25 November 2011

IC Pins Named after Persons

This topic deserves its own post!

Jim Williams, in discussing the ROYER pin on the CCFL power-supply chips that Linear Technology produces, commented in a footnote [1] that "Local historians can't be certain, but this may be the only IC pin ever named after a person." After I posed this question in a previous blog post, some faithful correspondents came up with two other examples: the ZENER pin on the CD4046 PLL chip and the KELVIN pin on the CAT2300 switch controller.

Here is the list so far:

1. The ROYER pin on the LT1182 family of CCFL Switching Regulators (and other CCFL chips from Linear Technology):


2. The ZENER pin on the CD4046 Micropower Phase-Locked Loop:


3. The KELVIN pin on the CAT2300 Current Mirror and Switch Controller for SENSEFETs:


Please let me know if you find any more!

[1] Jim Williams, "SMBus controlled CCFL power supply," Linear Technology Magazine, vol. 9, no. 3, p. 35, September 1999.



Footnote: Even with these examples, Jim's statement is still true if you consider that the ROYER pin was probably named directly in honor of George H. Royer, while the other pins were named after functions that were, in turn, named after persons...

2 comments:

Brad said...

This is an interesting coincident, I just finished reading the chapter by Jim Williams in 'The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design. Jim loved the Royer circuit which was used in many older Tek scopes CRT drivers and he went into detail into how he used the circuit to design an efficient CCFL display driver for laptops.

Kviklan24 said...

Great reading youur blog