Tom Frederiksen, RIP

Yup. They only have about 8 hours assigned to each application, though, and rely very heavily on keyword searches to find prior art.

Garrett Moddel of U Colorado and I (IBM) have almost the exact same patent on waveguide-integrated tunnel junction optical modulators. If either of us had been able to make them work, it could have been an interesting fight. ;)

It's possible to have the same invention described in quite different terms, so that a simple keyword search doesn't find the prior art.

There's an appeals process in the USPTO that handles interferences and re-examinations. I've done a few re-exams--the rules are much more like the initial examination and much less like a district court case. The patent owner has to prove his case in a re-exam, whereas in court there's a strong presumption of the validity of an issued patent.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My 3,491,301 was initially denied. Then I told the examiner he was too dumb to understand it (I was only 25 at the time :-) The examiner allowed it ;-) ...Jim Thompson

You're talking about Figure 6 in the Frederiksen sole-author regulator paper (not the joint paper with Solomon), right? Tom credits you in a footnote: "This circuit was suggested by J. E. Thompson." Its purpose was to deal with very poor PNP beta?

Thanks, I missed that. Yes, it side-steps the poor lateral-PNP beta problem. ...Jim Thompson

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The RCA and EMI colour TV patents described the process of putting the colo ur information on a sub-carrier as "quadrature modulation" and "sine-cosine modulation" respectively. EMI patented it first, but the US court decided that the two descriptions implied different processes - they didn't say how - so the RCA patent stood - surprise, surprise.

lists it as a 1-Watt power amplifier.

Bob Pease seems to think that it was a National Semiconductor home product

Slowman seems to have a mental deficiency requiring incessant insistence on being a horse's ass.

Original release MC1554 was in a TO-5 can (MC1554G) and was thus rated (optimistically) as 1-Watt, based on a slip-on finned heat-sink.

I lost a bet to Tom concerning how much power output could be attained. He opined some outrageous amount... I don't remember, maybe

I lost. I came to work one Monday morning to find that Tom had come in over the weekend and machined a slab of Aluminum such that a TO-5 could be force-fit into it. He also drilled a pathway thru the block with threaded fitting such that he could pipe CO2 thru it. Voila!

LM117 is the numbering assigned by National... I'm not sure if it was (initially) made at Motorola Semiconductor Products Division... Motorola SPD was heading into its final death spiral in that time frame. ...Jim Thompson

Perusing all of Tom's patents, only the two RExxxxx one's are assigned to Motorola. Neither of which can I attach a Motorola part number. ...Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson seems to be suggesting that the mental deficiency was at Motorola - there's not a lot of point in developing a 3-Watt chip and selling it in a 1-Watt package. National Semiconductor didn't make this mistake with the LM12.

So he knew the score, even if you didn't.

Putting the MC1554 into a 1-Watt package would be evidence of that.

............................................... >:-} ...Jim Thompson

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Rambling incoherent Jim Thopmson can't make any sense of it.

Jim Thompson is even worse than krw at making sense of stuff that he doesn' t want to think about.

I've finally got Jim Thompson to identify a integrated circuit that Jim thi nks that Tom Frederiksen designed, but Jim can't explain why the MC1554 end ed up in a 1-Watt package, when Tom Frederiksen trumped it as a 3-Watt devi ce (and demonstrated that you could get 10W out of it with a sufficiently b izarre heat-sink).