Bernard Valentine Vonderschmitt (October 14, 1923 – June 9, 2004) was an electrical engineer, most noted as a co-founder of leading

FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices (PLDs). They consist of a ...

producer

Xilinx Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also pioneered ...

Biography

He was born on October 14, 1923, in

Jasper, Indiana Jasper is a city in and the county seat of Dubois County, Indiana, United States, located along the Patoka River. The population was 16,703 at the 2020 census making it the 48th largest city in Indiana. On November 4, 2007, Dubois County returned ...

. Vonderschmitt graduated with a BSEE from Rose Polytechnic Institute in 1944. He also received an MSEE degree from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

, an MBA from

Rider University Rider University is a private university in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, United States. It consists of three academic units: the Norm Brodsky College of Business, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, which includes Westminster Choir Coll ...

, and eventually an honorary doctorate from that same institution. Vonderschmitt began his career with

RCA RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded in 1919 as the Radio Corporation of America. It was initially a patent pool, patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Westinghou ...

, and worked with them for 34 years, taking a short time during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

to serve in the

US Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the naval warfare, maritime military branch, service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is the world's most powerful navy with the largest Displacement (ship), displacement, at 4.5 millio ...

as an electronics officer. He holds 13

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s that cover

color television Color television (American English) or colour television (British English) is a television transmission technology that also includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improv ...

and

solid state electronics Solid-state electronics are semiconductor electronics: electronic equipment that use semiconductor devices such as transistors, diodes and integrated circuits (ICs). The term is also used as an adjective for devices in which semiconductor electr ...

. After leaving RCA, he worked briefly for

Zilog Zilog, Inc. is an American manufacturer of microprocessors, microcontrollers, and application-specific embedded System on a chip, system-on-chip (SoC) products. The company was founded in 1974 by Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann, who were soo ...

, before co-founding

together with

Ross Freeman Ross Freeman (July 26, 1948 – October 22, 1989), was an American electrical engineer and inventor, and co-founder of the leading FPGA developer Xilinx. Early life and education Freeman was born in the upper peninsula of Michigan on July 26, 1 ...

in 1984. With Xilinx, he pioneered the ''

fabless Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...

'' business model which is now used by a large number of semiconductor companies around the world. Vonderschmitt died on June 9, 2004, in Jasper, Indiana.

References

External links

* * * 1923 births 2004 deaths American electrical engineers Rose–Hulman Institute of Technology alumni People from Jasper, Indiana 20th-century American engineers University of Pennsylvania alumni United States Navy personnel of World War II {{US-electrical-engineer-stub