Bob Pease dies

Legendary analogue engineer Bob Pease has died in a car crash.

Known latterly for his magazine column Pease Porridge, his appearances at National Semiconductor analogue seminars, and hosting panels at technology conferences, he was also the designer of many ICs including the LM331 voltage-to-frequency converter and the LM337 adjustable negative voltage regulator.

He epitomised the old-school analogue IC designer who understood every tiny characteristic of the bipolar transistor and the maths behind them. Squeezing precision performance from simple circuits was second nature. Bob Pease goes back to the wild days of analogue design," said Former National Semiconductor colleague Paul Rako. "This is when a core group of passionate engineers and scientist would work hard, play hard, and do as they pleased."

He got his bachelor's electrical engineering degree at MIT in 1961 and went on to work on op amps made from discrete components at Philbrick. Then in 1976 he moved to California to work at National Semiconductor where he stayed until recently, finally as an applications engineer and the engineering face of the company

"Among the products Pease designed are temperature-voltage frequency converters used in medical research expeditions to Mount Everest in the 1980s," said National, "He also designed a seismic pre-amplifier chip used to measure lunar ground tremors in the Apollo moon landings."

National has put up a web page of tributes.