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Analog Aficionados party 2012
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 This is what the Aficionados party is all about. Here is IC designer Tom Frederiksen talking to Arlie Stonestreet II and Kirkwood Rough. It is essential to the get the experienced old hands of analog some exposure to the next generation of analog talent. Tom designed the LM3900, the Norton op amp, when he was at National Semiconductor.  I also like to ask the technical media to the party. Indeed tech publisher UBM, of EETimes, EDN and Planet Analog fame were a double sponsor this year. Here we see Silicon valley media legend Dave Bursky on the left and Electronic Design analog editor Don Tuite on the right. Henry Hsieh and Gartner Group analyst Steve Ohr also made the party |
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 Sure, working engineers and media types are a good combination, but I also ask college professors since we may need to do some hard math. Here is Stanford prof Tom Lee holding a 1957 transistorized oscilloscope he brought to show around.  And I know you tech types are more interested in things than people, so here is a close-up of the guts of Tom Lee's 1-inch oscilloscope. |
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 Professor Sergio Franco also came and was nice enough to give me a signed copy of his new book, "Analog Circuit Design, Discrete and Integrated". My cube-mate at Analog Devices had Sergio as a professor and she told me "He is really tough". I mentioned it to Sergio and he said "I had to learn electronics twice, once the wrong way, and once the competent way." So he was just saving my co-worker time by being tough.  |
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I do want to shout out to several people that really help the
party. First and foremost is Martin "international man of mystery" DeLateur. He came early and helped stuff badges and
assemble tripods and 100 other things. Here he is on the left, with TI analog guru Paul Grohe on the right. And lets not forget the three guys that took pictures for the event. One was Ron Quan, here with Analog Devices' Joann Close, who came up the name Analog Aficionados three years ago.  Here is Ed Fong, with his Sigma camera. Ed actually worked for Foveon, and explained to me why getting any signal-to-noise out of the red pixels was so difficult. |
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 Last but not least, here is Fran Hoffart, who has been taking pictures of analog aficionados going back to the Bob Widlar days. That's Fran on the left, with Mineo Yamatake in the center and Arlie Stonestreet II on the right. That great National Semiconductor app note on JFETs? Mineo knocked that out in his spare time with he was not helping Bob Widlar get the first silicon figured out.  I also want to especially thank the sponsors. They will assure we can afford to keep the party going next year. Here is Barry Harvey, who bought all the deserts for us famished aficionados. Here is Barry in the center, with Scott Fritz on from Atmel on the left, and some guy that didn't want a badge, perhaps because he thought it was troublesome for me to do it, as opposed to spending an hour after the party trying to find out who the heck he is so I can put his name in the caption. |
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 We had two double sponsors. One was my alma mater, UBM Electronics, publishers of EDN, and EETImes. Another double sponsor was Linear Systems. Here I get a check from Paul Norton that will cover some of the food bill. I don't think there was enough food, hopefully next year we can have more sponsorships.  We also got a sponsorship from Texas Instruments. Here Mark Alden, Texas Instruments PR maven, hands me a check that helped make t he 2012 Analog Aficionados party the great time that it was. Mark also did a tremendous job getting a beautiful poster of Bob Pease made that we could display at the party. |
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 Finally, we got a sponsorship from my company, Analog Devices, thanks to the diligence of Technical Marketing Director Dave Kress. Dave could not make it out for the party, but several other Wilmington ADI people made it, including ADI fellow Scott Wurcer and his wife Madeline, ADI fellow Lew Counts, and David Robertson. OK, a new episode of House is coming on, so I will stop here, plus I have to get Fran Hoffart's pictures Tuesday, which will knock you out. |
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| Here is the "legacy" part of the post, the invitation and directions and such. ===== ====== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ===== ====== If you get drunk and kill yourself or someone else, neither I nor the restaurant, nor the sponsors are responsible. This is the same venue I had the Bob Pease and Jim Williams remembrance last June 2011. Everyone loved it since there is plenty of parking and the room is much bigger than The Duke of Edinburgh last year. We have 153 people confirmed so feel free to drop it.  They are building a parking deck for us next year, so you can park on the dirt area or by the banquet hall. Note the party is not at the banquet hall, it is in the restaurant itself.  Jim Williams and SFSU Professor Sergio Franco at last years party. Sergio is coming this year too. |
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 Bob Pease and Greg Schaffer at last years party. Greg is coming this year too. The 2012 Analog Aficionados party is shaping up to be something special. We are doing in Honor of Jim Williams and Bob Pease. Jim William's widow Siu is coming. Nancy Pease is traveling but both her sons, Benjamin and Jonathan, are coming. This is a living article, so I will update it after the party with pictures and stories from the party. The big relief for me is that we have five sponsors this year. Intersil offered to sponsor the the last two parties. but I could not accept since I worked at EDN magazine and Intersil was an advertiser. EDN and I both take ethics very seriously so I never billed Intersil. Now that I am at Analog Devices and don't report on Intersil, I can actually accept. Just as nice Analog Devices and Texas Instruments are sponsors. Karen Field and Patrick Mannion at UBM Electronics, owners of EDN, have kicked in a double sponsorship. A real honor is that John Hall's Linear Integrated Systems is also donating a double sponsorship to celebrate their 25th anniversary. As I have done for the last two parties, I made up a placemat showing notable analog engineers, professors, and media people that will be at the party. The pdf file of the placemat is here (rev 4). The HTML I made the pdf from follows: |
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 Tom Lee is a Stanford professor, where he founded the microwave integrated circuits laboratory. He has written and co-authored several books and papers. He's got 3 degrees from MIT. Tom co-founded Matrix Semiconductor and ZeroG Wireless. Ask him about: the oscilloscopes, working as a director of DARPA.  Scott Wurcer is a fellow at Analog Devices. He designed the AD524 instrumentation amplifier and many low-distortion circuits. He is member of IEEE and AES. A native of Milwaukee, he went to MIT. Ask him about: cooking, carpentry, and non-commercial music. |
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 Barry Harvey is an Intersil Fellow and an all around good guy. He has 15 patents, and has published 30 papers. He has made a bunch of op-amps. Ask him about: settling time, slew rate, fast pulse generators, and anything about video.  Earl McCune is an RF and wireless design consultant. He has over 50 patents. He co-founded two start-up companies. He has written a great book: "Practical Digital Wireless Signals. Ask him about: multipath, how many bits per hertz you really get, wireless power transmission, his ham license, the impracticality of transmitting gigawatts from space-based solar panels. |
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 Dennis Monticelli is a fellow at Texas Instruments. He went to UC Santa Barbara. He has scores of patents. Ask him about: point-contact transistors, photography, Tom Frederickson, low-dropout regulators, the culture of innovation, the Kodak chip, broadband over power lines, his Ham kit, why he chose National Semi out of college instead of Intel or Fairchild.  David_Fullagar was a founder of Maxim. He went to Cambridge University, worked at Transitron and Fairchild in the 1960s, then at Intersil in the 1970s. He started at Fairchild 2 days after Widlar left. Ask him about: sailing, photography, the early days of analog and the 741, England, Intersil & Analog Devices joint venture, Jean Hoerni and Jack Gifford. |
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 Eric Schlaepfer is a hardware engineer at Google. Formerly he worked as a senior applications engineer at Maxim. He graduated from Cal Poly where he was on the hybrid vehicle development team. Ask him about: fencing, his GPL scoring machine, his CRT clocks, his LED watch, and his GPS-disciplined rubidium atomic clock.  Stephan Ohr is Gartner's research analyst for analog IC markets. Previously he was a reporter and columnist for Electronic Engineering Times and editor of Planet Analog. Ask him about: data center power management, his Jesse Neil Award, and Nordic Noir fiction. |
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 JoAnn Close is a design group leader at Analog Devices. She recommended Analog Aficionado as the party name. Ask her about: JFETs, Lew Counts, her many IC designs, steam-punk hats, the MIT Lewis music library, why analog designers still rule, and opera as a team sport.  Lew Counts was a fellow and vice president of analog technology at Analog Devices. He has an SBEE degree from MIT. He worked on amplifiers, rms-to-dc converters, and wireless systems that require high dynamic range. He is a member of the IEEE. Ask him about: JFET amplifiers, working with JoAnn Close. |
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 Sergio Franco is a Professor at San Francisco State University. He was born in Friuli. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Ask him about: his 3 books,"Analog Circuit Design - Discrete and Integrated," "Design with Operational Amplifiers & Analog Integrated Circuits," and "Electric Circuit Fundamentals".  Ricardo_Salaverry is a director at Tyco ELO Touch. Prior to innovating touchscreen technology he worked at Zoran designing digital still cameras. Ask him about: emigrating from Chile, antennas, the overly-complex ATSC standard, getting 135 of 137 boards working on the first spin, and innovation in America. |
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 Tamara Schmitz works at Intersil as an application engineer manager. She is also an author. She graduated from and keeps close ties with Stanford University. Ask her about: Professor Lee, the wild Stanford bunch, how to write clearly.  Don Tuite is the analog editor at Electronic Design magazine. He also worked at Cypress Semiconductor. Ask him about: Pretty much anything, his Burgman motorcycle, things that go "boom". |
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 Ted Selker is a professor at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. Previously he worked at the MIT Media lab and was an IBM fellow. He worked at Xerox, PARC and Atari Research Labs. He has numerous awards, patents, and papers. Ask him about: context-aware computing. his inventing the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device, xcubation.  John H. Hall, head of Linear Integrated Systems, was a protege of Silicon Valley legend Dr. Jean Hoerni. John was the director of IC Development at Union Carbide, co-founder and vice president of R&D at Intersil, and founder and president of Micro Power Systems. Ask him about: fast Buicks, the Minuteman missile program, and how to find a good Japanese restaurant. |
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 Jim Solomon, IEEE Fellow, did analog design for 20 years, then co-founded Cadence, Smart Machines (with his son) and Xulu Entertainment. After an MSEE at Berkeley, he started at Motorola Semi, then moved to National Semi where he invented the BiFET op amp. Ask him about: tutorial on op amp design, TRS- 80 op amp macro-models, Cadence usability lab, and Xulu's virtual world.  Dave Bursky is a Silicon Valley legend. He has worked at several trade magazine and media companies-- Electronic Design, EE Times, and Chip Design. He runs PRN Engineering Services. He received a BSEE and MSEE from the City College of the City University of New York. Ask him about: anything involving Silicon Valley, Maxim, the trade press, Penton publications. |
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 Bo Lojek is a research scientist at Atmel's Colorado Springs facility. He instructs at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. His book, "History of Semiconductor Engineering" is the definitive record of the exciting days of IC design. Ask him about: Bob Widlar's Russian papers he discovered, how Bob Noyce really "got it," and simulation-independent compact device modeling.  Tom Frederiksen's career started at Hughes, then Motorola, and finally National Semi. Tom is best known as the father of the "quads," including the LM3900,"Norton amp" current- differencing op amp. He worked on integrated audio chips and metal-gate CMOS data converters. Ask him about: his books on intuitive op amps, CMOS, LM324, LM339, LM3900, and mentoring Dennis Monticelli. |
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 Martin DeLateur of DeLateur Engineering is a former National and Fairchild product engineer. He grew up with the Wosniaks, attended Bellarmine, and got 4 degrees from Berkeley. Ask him about: discretes, package and process, ways to entertain yourselves overseas, whatever happened to the CRT (cathode ray tube) market, his regular monthly table at the eFlea.  John Massa went to Ohio State and Notre Dame. A Captain in the Air Force, he took several military technical and language schools. He holds a top-secret security clearance. He is fluent in French and Moroccan Arabic languages. Ask him about: the sidewalks at Ohio State, Sherrifs, his Harley "Jezebel," why PCB CAD is important, elution, and mentoring Paul Rako. |
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 Paul Rako is host of the Analog Aficionados party. He is a web developer at Analog Devices. He spent 10 years as an auto engineer in Detroit, 20 years as a consultant in Silicon Valley, 5 years as an applications engineer at National Semi, and 5 years as an EDN editor. Ask him about: Stratocasters, Harleys, his home lab, and mentoring Francis Lau.  Francis Lau emigrated from Hong Kong when he was 8. He got a 4.0 at UCLA, then an MSEE, and now works at ELO-Touch as a systems engineer. Ask him about: his Porsche, his milling machine, his giant sword project, the robot he is building, the motor drivers he designed, the best pho restaurants, and folding puzzles. |
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In addition to all these great analog people, including Bob Dobkin from Linear Tech, Jim William's boss and friend, I am encouraging people to bring any gizmos or some analog remembrance. Professor Tom Lee from Stanford writes: If I remember, I'll dig out the very first transistorized scope (featured on 1957's EDN cover). I am too frightened to power it up, but I'll take out the case screws so that folks can see what my late friend, Joe Deavenport, hand-crafted with CK722s and a 1" CRT! (BTW, he co-founded Wavetek.)Ron Quan, an ex- Ampex engineer heard John Hall was coming and explained how he used Micro Power Systems transistors in Ampex products. Ron promised to bring some MP series transistors for John Hall to enjoy. Ron also writes: I found a really old blueprint of my 3 inch viewfinder for the Ampex BCC-20 color TV camera. See attached jpeg. If you look carefully near the top, just left of center, you will see that Q306 is one half of an MPS312 dual NPN transistor. The BCC-20 camera also used quite a few of the MPS dual transistors.  |
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| Eric Schlaepfer always has some cool gizmos to show around. Alan
Martin is threatening to set up a lab bench. Also, you should bring any books by the attendees you have so they can sign them. It's getting late, so I will add more tomorrow, but here is a partial list of attendees, not counting spouses. We are up to 135 people so far, with more to come. Just email me at paul.rako[at sign here]gmail.com if you want to come and give me all the names and companies of people you are bringing. [Friday before the party update:] We are up to 145 aficion ados coming. First some bad news, Bill Whitlock, AES Life Fellow - IEEE Life Senior, won't make it because of a serious accident. He wrote me to say: I regret that I won't be able to make it to either function. A fall last February crushed two vertebrae, which subsequently became infected with MRSA that destroyed the disc and part of the bones, still severely limits my movement (and travel). Doctors expect a full recovery but say it may take up to another year. I hoping to make it next year. I'll enjoy reading the reports ... and keep up the great work!Bill is one audio nut that really understands electrronics, including groudning and shielding. I loved Bill's signature line: "Marketing is, all too often, the art of deception by omission." Bill said it was OK to give his email address in this form: whitlock[atsign goes here]jensen-transformers.com in case you want to offer your condolences. |
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A brighter note comes from an auto response that told me that
Bob Moses, the guy that arranged for Jim Williams and Bob Pease to present at AES (audio engineering society) a few years ago is now
director of the AES. Bob and Bill are friends so look for them booth at the next AES.  Party double-sponsor Linear Systems has a sample kit they want you to know about. Tim McCune sent me one and Dennis Monticelli and Scott Wurcer have already asked Tim for one. Tim will give sample boxes to working engineers that will really use them. To inquire, Please provide your name, company name, position, current design interests, address, phone and email to Tim McCune at tim[yup the atsign]linearsystems.com. And yeah, that is my "analog laptop" to the right of the kit.  |
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 Other good news is that the sponsor posters came in. I got them at a local Sunnyvale place called Banner Express. They print directly onto the foamboard. $70.80 for each of the big posters, $35.72 each for the small ones. These are 3/16 foamboard. he has a gatorboard he says warps less over years. I expedited them in case they screwed it up, but the poster is OK. What I screwed up was thinking that paying a few bucks more for an "easel" got me a wood or metal tripod. What an easel is to these folks is cardboard on the back you can fold out so the poster is marginally stable on a table. Analog people drink way too heavily for this to work.  So I am going to hunt down some real easels before the party. Mark Alden of TI is bringing two extra, and I will go buy three more so we can position the sponsors' posters better and we don't waste table space. [I got some nice wood ones at Staples.] |
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[Update, Satruday morning] We had an informal get-together at
the Duke of Edinburgh Friday night and it was great. I got to meet John Hall, Ricardo Salaverry and Ted Selker showed up, so that is
three people off the placemat, four counting myself. TV engineer Robert Getsla showed up. He was the guy that tipped me off that
digital TV is not all it is cracked up to be. Ron Quan, the guy with the Ampex schematic above showed and had great stories to tell. He
also brought some Micro Power Systems transistors to give John Hall, who founded the company decades ago. Earl McCune, RF consultant
was there and met Tim McCune, who arranged for Linear Systems to give a double sponsorship to the party. Earl brought a
sheet showing all the McCunes in his family back to 1705, but he doesn't think he and Tim are related. We will do more work on
this Saturday night. Here is Ted Selker with many revision of the TrackPoint button used on every IBM laptop and a whole lot of other machines. He explained the refinements and the tremendous cost reductions they achieved. Lets hope he brings these to the Aficionados party, this is at our Friday Preficionados party. |
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 Here is Linear Systems founder John Hall with marketing manager Paul Norton chatting with Todd Bailey on the right. This is at the Friday warm-up party. Todd came in from Brooklyn with a bag full of cool gizmos, including an automatic door contro ller he did for Calvin Klein's house. 19 of em, Calvin must love automatic doors. Sorry for my crappy DimageX50 pic, Ron Quan, Ed Fong, Fran Hoffart, and Alan Martin will have decent cameras with "big glass" as my buddy Dave Ruigh describes them.  This is what I am doing Friday night and Saturday morning. I have to dry the placemats on my bed before printing the other side. I am using the excreable Brother MFC-J6510DW printer,and it is jamming every 5 sheets and gobbling $21 ink cartridges like Cheech Marin gobbling Doritos after a bong hit. |
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| Next year I will just have a print
shop do this on a B-sized color laser. That way the place-mats won't run or smudge when water hits them and that way I won't have to
nurse this craptastic Brother printer instead of frolicking in the garden or some other Saturday morning activity.
[Update:] I just checked with Kinko's, and its $3.08 a page for two-sided B-sized printing. Note having an extra $500 on me, I will
just keep suffering with the Brother printer. Perhaps some high-tech Silicon valley company will do a sponsorship next year by
offering to print the place-mats. Here are attendees as off Saturday morning before the party:
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