[PLUG-TALK] Happy 50th Birthday to the Signetics 555 Timer IC
Keith Lofstrom
keithl at kl-ic.com
Tue Aug 30 23:50:02 UTC 2022
On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 03:27:39PM -0700, Galen Seitz wrote:
> This one's for Keith, but others may be interested.
>
> <https://www.eejournal.com/article/happy-50th-birthday-to-the-signetics-555-timer-ic/>
I never met Camerzind, though knew other engineers at
Signetics. I have a small bin of ancient Signetics
555 timer chips.
Decades ago, Tektronix issued little plastic clip badges
with 3 millimeter colored dots indicating the group.
My group was the Integrated Circuit Operation (in the
building that is now Analog Devices, at Jenkins Road
and Blumlein Way in Beaverton), and we had a green dot.
I drilled out the dot, replaced it with a green LED, with a
555 timer and coin cell batteries on the back of the badge.
It was designed to blink the dot for about 100 milliseconds,
a very brief bright green flash, with a 60 second cadence.
I only turned it on in meetings that I did not want to
attend. Only one other engineer figured out that my
badge blinked ... most folks were subconsciously
unsettled but never figured out why.
My experiment was not rigorous, so I cannot claim with
certainty that it psychologically discouraged useless
and unpleasant meetings. It did help me endure them.
Veering off on a different tangent ...
The article misconstrues patents.
Almost everybody does. The reason that rational people
(like you) at small companies (like Signetics) pursue
patents is NOT to stop infringers - that is indeed
impractical - but to stop other organizations (with more
lawyers) from getting a patent on YOUR idea, and suing YOU,
the actual inventor. Yes, you might eventually thwart the
scoundrels in court, but that requires very deep pockets.
A patent wards off many of those scoundrels, and adds some
protection for YOU (and the companies you sell to) from THEM.
I got a patent on one of my ideas, US 6161213, filed 1999/02/17
and issued 2000/12/12 . I "licenced" that. More accurately,
I sold my time and expertise to companies implementing the
idea. My patents protected THEM from many patent trolls.
One of my clients was Hitachi ULSI in Japan. We were planning
to revolutionize RFID, combining their technology and mine,
cryptographically protecting the privacy of billions of
consumers owning products containing retail RFID tags.
Hitachi's patent department (8th largest patent holder in
the world) looked at my low-cost minimum claim patent and
the enormously detailed description ("specification") and
said "there's material here for far more claims". They
successfully completed a rare re-examination and reissue,
resulting in patent RE61488 (iirc). A reissue, examined
TWICE, is considered a "superpatent", nearly impossible to
successfully attack in court. Hitachi and I were poised
to transform retail ...
... and then came the Sendai earthquake. Hitachi shifted
its focus from chips to reconstruction, and manufacturing
the big earthmoving equipment to do so. I concurred.
I donated the royalties I had earned so far to Red Feather,
the Japanese equivalent of the Red Cross.
No more transformation of retail. A gaping void filled
by Amazon. That also turned out well. In an alternate
reality with more storefront retail and less internet
commerce, far more people would have been exposed to
COVID in stores and died. I am proud of my "failure".
As icing on that particular cake, as the patent and reissue
neared end-of-life, I sold the patent+reissue to a small
law group that hoped to earn Big Bucks by suing the many
companies who have "infringed" (scare quotes) on the patent.
That went about as I expected - the law group went bankrupt
with court costs (and did not finish paying me for their
patent purchase).
Useful data points for anyone contemplating patents as a
road to riches. A very few tenacious b*****ds come out
ahead, almost all lose a lot of money. Perhaps the only
subfield of patents that (on average) earn inventors more
than they cost are chemical, specifically novel molecules
with provably unique atomic arrangements.
You can read more about this in "Patent Failure" by James
Bessen & Michael J. Meurer, Princeton University Press, 2008.
Ah well. If patents keep rapacious lawyers busy attacking
wealthy companies, rather than evicting the poor and
punishing small businesses, the world is a better place.
Otherwise, abolish patents.
Keith
--
Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com
More information about the PLUG-talk
mailing list