Artifact Details

Title

Poulton, Ken oral history

Catalog Number

102792192

Type

Moving image

Description

Ken Poulton obtained a Bachelor's degree in Physics and a Master's in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He joined Hewlett-Packard Labs and has been working in the same department for 40+ years, although the department was spun off twice, in 1999 into Agilent Technologies and in 2014 into Keysight Technologies. Most of his work has been in the field of integrated-circuit data (analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog) converters for measurement instruments like digital oscilloscopes, mass spectrometers, and direct-to-RF spectrum analyzers and signal generators.

Up to the late 1990s data converters for digital oscilloscopes were implemented in the fastest bipolar technologies available but Ken and his team drove the switch to CMOS. Because CMOS integrated circuits are slower and less precise than bipolar, the breakthrough principle that made them useful was a massively parallel architecture, time interleaving many dozens of identical ADCs, and using sophisticated analog and digital error correction to recover the precision needed for high-end instruments.

Date

2021-05-13

Participants

Poulton, Ken, Interviewee
Steinbach, Gunter, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Palo Alto, CA

Duration

01:16:28

Format

MOV

Category

Oral history

Subject

Time-interleaved data converter; Massively parallel analog-digital converter; Stanford University; Digital Oscilloscope; Analog integrated circuit; CMOS; bipolar; Keysight; Hewlett-Packard; Agilent

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X9479.2021
 

Related Records

102792191 Poulton, Ken oral history