John Birkner News Today

Well, you made it to February. Congratulations! This is the leap month of a leap year. If you’re following the news, Kathy Ireland calendars from 1996 are hot eBay items because the dates and days of the week are the same as for 2024, so you can use ‘em again this year. Meanwhile, in more…

With tensions still running high in the Westwood Regional school board, four new board members were sworn in Thursday night.

As discussed in Parts 1 through 4 of this article series, the earliest PLDs evolved along easily traced genetic lines that started with Harris Semiconductor’s programmable diode arrays from the 1960s and progressed through bipolar PROMs, the Signetics 82S100 FPLA, MMI’s PALs, and finally the transcendent CMOS replications of PAL devices created by Altera and…

Part 2 of this article series discussed the development of the first successful programmable logic device, the Signetics 82S100 FPLA (field programmable logic array). A Signetics salesperson tried to convince John Birkner, a minicomputer designer at Computer Automation in Irvine, California, to use the 82S100 in his designs, but Birkner saw that the device was…

Part 1 of this article series discussed the earliest programmable ICs that could be used to implement logic circuits. Not quite programmable logic, Harris Semiconductor’s programmable diode arrays and PROMs laid the groundwork for PLDs (programmable logic devices) to come. This is where we return to Napoleone Cavlan, Ronald Cline, and the story of how…