Page 12 - Troubleshooting Analog Circuits

About the Author

For the record, Bob Pease is a senior scientist in industrial linear-IC design at
National Semiconductor Corporation in Santa Clara, California; he has worked at
National since 1976. He is also one of the best-known analog-circuit designers in the
world-he’s been creating practical, producible analog products for fun (his) and
profit (both his and his employers’) and writing about analog topics for over a quarter
of a century.
As you might expect, though, there’s a lot more to Bob Pease than his impressive
credentials. Following untrodden paths to discover where they lead is one of Bob’s
avocations. He’s done it on foot, on skis, and on a bicycle-sometimes by himself
and sometimes with his wife and two sons-often along abandoned railroad roadbeds
throughout the United States and England. Aside from the peace and quiet and the
thrill of the journey itself, the reward for these wanderings is observing vistas of
America that few people have seen. The curiosity that motivates Bob’s exploration
of old railroad routes is reflected in many of his other activities both at and away
from work.
For example, another of Bob’s hobbies is designing voltage-to-frequency con-
verters (VFCs). Most people who design VFCs do it as part of a job. Although Bob
sometimes designs VFCs for use in National products, he often does it just for fun
and because he finds the activity educational and challenging. A couple years ago, on
such a lark, he put together a VFC that used only vacuum tubes. This circuit proved
that the company where he spent the first 14 years of his career, George A. Philbrick
Researches, (more recently, Teledyne-Philbrick, now Teledyne Components of
Dedham, MA) could have gone into the VFC business in 1953-eight years before
Pease received his BSEE from MIT. Twenty years after he designed it, one of Bob’s
first solid-state VFCs, the 4701, continues to sell well for Teledyne-Philbrick. The
story of how Pease pioneered the voltage-to-frequency business is recounted in a
chapter of Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, ana‘ Personalities (Butterworth-
Heinemann, 1991), edited by Jim Williams. (See the ad at the end of this book.)
Bob also loves to write-he clearly enjoys communicating to others the wisdom
he has acquired through his work. He has published about 60 magazine articles (not
counting the series in EDN that led to this book) and holds approximately ten US
patents. Recently he began a series of columns in Electronic Design magazine, where
he comments fortnightly on various aspects of linear and analog circuits.
Bob takes great delight in seeing his ideas embodied in the work of others. For
example, one of his proudest accomplishments is a seismic preamplifier that he de-
signed for an aerospace company during his coffee break. After many years of ser-
vice, the amplifier was still at work on the moon, amplifying and telemetering moon-
quakes (but its batteries may have recently expired). Bob also designed a compact
1/3-ounce voltage-to-frequency module that was canied to the summit of Mt. Everest,
where it was used to convert medical and scientific data for medical research, with
the 1980 American Medical Research Expedition (from the University of California
Medical School at La Jolla).
National has taken advantage of Bob’s penchant for providing ideas that others can

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