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