Inducted May 2019

Ralph Morrison was a pioneer in the field of high frequency / high-reliability electronic control system design. He authored more than 12 books on currents and voltage in PCBs, among them the seminal tomes on the design of electronics circuits, including Solving Interference Problems in Electronics, Grounding and Shielding Techniques in Instrumentation, and The Fields of Electronics: Understanding Electronics Using Basic Physics.

He received a bachelor's in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949 and an MSEE from the University of Southern California in 1965. His vast experience spans applications from aerospace to military, both as a primary designer and hired gun when things went wrong.

Inducted 2019

Michael Faraday observed that the excess charge on a charged conductor resides only on its exterior and has no influence on anything enclosed within it. To demonstrate this fact, he built a room coated with metal foil and allowed high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator to strike the outside of the room. He used an electroscope to show that there was no electric charge present on the inside of the room's walls. That application, known today as a Faraday cage, is commonly used in printed circuit board design to block electromagnetic fields.

Inducted May 2015

John Blankenbaker (b. 1930) is credited with designing the first commercial personal computer, which made its debut in 1971. His double-sided design predated microprocessors, relying instead on ICs mounted on a PCB for logic and MOS shift registers for serial memory. Although his company, Kenback Corp., sold only 40 units of the Kenbak-1 before shutting its doors in 1973, Blankenbaker launched an industry that has transformed not just electronics but humanity.

Inducted May 2013

Alan C. Finch (d. 2012) is known as the father of the shape-based autorouter. In 1985, Finch, with coauthors K.J. Mackenzie, G.J. Balsdon, and G. Symonds of Racal-Redac, proposed a gridless method for designing fine-line printed circuit boards. The inventors said in their groundbreaking paper, which was presented at the 22nd IEEE Design Automation Conference, that then-current designs had "stretched most previous automatic routing algorithms to the limit." Building on a concept from 1980 by Ulrich Lauther, the former Racal­-Redac developer conceived a router with no defined cell size. The resulting tools forever changed the way printed circuit design is performed.