Bob Pease

Bob Pease had a wonderful life. He give a joy to engineers. He was newer sad. He always give help to others. He look like a guru and he was a guru. I waited whole year to hear him in person with his "Bob Pease Show".
2001 he designed a to me a real though design. I needed a laser voltage detector for series capacitor station. The power available for this unit was 10uA from 8 V laser power supply. The detector should give 70mA 5us pulses every 70ms periods to fiber optics. The temperature range was -40 +70 centigrade. This unit monitors the state of the laser power supply.
Bob solved this problem during a coffee break in 5 minutes with his analog design. I had took a whole day from me. UI used micro controller. The difficult was a reference voltage at whole temperature range with a very small current.
The capacitor station is in high voltage (500kV) and operating power is brought to high voltage by a laser through fiber optics.
Pekka Ritamaki /Finland

Bob was a great engineer and dedicated himself to helping people all around the world. Thanks for sharing this personal story with the community.

I too remember him. I had just published my first paper in Electron Devices ("the red rag") on my "brilliant" analog layout editor I did and I was surprised to hear from the journal that Bob Pease will be publishing a rebuttal to my assertion on common centroid layout. I took this to my graduate professor and he became very excited.
"To be called out and acknowledged by Bob was a true honor!"
Bob and I had a wonderful time debating the finer points of common centroid layout over 4 periodicals. I have to say it is a highlight in my career to be fortunate enough to be able to debate with Bob. I will truely miss him.

Jeff

Jeff,
Is your work be shown somewhere?

I think everybody remember Bob forever if he/she had an opportunity to met him.
When he entered in front of the audience he had his backpack and suspenders. Please look my picture.

He sold his books from backpack.
I have a rare book about How to avoid car accidents, with his signature inside. Also the book of analog troubleshooting.

Bob Pease show story Helsinki 2001:
The black suit men of National Semiconductor gave speeches after Bob. One German speaker told "This voltage is 2.4999959V".
I asked how he can be sure about this extraordinary accuracy. He didn't understand the question. I asked again how has measured this voltage. He didn't understand this question either. He said it written in this paper.
When the speech was over, Bob came into front, he had hear what I had asked.

"Let me explain".
"Hewlett Packard was designing a new high accuracy digital voltmeter. It needed a good reference IC. We didn't has a reference good enough for this task."
"I put four our best reference ICs to together with the resistors. The noise was reduced to squareroot of four. This was not enough for HP."

"I took four of these new references, but this was not good enough."
" Again I took four new references, but this was not good enough"
"But when I took four new references, this was good enough for the HP."
"That is how I got these figures"

Pekka Ritamaki/Finland