Texas Instruments announces analog innovation award

TI has announced the annual $150,000 Engibous Prize. The downside is you have to be a senior in college to enter the Analog Design Contest that may get you a chunk of that cash. Now I remember the name Engibous. He was the TI chairman that just retired. It was under his watch that TI had the sense to see how the Speak and Spell toy could use a DSP and indeed, there are a lot of DSP applications. This came at a time when TI and National and IBM and everyone else was trying to take on Intel in the CPU business. Bad idea. By stopping the chase against Intel and developing a leadership in DSPs, TI became a major force in all kinds of imbedded systems. Then to top things off, they bought Unitrode/benchmarq and then Burr-Brown because they realized that all their DSPs needed power and analog to make a complete systems. There was a product teardown in another trade paper and every single ship was a TI chip. It was obvious that the product was simply a TI reference design. That’s how system oriented TI has become lately. Of course, TI’s expertise in DSPs made them a natural for doing baseband chips in cell phones, another huge volume business. Now lately TI has been talking about stressing analog and that sure is music to my ears. What I did not know until reading the Prize announcement was that Tom Engibous started his career as an analog IC designer. Pretty cool, I guess it took an analog guy to architect a great company like TI. From the TI press release:

As CEO and chairman, Engibous took a personal interest in encouraging engineering students to pursue studies and careers in analog design. He has often spoken of how an increasingly digital world ironically needs more analog circuitry in order to translate real-world signals into the ones and zeros of digital processing. But the number of electrical engineering graduates who focus on the analog aspect of semiconductor and equipment design is small compared with the need. Engibous chose to join TI because the company afforded him the opportunity to design analog chips right out of college. He remembers designing his first analog chip that drove electronic displays on gas pumps. After completing the design and receiving the sample chip, he stayed in the lab testing the device night and day, without sleep. “The moment I confirmed that the chip actually worked was one of the most thrilling of my early career,” Engibous said.

Well, it’s good to see analog guys do well.