Harry L. "Nick" Tredennick was an American manager, inventor, VLSI design engineer and

author In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...

who was involved in the development for Motorola's

MC68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

and for IBM's Micro/370 microprocessors. He held BSEE and MSEE degrees from

Texas Tech University Texas Tech University (Texas Tech, Tech, or TTU) is a public university, public research university in Lubbock, Texas, United States. Established on February 10, 1923, and called Texas Technological College until 1969, it is the flagship instit ...

, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 students as of fall 2 ...

at Austin. Tredennick was named a Fellow of the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

; the citation reads "For the design and implementation of the execution unit and controller of the MC68000 workstation microprocessor". He died July 26, 2022, in an

All-terrain vehicle An all-terrain vehicle (ATV), also known as a light utility vehicle (LUV), a quad bike or quad (if it has four wheels), as defined by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), is a vehicle that travels on low-pressure tires, has a seat ...

accident.

Career

* From 1977 to 1979, he was a Senior Design Engineer at

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

, where he specified and designed the microcode and the controller core of the

microprocessor, one of the first microprocessors designed by structured VLSI design. * From 1979 to 1987, Tredennick worked on microcode and logic design for the IBM Micro/370 microprocessor at the

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. Its main laboratory is in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City. It also operates facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Albany, ...

. While at IBM, in 1983/1984 he took sabbatical leave to teach computer organization, chip design, and the Flowchart Method at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

. * In 1986, Tredennick co-founded

NexGen NexGen, Inc. was a private semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD on January 16, 1996. NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other c ...

and was director of product development there in 1987-1988. NexGen later developed the Nx686 microprocessor which became the

AMD K6 The K6 microprocessor was launched by AMD in 1997. The main advantage of this particular microprocessor is that it was designed to fit into existing desktop designs for Pentium-branded CPUs. It was marketed as a product that could perform as wel ...

when the company was acquired by

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

in 1996. * As Chief Scientist of

Altera Altera Corporation is a manufacturer of programmable logic devices (PLDs) headquartered in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1983 and acquired by Intel in 2015 before becoming independent once again in 2025 as a company focused on developm ...

Corporation from 1993 to 1995 he began advocating

Reconfigurable Computing Reconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with flexible hardware platforms like FPGA, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The princip ...

as an essential paradigm shift in computer science, a topic he spoke and published on extensively. * In 1988 he started Tredennick, Inc. to analyze microprocessor industry trends and provide consulting on VLSI CPU design and reconfigurable computing. Tredennick was an advisor and investor in numerous pre-IPO startups and a member of technical advisory boards for numerous companies. In 2007 he joined the board of Patriot Scientific. In parallel to his professional career, Tredennick served as a pilot with the U.S. Air Force (active, reserve, and National Guard) from 1970–1984, attaining the rank of major, as Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1986-2000 at the rank of captain, and on the

Army Science Board The Army Science Board (ASB) provides advice about army science to senior military leaders. The ASB is a Federal Advisory Committee organized under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It is the United States Department of the Army senior scienti ...

from 1994–2001 and from 2006.

Publications

Tredennick wrote several books and numerous articles in professional and trade magazines; inter alia, as a Contributing Editor of ''Microprocessor Report'', and on the Editorial Advisory Boards for ''Microprocessors and Microsystems'', for ''Embedded Developer's Journal'', and ''IEEE Spectrum'', as well as editing the ''Gilder Technology Report'' on leading-edge components. He has often appeared as panelist and keynote speaker on international conferences. Tredennick held nine U.S. patents on subjects ranging from microprocessors to reconfigurable computing.

Selected publications

* Microprocessor Logic Design: The Flowchart Method. * Microprocessor-based Computers. * Implementation Decisions for the MC68000 Microprocessor. * The Case for Reconfigurable Computing.

Sources

ACM profile

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tredennick, Nick 1946 births 2022 deaths 20th-century American inventors Cockrell School of Engineering alumni Texas Tech University alumni