IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Summer 2016 - 18

Like many kids, I started my destruction career
at an early age; unlike most people, I never
grew out of it.
interest than yours and the power of a
good team. And, yes, the David Silverman I knew as a kid ended up being one
of the creators/directors of The Simpsons and many other animated films.

Why I Became a Digital
Circuit Designer
I began playing with electronic devices
when I was in junior high school. My
uncle, Harold Sanders, was an electrical
engineer working on building detectors
for high-energy particle accelerators,
giving him access to many "advanced"
semiconductors. He would occasionally give me some components to play
with. They were magical devices to
me: things like bipolar transistors and
some transistor transitor logic (TTL)
small-scale integrated circuits (ICs)
(remember this was in the 1960s), and
even advanced miniaturized tubes. Initially I just saved them; they were my
treasure. But that didn't last long, and

my curiosity eventually got the better
of me. I wanted to figure out what was
inside these little metal cans and how
to use them. I remember carefully filing
the top off of a metal transistor can to
look inside. Today, I would do almost
anything to get one of those transistors
back since inside was a very nice long
rectangular bar of semiconductor with
two leads on either end and one lead in
the middle. These were very early transistors from TI.
For my 14th birthday, I got a kit
that allowed me to build 50 different
electronic circuits, which included a
number of different AM radios. Playing with this kit and trying to build a
radio is the reason I became a digital
designer. I lived under a mile from
the WTOP antenna towers in Wheaton, Maryland. Their signal was so
strong in my house that I could hear
"WTOP, 1600 on your AM dial" on the
earphone for the radio I was building

by just holding the ends of the earphone in my fingers, making it a zero
transistor radio. Unfortunately when
I tried to build a one-transistor, or
even a five-transistor, radio, I still
only heard WTOP. This was not much
fun. Fortunately, my older brother
was taking a class in computer electronics. I don't think he liked it that
much, but I did! It was more fun than
the projects in my kits, and I started
to focus on that.
But this then caused another problem. I wanted to find out what interesting parts were available, but there was
no Amazon or Internet at that time.
While companies advertised in trade
magazines, you needed to write to them
to get more information or samples.
And nobody seemed to want to deal
with a kid in primary school. Due to
the poor response rate, I started my
first company, Comtronic, when I was
around 14. It's probably more accurate
to say I created stationary for my imaginary company, whose address just happened to be the same as my parents'
house. I used Comtronic to ask for all
kinds of information and loved all the
mail I got. This experiment is also how

Figure 4: The schematic and Comtronic invoice I created in 1974 for a stop watch I built for Kennedy High School.

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