Deceased--Bob Pease

Bob Pease
August 22nd, 1940 to June 18th, 2011

"PASSINGS: Bob Pease"

Bob Pease, a Silicon Valley engineer and author on analog chip design, dies at 70

June 23rd, 2011

Los Angeles Times

Bob Pease, 70, a prominent Silicon Valley engineer and author of several books on analog chip design, died Saturday evening when his car crashed into a tree in Saratoga, Calif., southwest of San Jose.

Pease, who was not wearing a seat belt while driving his vintage Volkswagen Beetle, struck the tree head-on and died instantly, according to the California Highway Patrol. Authorities said Pease was coming out of the Mountain Winery driveway, but it was not clear if alcohol played a role in the crash.

A San Francisco resident known for his brilliant mind, eccentric personality and flowing white beard, Pease worked for 33 years as an analog chip designer at National Semiconductor Corp. in nearby Santa Clara.

Among his most important designs were a temperature-voltage frequency converter taken on medical research expeditions to Mt. Everest, a seismic pre-amplifier chip to gauge lunar ground tremors on NASA's Apollo missions to the moon and the LM337 negative voltage regulator.

Robert Allen Pease was born Aug. 22, 1940, in Rockville, Conn., and earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961.

He worked for George A. Philbrick Researches in Boston designing operational amplifiers, analog computing modules and voltage-frequency converters until 1976, when he moved to National Semiconductor. He left the company in 2009.

In addition to well-regarded scientific volumes such as "Troubleshooting Analog Circuits," Pease also wrote "Pease Porridge," a regular column for Electronic Design magazine.

He also was the author of "How to Drive Into Accidents — And How Not to."