Love the chip, the guys a hero up there with the also recently departed Bob Pease and Jim Williams.
I realize this is hacker news and pretty digital heavy, so I do feel the need to point out that "Incredibly, he created the chip alone, spending a year designing it by hand as a freelancer." and "His design incorporated 23 transistors, 15 resistors and a pair of diodes." is in the analog EE world not so much incredible as "probably about typical months design productivity". As usual in the analog world R+D and "productification stuff" and extensive testing burned up the other 11 months.
So Pease, Williams, and now Camenzind are gone. Hard to believe Widlar's been gone 20 years, now he was a guy who packed 2000 years equivalent of wild heroic living into, unfortunately, only about half a century. Losing a whole generation of analog arch-wizards. Sad.
I realize this is hacker news and pretty digital heavy, so I do feel the need to point out that "Incredibly, he created the chip alone, spending a year designing it by hand as a freelancer." and "His design incorporated 23 transistors, 15 resistors and a pair of diodes." is in the analog EE world not so much incredible as "probably about typical months design productivity". As usual in the analog world R+D and "productification stuff" and extensive testing burned up the other 11 months.
So Pease, Williams, and now Camenzind are gone. Hard to believe Widlar's been gone 20 years, now he was a guy who packed 2000 years equivalent of wild heroic living into, unfortunately, only about half a century. Losing a whole generation of analog arch-wizards. Sad.