A New Era of Innovation
Tuesday, October 4th, 2005
Gene Frantz
TI Principal Fellow and Business Development Manager, DSP
Let me go back a bit in history in order to make an important point on innovation. When I started my engineering career, the mainframe computer was king. Rather than bringing up the good old days when we used keypunch cards to talk to computers, I will get to my point. What made the mainframe computer happen was the transistor (or if you are older than me, the tube – valve, for our British friends). As a young engineer, I had a transistor book full of all of the different transistors I could choose for my design. The focus of innovation was on the transistor. But the era of the mainframe was replaced by the mini-computer. The mini-computer was a result of someone realizing that several transistors put together made a gate. The gate became the focus of innovation. “74xx” logic ran out of numbers and became the “74xxx” family.


