Bob Widlar – The Life of an Engineering Legend | Hacker News Reader

Bob Widlar – The Life of an Engineering Legend

autodesk.com

55 pointssteven74110 comments

You don't see ads like this today:

https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/blog/wp-content/uplo...

I’m guessing this is the guy who invented the Widlar current mirror?

For anyone wondering ICs need accurate current sources to drive transistors etc and large resistors take up loads of space and vary a lot with temperature so hence so are very expensive to manufacturer, hence why current mirrors are used all over the place. In fact the 1st stage of an op-amp is usually a current mirror.

The guy was a serious eccentric who's wild antics are the stuff of legend. Just google for some of his images and you'll get a full sense of how out there this guy was. Bob Pease even corobberated a lot of these so they are more true than legend. Though he apparently was a master at his craft. Pease recounted how Widlar would disappear into mexico following some bohemian crowd for many months, come back to work and design a revolutionary circuit, get paid big bucks and disappear again like a wizard. True genius.

I remember how in undergrad, my Circuit Theory professor who studied at Boulder and also worked at Ball Brothers would corroborate the myths of Bob Widlar. They were contemporaries, and my professor really emphasized his insane output and work ethic. He recounted how Widlar would routinely disappear in bar crawls for 3-4 days, and then return to ace his exams. While many of Widlar's actions might not have been exemplary, his contributions to modern IC's is still pretty underrated.

I'd never heard of Bob Widlar before, but it's great to see someone praised for significant innovation in an esoteric field. It's great to see such specialized work appreciated. It's also interesting, and kind of weird, to see a giant of Silicon Valley engineering design whose education was primarily "home grown," as contrasted with the highly academic engineers of today.

Widlar, Bob Pease, and Jim Williams are all worth reading about if you're not familiar. Bigwig semiconductor designers from a bygone age.

There are some great application notes by Jim Williams from his time at Linear Tech if analog design application notes are your thing.

This book is good:https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Circuit-Design-Personalities-E...

My favourite Bob Pease article, about being extremely methodical in the measurement of small currents: https://www.electronicdesign.com/test-amp-measurement/whats-...

Someone has a "best of" Jim Williams: http://readingjimwilliams.blogspot.com/p/best-app-notes.html

Some while ago I wrote a blog post about how fantastic app note 47 was; very much "nothing like this will be built again". For its unassuming title it is a more instructive read than quite a lot of books on opamps.

AN-47 is a master work.

Best use ever of the slogan "I'd rather fight than switch".

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