As posted in CCD-World mailing list, Semiconductor Technology Associates, Inc. founder Dick Bredthauer passed away.
Dr. Richard Bredthauer was involved in the design and fabrication of a large variety of scientific imaging CCDs from 1975 to 2016. He managed CCD development at Lockheed Martin, Loral, Ford Aerospace, and Rockwell. He designed the original 9k x 9k imager while at Lockheed Martin, and his CCDs included notable instruments such as Hubble’s WFPC2, all of the visible imagers on Cassini, the stereo camera in Mars Pathfinder, and most recently the lightning imager for GOES-R. In 2016, his son Dr. Greg Bredthauer became president of STA and took over daily operations.
Thanks to GM for the pointer!
I first met Dick at the 1986 IEEE Workshop on CCDs. At the time, my group at Columbia was working on smart image sensors implemented with "charge-coupled computing." Dick very generously offered to fab some masks and wafers for us and that enabled several PhD theses and archival journal papers. Dick was a very open technologist sharing everything he knew with students and colleagues alike with upbeat enthusiasm. He is high on my personal heroes list and while I aloqly fell out of regular touch with him, I always considered him a good friend. He also had a long time collaboration with JPL and Jim Janesick that led to alot of interesting CCD explorations, like the infamous Skipper chip and the "open-pinned-phase" CCD. I knew he was ill and incapacitated for some time and I am very sorry to learn of his inevitable passing. Along with Barry Burke's passing, it seems we are starting to lose the core of the CCD generation. My condolences to Dick's family.
ReplyDeleteSad news ! I saw Dick for the last time about 5 years ago and at that time his health became worse already. Too bad, he passed away way too early. I think he must have been 75 years. RIP Dick.
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