma-delta converters.
Charlie Allen and Dave Bingham: Pioneers in analog switchers and line drivers.
Paul Allen: Software innovator who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with Bill Gates.
Roger Amidon and Chris Rutkowski: Developed the Valdocs integrated software system.
Robert H. Anderson: Invented the direct-view bistable cathode-ray tube, which was instrumental in advancing oscilloscope technology at Tektronix.
Bill Atkinson: Developed the Menu bar and HyperCard. For Apple’s Macintosh, he created the ground-breaking MacPaint application as well as QuickDraw.
Jayant Baliga:Conceived the idea of functional integration of MOS and bipolar physics, which led to the development of the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)
Rob Barnaby: Created WordStar text editor, the most popular word-processing software in the mid-1980s.
Hans W. Becke and Carl F. Wheatley: Co-invented the IGBT, or insulated-gate bipolar transistor
Arnold O. Beckman: Founder of Beckman Instruments. Innovator in precision instrumentation and components. Inventor of the Helipot.

This will be the seventh year of the Electronic Design Hall of Fame. On our Hall of Fame Web page, you’ll find truly remarkable innovators from past to present. And what would a compilation of historic technological ingenuity be without PONG? Yea, we have PONG on our page, so don’t be shy.

To vote for the “2008 Electronic Design Hall of Fame” click here. The ballot is open from September 1 through October 3. You can submit questions about the survey to me at [email protected].