NE555

 Fellow Radiophiles:

Hans Camenzind designed the ever popular 555 timer on contract to Signetics in 1971. The 555 timer is usually credited as the most popular IC of all time.

Mr. Camenzind was born in 1934 in Switzerland and passed away on August 8th of 2012 in the USA. His career as engineer, entrepreneur and inventor extended well beyond his NE555 design. He published an introductory book on IC design that is available for free download on his web site Designing Analog Chips.

Best Regards,

-Joe

The 555 Timer is one of the first ICs I used in the early 1970s. I still use it today, this year I made an experimental 90V PSU for battery radio using the CMOS 555 and an external transistor switch. It's also handy as a 38KHz generator to drive an IR-LED OOK/ASK gated by handshake line on a PC serial port for IR Remote control. My son used one about 10 years ago in school as the Exit Delay on a Burglar Alarm project demo implemented as a Miniature Room Model with Reed switch and magent on a door and window.

Also the same week we lose Victor Poor.

July 12, 1933 – August 17, 2012

Perhaps less well known Victor Poor was one of the people to see the potential of a single chip CPU and had considerable input to the 8008 project at Intel.

Following Intel's failure to get the 8008 ready on time, Poor's Computer Terminal Corporation would develop its own instruction set architecture for the 2200-series and change its name to Datapoint, going into direct competition with the company. Far from being crushed under Intel's heel, Datapoint's designs would remain at least a generation ahead of Intel's until the launch of the 286 in 1982.

With a passion for radio, he built his own transceiver from collected discarded pieces, and got an  amateur radio licence in 1951 (callsign W6JSO). He developed the idea of adapting radioteletype (RTTY) machines to send data rather than just text wirelessly. These were then sold to both the United States Army and later commercial newswire/ media customers for faster news reports as data by wireless, presumably using encryption. Victor Poor to develop software that integrates Internet with amateur radio to store and forward messages; this system is today part of a major amateur-supported emergency communications network (Amtor Packet Link, Winlink).