Talk:Bob Widlar

National Semiconductor
Didn't he also work for National Semiconductor?? I heard he was lured away from Fairchild and was offered significant shares of National stock in their early years. National took off and he made a fortune, or so I recall. Madhu 01:08, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

/* Much of Widlar's most creative work was done at National, where he, Dobkin and Pease (IIRC) were billed as the "Practical Wizards of National". Widlar's design brilliance was complemented by his clear and comprehensible writing style (see, for example, NSC's AN-29, the Application Note about the LM108/208/308 titled "IC Op Amp Beats FETs on Input Current", footnoted, "Reprinted from EEE December 1969" -- this and other Widlar-authored appnotes should still be available online as PDFs; I'm looking at my hardcopy 1986 edition NSC Linear Applications Handbook) which greatly eased the task of comprehending and using the devices he designed. His crowning achievement, in my opinion, was the LM10, designed under contract to NSC after he had nominally left (retired from?) there, with help from Robert Dobkin and Mineo Yamatake. Robert Pease recently mentioned the LM10 as one of his "favorite chips" ( http://spectrum.ieee.org/may09/8749/2: "One of my favorite chips was Robert J. Widlar’s  LM10. It was the first op-amp in the world to have rail-to-rail output swing. Also, it had a 200-millivolt band-gap reference built in, so it could put out 200 to 39 000 mV of stable reference. (It took a couple of dozen years before anybody else made such a wide range of Vref.) Also, this IC could run from plus or minus 0.6 up to plus or minus 20 V of power. Unique. It is still made and sold 30 plus years later. Unique capabilities. The LM10 has helped me make many useful circuits." --full quote ). Appnotes AN-211, "New Op Amp Ideas", and TP-14, "Low Voltage Techniques", which became an addendum to AN-211, discuss the LM10. TP-14 was published in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits December 1978. Again, my reference is the 1986 edition NSC Linear Applications Handbook.

btw the pagename "Robert_Widlar" doesn't exist -- "Robert_widlar" does, as a redirect to Bob_Widlar. Oops.

--crb3 (Carroll R. Bryan III)
 * / —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.154.235.49 (talk) 02:36, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Widlarising
Should we add the Widlarising technique for preventing faulty components from ever being used again?--Light current 15:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

And how about bandgap voltage reference invented by Widlar?
 * Done both, and some more! East of Borschov 17:57, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Application note
I would add a citation for the famous application note 'The care and feeding of the 709' if I could find it on the WWW. Does anyone know where it can be found? EEye (talk) 00:14, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

uA732 vs LM100
The book by Harrison, which is misleadingly cited as source here for that matter, doesn't actually actually mention any of these two. Lojek's book only mentions the LM100 and claims (p. 301) that it was the "world's first integrated voltage regulator". YMMV as how accurate that claim is, but the present claims aren't backed-up the source cited and are actually contradicted by one other source cited a bit later. 86.121.186.32 (talk) 21:44, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Surely that should be µA723? EEye (talk) 11:06, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

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Improvements and comments
This is a very interesting article. I enjoyed reading and I made several improvements, primarily trying to address the sequence of the sections which were somewhat out of order and, definitely, not in chronological order.

1. The spelling on the names of Widlar's parents should be resolved. I see some uncertainty.

2. The article states that Widlar was a co-founder of Linear Technology but the article on Linear Technology does not say the same. One of the two article must be incomplete or incorrect.

3. References 76 and 81 are permanent dead links. It would be nice to find a source to relink.

ICE77 (talk) 02:41, 20 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I found a working link for ref 81 and fixed it. A more complete quote from it would be "Robert Widlar, a strange, alcoholic genius of analogue-computer miniaturization". Dicklyon (talk) 03:23, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
 * This book says "In 1981 Widlar, Robert Swanson, and Robert Dobkin co-founded Linear Technology Corporation." Dicklyon (talk) 03:27, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Dicklyon, thanks for the information. That's rather interesting. Then the article on Linear Technology should include Widlar in the founders (although, considering his personality and work style, I just don't see how he could be a founder).

ICE77 (talk) 16:49, 24 August 2018 (UTC)