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Bob Widlar and Analog Integrated Circuits

Abstract

Robert J. Widlar (1937–1991) invented the analog integrated circuit business. At Fairchild Semiconductor he designed the µA702 (1964) and µA709 (1965), the first commercially successful monolithic operational amplifiers; at National Semiconductor he created the first integrated voltage regulators, the Widlar current source, super-beta transistors, and the bandgap voltage reference, building blocks still inside virtually every chip that touches the physical world. He did it while cultivating the most notorious personality in Silicon Valley history: he brought a sheep to work to protest lawn-budget cuts, built a noise device to punish loud colleagues, smashed faulty components with a sledgehammer, and retired a millionaire at 33. He died at 53.

The Interview

Widlar was born on November 30, 1937 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a radio engineer. He was repairing radios and televisions at fifteen, taught electronics in the Air Force, and finished his electrical engineering degree at the University of Colorado in 1963. He arrived at his Fairchild Semiconductor interview that year reportedly intoxicated and told his interviewers that their existing analog circuits were, in his word, worthless. Fairchild hired him.

The timing mattered. Fairchild (the company founded by Robert Noyce and the “traitorous eight”) had the planar process and was mass-producing digital logic. But analog circuits, which amplify and regulate continuous signals rather than switching bits, were considered nearly impossible to integrate: monolithic silicon offered badly matched resistors, no good capacitors, and temperature-drifting transistors. The consensus was that precision analog required discrete components.

Designing Around Silicon’s Flaws

Widlar’s insight, developed with process engineer David Talbert, was to stop fighting the medium. Silicon’s absolute component values were terrible, but the matching between adjacent transistors on the same die was superb. Widlar invented circuit topologies that depended only on matching, and turned integration’s weakness into an advantage.

  • The µA702 (1964) was the first monolithic operational amplifier sold as a standard product.
  • The µA709 (introduced November 1965) was the first genuinely practical IC op-amp, cheap, usable, and soon ubiquitous. It made “op-amp” a component category rather than a rack of discrete parts.
  • The Widlar current source (a two-transistor circuit generating tiny, stable bias currents from mismatched emitter geometry) became a standard textbook building block.

At the end of 1965 Widlar and Talbert left Fairchild for the small Molectro operation of National Semiconductor in Santa Clara, taking 20,000 stock options with them. There Widlar designed the LM100 (1966), the first integrated voltage regulator; the LM101 op-amp (1967), which fixed the µA709’s weaknesses with single-capacitor frequency compensation; and the LM108 (1969), using super-beta transistors he developed for ultra-low input currents. His bandgap voltage reference, a way to generate a stable reference voltage that cancels temperature drift, first deployed in his voltage-regulator work around 1970, remains the standard reference circuit in nearly every analog and mixed-signal chip made today.

Why Analog Still Matters

Every digital system meets the physical world through analog circuits: power regulation, sensor amplification, data conversion, radio. Widlar’s op-amps, regulators, references, and current mirrors are the vocabulary of that boundary layer. A modern smartphone contains dozens of descendants of his circuits.

The Wildman

Widlar’s technical legend is inseparable from his behavioral one.

  • When National cut its lawn-maintenance budget and the grass grew shaggy, Widlar bought a sheep, drove it to work in the back of his Mercedes convertible, and set it grazing on the company lawn in front of photographers.
  • He built the “hassler”, a device that detected loud talking in the lab and answered it with a high-pitched squeal just at the edge of hearing, escalating until the offender quieted down.
  • Faulty components were “Widlarized”: beaten flat with a hammer so they could never confuse anyone again.
  • He silenced an annoying public-address speaker permanently, with firecrackers.
  • He drank openly and heavily; colleagues recalled him refusing to give a lecture until gin was produced, then delivering it flawlessly.

The stories were tolerated because the designs were untouchable. National’s analog product line, built substantially on Widlar’s and Talbert’s work, carried the company for years.

On December 21, 1970, Widlar cashed in his National stock for roughly $1 million and retired to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He was 33. He returned as a consultant in November 1974 and kept designing, the LM12 power amplifier and the LM10, an op-amp plus reference that ran on a single 1.1-volt cell, among them. In 1981 he was involved in founding Linear Technology with Robert Swanson and Robert Dobkin, but broke with the company in 1984 in a dispute over patents and returned to consulting for National.

The Cost

Widlar died of a heart attack on February 27, 1991, at age 53, while jogging on a hill near his home in Puerto Vallarta. He had cut back his drinking in his final years, but colleagues believed the damage was long since done. In death the legend only grew: Bob Pease, National’s other great analog eccentric, spent years documenting and fact-checking Widlar stories in his Electronic Design columns. Widlar was inducted into the Electronic Design Hall of Fame in 2002 and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2009.

Widlar never fit the corporate mold that came to define the industry, and never tried. He remains the counter-figure to Silicon Valley’s management culture: proof that, at least once, a single ungovernable designer could define an entire product category. The industrial world his circuits enabled is covered in The Integrated Circuit Revolution; the culture that half-embraced and half-endured people like him is examined in Silicon Valley: How a Place Became a Myth.

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