Robert H. Dennard

Robert H. Dennard was born in Terrell, Texas, on 5 September 1932 and spent his career at IBM, where he played a key role in two of the most groundbreaking innovations of the microelectronics industry. His work on the one-transistor memory cell led the way to readily available, inexpensive, high-density memory, and the principles he helped develop for scaling MOSFET devices are now commonly called the scaling laws. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University in 1954 and 1956 and a doctorate from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1958, and he joined the IBM Research Division that year. He pioneered the dynamic RAM memory cell used in most computers today and was issued 26 U.S. patents. He received the U.S. National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and was named the 2009 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor. He died on 23 April 2024.