Hall of Fame

Dieter Bergman PCB Design Hall of Fame

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.

Ralph Morrison

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.

John Blankenbaker

 

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.

 

Inducted May 2013

Dr. Howard Johnson is considered the leading authority on signal integrity, having spent much of his career demonstrating the effects of analog signals in high-speed digital systems. He is author of three books, including two on high-speed design, and and has taught more than 12,000 students over his 30-plus year career. As the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' chief technical editor, Johnson wrote standards that govern Ethernet, IEEE 802.3 Fast Ethernet and IEEE 802.3 Gigabit Ethernet. In 1979, Johnson invented PhoneMail, the first integrated voice messaging system. During his career, Johnson was manager of technology and advanced development at ROLM, director of engineering at US TeleCenters, and manager of technology and advanced development at Ultra Network Technologies. He has bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Rice University.

Howard Johnson

Inducted May 2013

 

Richard (Rich) Nedbal is credited with revolutionizing computer-aided manufacturing software for printed circuit fabrication. An electrical engineer who graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1966, Nedbal worked at Carnegie Mellon Institute from 1970 to 1976, designing system logic and integrated circuits for electronic fuel injection systems prototypes. When the research program ended, Nedbal moved to California and rose through the ranks at American Microsystems, a semiconductor design and manufacturing company. In 1982, he founded Personal CAD Systems, with the goal to develop lower cost electronic CAD tools. By 1988, P-CAD, as the company came to be known, owned the largest installed base of users in the EDA industry, with over 10,000.Two years later, P-CAD had over 100,000 users, at which point Nedbal sold the firm to Accel Technologies.

Having shaken up the CAD industry, Nedbal then set his sights on CAM tools. He founded Advanced CAM Technologies in 1994. At ACT, Nedbal changed the idea of what a CAM tool could be, as its signature tool, called CAM350, was the first CAM tool to adopt many traits of a CAD tool. After Pads Software's acquisition of ACT, in 1998, Nedbal stayed on for a year, then left the industry to purse a second career building injection systems for car engines.
Richard Nedbal