Bob Pease died in a car accident- honor him Tuesday

Here is the bad news from analog editor Bill Schweber:

Analog expert Bob Pease dies in accident

I talked it over with Jim Williams wife and she feels it would be fine to honor both Jim and Bob Pease at our celebration of life Tuesday, June 21, 2011. Bob Pease’s wife Nancy is flying in from Cape Cod that day and should be there a bit late, perhaps 7:30, but please come and offer your condolences.

[update] OK, my obit just went live:

Analog engineering legend Bob Pease killed in car crash

 Here is a section we cut out since it was too long:

^{The wild days of analog design}

Bob Pease goes back to the wild days of analog design. This is when a core group of passionate engineers and scientist would work hard, play hard, and do as they pleased. Nobody knew what breakthrough would come next. They all knew that they had to work a furious pace lest their company be bested by one down the road. Dennis Monticelli, a fellow at National Semiconductor talks about turning down Intel to take a job with National back in 1975. “They couldn’t believe that any engineer would not want to work on memory and digital chips,” he relates. “The thing is, all the excitement and real passion was in analog, and it still is.”

How passionate are these analog folks? One story about Bob Pease comes to mind. It was 15 or 20 years ago. National was spinning a new mixed-signal group out of the amplifier group where Bob was an application engineer. Over the course of a week, engineers assigned to that new group would come into the amplifier lab and take some test equipment, all with manager’s approval. One day, two guys showed up and began to wheel away a large temperature tester, a so-called “elephant” due to the trunk-like nature of its air-output duct. Pease saw them pushing the elephant out the door and exclaimed “What’s next?! Our pants?!” He then whipped off his trousers and threw them up to the ceiling, where they poetically hooked onto a fire sprinkler head. They were in easy reach, Bob could have just pulled them down, but he was way too incensed. So he left the lab and went looking for his boss in the cubicles. Thankfully his boss was not at his desk, so Bob, still in his underwear, and still fuming, started off to the parking lot to just drive home in a huff. A concerned employee told Bob’s friend and mentor Martin Giles, the guy who put on the analog seminars. Martin saw that Bob was in the parking lot and said “Well, let’s just let him go, it’s better than bringing him back into the building wearing his underwear.” It is hard to know if this episode had an effect on National’s management, but they did buy new equipment for the amplifier lab. “We ended up with newer and better equipment, so it turned out to be a blessing,” Bob’s friend and analog guru Paul Grohe relates.

Another wild story comes to mind, the day when Bob got so exasperated at his computer he dropped it off the third-floor parking deck at National Semiconductor. He even arranged for friends to film the deed. Years later, when working on the Bob Pease show, the top management reminded Bob that National sold a lot of chips to computer vendors so he should not consider throwing any more computers off the parking deck. I could see the disappointment in Bob’s eyes. So I said, “Brian Halla never said we could not use a trebuchet to toss a computer up three stories to the parking deck.” I became concerned when Bob started doing the calculations to see how much energy we would need. We all explained that I was joking and we really should not be throwing computers anywhere, up or down.

When I told Bob Pease’s good friend, retired application engineer Marcello Salvatierra, the news about Bob, he wrote back with an epitaph more fitting than any random journalist could come up with.

• What’s this RAP stuff anyhow?
• I’m stunned and unable to comprehend. Something immeasurable has gone out of our lives. I will miss our dear friend RAP. He was such a knowledgeable person, not only about electronic design or semiconductor physics, but lots of other topics. From music to philosophy and, of course, his passion for the outdoors and the environment. He was well read and very unselfish, sharing all of his learning. I was witness to this when we were on seminar trips. He would spend time with customer problems until finding a positive result, no matter how trivial the question. On the road he would rather rent a car and drive to the next seminar location, taking the road less traveled so he would see the country. He would even videotape his meals, so he could enjoy it again later, he said. He lived life to its fullest every day. I learned a lot from RAP, not only electronic circuits or physics but about life itself. I’m grateful for the many years I was so fortunate to have known him. This is a sad day for the analog world.”