RIP Hans Camenzind, Inventor Of The 555 Timer
retrothing.com
retrothing.com
Interestingly, the design wasn't patented and companies
like National Semiconductor and Fairchild soon released
their own versions. This helped to push the price down and
ensured that the chip would become ubiquitous in the decades
that followed.-- Continued from above. Interesting, note the incentives vs the output.
I read the fact that he didn't patent the 555 with some disappointment. He had a successful career, good; and yet, he deserved to capture some of the marginal product of his labor, not simply to go on to be promoted super-Executive-Senior-Engineer-Level-XII. In this case, he did later start and sell a company after he left Signetics, and his reputation from the 555 timer surely helped him to success in that.
But to my mind not patenting the design clearly made it harder for him to partake in the direct rewards he deserved for creating such a useful circuit.
Yes, you could argue that he would not have been eulogized, but you would need to have a better argument and it would be speculative at best.
Edit: sorry it's late, not trying to be a dick.
The invention is before the patent. You're missing that. It is important.
> Invention | patent
There are no patents on the 555. Signetics did not
want to apply for a patent. You see, the situation
with patents in Silicon Valley in 1970 was entirely
different than it is now. Everybody was stealing
from everybody else. I designed the 555 Signetics
produced it, and six months, or before a year later,
National had it, Fairchild had it, and nobody paid
any attention to patents. The people at Signetics
told me they didn’t want to apply for a patent,
because what would happen if they tried to enforce
that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come
back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say
“These are our patents, now let’s see what you’re
violating”. It was a house of cards – if you blew
on it, the whole thing collapsed.[1]
[1] http://www.semiconductormuseum.com/Transistors/LectureHall/C...
No they had a solution and it was MAD.
>The people at Signetics told me they didn’t want to apply for a patent, because what would happen if they tried to enforce that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say “These are our patents, now let’s see what you’re violating”.
And it worked really well for a time. Unfortunately someone thought they could win and decided to "go nuclear" and now we're all stuck in the middle of a patent war.
As he mentions in his book "Designing Analog Chips" he was at one point stuck on a design that required 9 pins, and that forced it into a 14 pin package. He initially submitted this design to Signetics and it was this design that someone in the company leaked to a competitor.
But the larger package bugged him and he kept at it until he was able to get it down to 8 pins which allowed an 8-pin package, much preferable over a 14 pin one. The competitors, unaware of the improved design, came out with the larger 14-pin package and this gave Signetics a significant edge when they started selling the 555.
Not patented -> rivals release own versions -> price pushed down -> chip becomes ubiquitous.
It is, of course, entirely possible that, if patented, it would have been licensed at a low enough cost to still have become ubiquitous.
Now, if he had left Signetics and founded another company to create the 555, then he might have been rolling in dough.
I never once heard him comment on disappointment about not getting royalties on the 555 timer, in fact, I never once heard him mention anything about royalties on any of the work he did for other companies during the 60's and early 70's. I don't think it was in the mentality of era. In the time since then, the success and popularity of the 555 timer was enough of a reward for him.
I recommend Chapter 11 (starting at page 141 in the PDF file) for a detailed personal account of how he developed the 555 timer chip.
I'm also finding that the first 30 pages of the book is a very readable introduction to how semiconductors and transistors work -- it's written from an engineering mindset as opposed to the usual physics point of view.
Direct link to the book:
http://www.designinganalogchips.com/_count/countdown.pl?desi...
Did not know. Learn something interesting on HN everyday ... /:
RIP fellow hacker.
"127 kOhm * 470 uF silence for the fellow."
i.e. using those values for the external resistor and capacitor would result in a moment of silence (followed by another and another, I suppose)
I was going to submit that but HN dupe check prevents it (it was originally submitted 1,001 days ago). Unfortunately it also appears that you can not discuss HN submissions that old, so there is no appropriate place to then discuss the other chips in that article.
Of particular interest to me is the DMD (Digital Micromirror Device). I had not really thought about how a digital projector might work, but if I had I would've said that it would be screen based. I wouldn't have guessed that the light would be projected at a microchip which would then reflect back only the pixels to be lit using incredibly small mirrors. And that this would happen so quick that the light would be sent through a gel of colour and would cycle through red, green, blue, and that the mirrors would reflect only a given colour at that moment for the pixel concerned.
It's amazing that this little chip has managed to stay so popular for so long.
Still amazes me that I can buy an entire computer for fifty cents.
I realize this is hacker news and pretty digital heavy, so I do feel the need to point out that "Incredibly, he created the chip alone, spending a year designing it by hand as a freelancer." and "His design incorporated 23 transistors, 15 resistors and a pair of diodes." is in the analog EE world not so much incredible as "probably about typical months design productivity". As usual in the analog world R+D and "productification stuff" and extensive testing burned up the other 11 months.
So Pease, Williams, and now Camenzind are gone. Hard to believe Widlar's been gone 20 years, now he was a guy who packed 2000 years equivalent of wild heroic living into, unfortunately, only about half a century. Losing a whole generation of analog arch-wizards. Sad.
Never heard of him but now you got me curious. Do tell more.
http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Mini-Notebook-Timer-Circuits...
It has since been republished in:
http://www.amazon.com/Timer-Amp-Optoelectronic-Circuits-Proj...
I especially like the adding machine made from 102 555s: http://www.vk2zay.net/article/258
RIP.
When you think about it, a design would have to be 'Uber-Elegant' to have a middle school kid be able to understand it like that. For the time, I think it was.
(As an aside, I can remember going ballistic on one of my friends who soldered one to a board. I would only use them on breadboards because I thought they were too 'valuable'. LOL! Money in middle school terms!)
I LOVED those 555's. Good times.
My first was a HeathKit digital electronics course which contained power supplies, sources of +5/0 V, and leds to read output.
Man, this takes me back...
RIP Hans.
(Also, an ATtiny is not an Arduino. The Arduino chips cost like $5, an ATtiny is 50 cents. ATtinys have much less flash, EEPROM, and ROM. But can still produce a nice square wave :)
"As of 2003, it was estimated that 1 billion (555 timer) units are manufactured every year."
Wow.
Disclaimer: I'm friends with one of the writers/editors/major contributors(?) of RetroThing.
RIP Hans - you touched my life!
At the company I worked in the late '80s the frustrated management banned its use altogether after a series of failures in the field were traced to designs that relied on the 555 to be more stable than it really was.
Those are all properties of the capacitors used, primarily, followed by Vcc stability. The 555 itself is a very long way down the list of Things That Make Oscillators Drift. Did you try polystyrene or polypropylene capacitors, or NPO ceramics? Supply pushing was also improved with the 7555 CMOS part, as I recall.
At the company I worked in the late '80s the frustrated management banned its use altogether after a series of failures in the field were traced to designs that relied on the 555 to be more stable than it really was.
Sounds enlightened.
Well, this is true, but the chip put constraints on the types of circuits you ended up with.
>Did you try polystyrene or polypropylene capacitors, or NPO ceramics?
Eh, I don't recall, as this was 25 years ago. Probably. We were making one or two of each product, so the cost of the parts was a rounding error compared to development and test.
>Sounds enlightened.
They had been burned a few times in a sort of public way. Yeah, it was overkill. On the other hand by that time you could already buy phase locked loops on a chip, so there wasn't really a reason to keep using the 555 as an oscillator unless you were making something that had to use really cheap parts.