JOHN G. LINVILL (1919-2011)

BY JAMES F. GIBBONS AND
MARTIN E. HELLMAN

JOHN GRIMES LINVILL,¹ who chaired Stanford University’s Electrical Engineering Department from 1964 to 1980, died on Feb. 19, 2011, at age 91.

John was a towering figure in Silicon Valley, though his soft voice and quiet demeanor reflected his roots in Missouri, where he was born Aug. 8, 1919.

As chair of Stanford’s Electrical Engineering Department, he oversaw its transition from a leader in vacuum tube technology to the center of electrical engineering’s move to solid-state devices. John recognized the emerging potential of semiconductor devices and integrated circuits earlier than most. His foresight and leadership gave Stanford a head start over many of its peers in what was arguably the most important technology of the 20th century.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from William Jewell College in 1941, and his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1943, 1945, and 1949, respectively.

After teaching at MIT for two years as an assistant professor, he joined Bell Labs, where he conducted research on transistor circuit design.

Stanford Engineering Dean Frederick Terman (NAE 1964) later recruited John to build a program around the application of transistors. In 1955, John became Stanford’s first appointment in a discipline that shaped an industry that, in turn, shaped the world.

During John’s lifetime, electronic computation increased by a factor of roughly 10 to the 20th power. Probably the only other time in Earth’s history any quantity increased so rapidly was when life first evolved. John played a key role in bringing about these truly monumental changes.

Stanford’s program was influenced in 1956 by the arrival in the Bay Area of William Shockley (NAS) and his Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Out of that beginning, and with some birth pangs, emerged what is now known as Silicon Valley.

John spoke with Shockley about the possibility of Stanford building a semiconductor lab. Shockley said the university needed a facility where doctoral students could fabricate semiconductor devices as part of their thesis work. He offered to train someone, selected by John, in how to build those devices. John invited his former doctoral student, James Gibbons (NAE 1974), to take on the role.

Gibbons accepted and initially split his time between serving as a Stanford faculty member and working at Shockley Semiconductor. Together, they succeeded in setting up the first university laboratory where students could fabricate semiconductor devices, with the first device produced at Stanford’s facility in 1958.

The partnership between Linvill and Gibbons also produced their groundbreaking graduate text, Transistors and Active Circuits (McGraw-Hill, 1961). John had an uncanny ability to spot great talent, and Gibbons later became dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering.

In the 1970s, as integrated circuits supplanted discrete transistors, John, Gibbons, and their colleague James Meindl (NAE 1978) founded Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems (CIS), a partnership between electrical engineering, computer science, and industry that enabled students to fabricate integrated circuits.

CIS was built around the idea that future computing systems would require innovation across hardware, software, and architecture. That vision led Stanford to establish the first major university microelectronics facility. Over the next several decades, that idea spread to many of its peer institutions.

As co-director of CIS, John helped implement a program that brought industry professionals to Stanford and that placed Stanford doctoral students in industry for part of their education. CIS has become a model for university-corporate partnerships.

John also played a key role in Stanford’s expansion into biomedical engineering, a path influenced in part by his daughter Candace becoming blind in infancy. At that time, the primary reading aids for the blind were bulky Braille books. John developed a way for Candy to read any printed material using the Optacon (optical-to-tactile converter).

The Optacon was a portable device with a small, hand-held camera that could be moved across printed material to generate images on a fingertip-sized tactile display, which the blind reader interpreted through touch. This allowed blind users to read text and also to perceive figures and other visual elements.

Krishna Saraswat, now professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford, who earned his doctorate developing high-voltage metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors to drive the Optacon’s 144 ultrasonic pins, described the experience: “The joy I derived by seeing blind people being able to perceive printed material for the first time taught me an inspiring lesson for the rest of my career.”

In 1970, John co-founded Telesensory Systems Inc. to bring the Optacon to market globally. The device became a landmark example of how technology could be applied to assistive solutions for people with disabilities. In 1971, Industrial Research Inc. named the Optacon one of the 100 most significant products of the year. Helped by her father’s invention, Candy attended Stanford and earned a doctorate in clinical psychology.

John’s interest in biomedical engineering extended far beyond the Optacon. In 1972, he hired Al Macovski (NAE 1988) in the first joint appointment between Stanford’s electrical engineering department and its medical school. This highly successful effort helped pave the way for the creation of Stanford’s bioengineering department and led to many additional joint appointments between engineering and medicine.

His influence and friendship extended to many others, including John Hennessy (NAE 1992), founder of MIPS, president emeritus of Stanford, and chairman of Google’s parent Alphabet Inc.; and Jim Plummer (NAE 1996), who later became dean of Stanford’s School of Engineering.

Among his many honors, John was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1960; was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1971; was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974; received the IEEE Education Medal in 1976; received the John Scott Award in 1980 for his work on the Optacon; received the American Electronics Association’s Medal of Achievement in 1983; and received the Louis Braille Prize from the Deutscher Blindenverband in 1984 for the invention of the Optacon.

He was survived by his wife, Marjorie Linvill; his son, Greg Linvill; his daughter, Candace Berg; his granddaughters, Angela and Alyssa Linvill; and his great-grandson, Sato Ramsaran.

Note
The bottom photo shows John Linvill, Jim Gibbons, and Gerald Pearson (NAE 1968) — then on leave from Bell Labs and later a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford — examining the first semiconductor device.

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¹This tribute draws from Andrew Myers’ 2011 obituary of John Linvill, with portions included directly and with gratitude.