Michael Francis Tompsett
Encyclopedia
Michael Francis Tompsett is a British born physicist and former researcher at English Electric Valve Company
, who later moved to Bell Labs
in America. He is best known as the inventor of Charge-Coupled Device
(CCD) Imagers used for imaging in devices such as digital cameras. Tompsett designed and built the first ever digital camera.
Dr. Tompsett blazed new trails in several technological areas. These have all been and continue to be of immense technical, commercial and social benefit, but because they were in different areas, he has not received the full recognition for his body of accomplishments. He has displayed technical leadership on the international stage, and is well-known particularly for his pioneering work on infrared imagers and CCD imagers. He has provided leadership in various fields and to the people who worked with him over the years. Pioneering inexpensive, compact, low power, high performance and low cost solid-state, infrared imagers, CCD imagers and digital cameras are all singular achievements. Dr. Tompsett has made significant individual and original contributions in several fields with significant patents and publications over an extended period of time.
Also while working with the EEV Company, Dr. Tompsett became aware of a mechanically scanned liquid nitrogen cooled single-pixel scanner for infra-red imaging that was a massive piece of apparatus, very slow and lacked resolution. He decided that electronic scanning and room-temperature operation should be his goal for thermal and night-vision applications and invented the un-cooled Pyroelectric Vidicon Camera Tube, that is patented solely in his name. This concept used electron beam scanning of a thin wafer of a pyroelectric material placed inside a vacuum tube. Small changes in temperature produced tiny changes in voltage across the wafer that the electron beam could detect. He published predictions of the performance that were subsequently obtained after a successful development. The tube won a British Queen’s Award in 1987. Night-vision thermal imaging cameras using these tubes have been deployed by the military and in civilian applications for firefighting, and search-and-rescue operations world-wide. Even 25 years later he was invited to write 2 book chapters in this area.
Dr. Tompsett then made a second invention in which he described an electronically scanned all solid-state Infrared imager, where a pyro-electric layer forms the gate electrode for an integrated array of MOS transistors. This patent predated the invention of the CCD and the development of a viable MOS technology. Today, integrated solid-state un-cooled night-vision imagers using pyro-electric materials have higher performance when seeing in the dark and smoke, and are much smaller in size and use less power than the tube cameras.
With these 2 inventions Dr Tompsett cracked the size/speed/power bottleneck in thermal imaging. They created two enabling technologies that have led to products with continuing major military and commercial impact. Interestingly enough, DARPA in January 2011, more than 40 years later, revived his vision and put out an RFP for a mobile-phone sized night-vision solid-state imager with a life-cycle cost less than $500.
Dr. Tompsett was the driving force for the development of CCD imagers, as well as making significant contributions to the physics of CCDs, and exploring their application to memory and filters. As supervisor, he led the development of CCDs at Bell Laboratories and became a world leader. His group was the first to demonstrate CCD linear imagers, television imagers and cameras. Other contributors were W.J. Bertram, D.A.Sealer, who worked on linear imagers, and C.H.Sequin on area imagers. It was Tompsett with his assistant E.J.Zimany who created a series of CCD cameras. The first one yielded the first discrete-pixel CCD color image, which was of his wife and was featured on the cover of Electronics Magazine in January 1973, 3 years before a camera, that is erroneously claimed by Steven Sasson at Kodak as being the first. Dr Tompsett’s CCD work culminated in 1976 with the first full television-resolution CCD camera. One of the structures in his original patent is still the basis for the design of astronomical and nuclear event imagers. He wrote the book on CCDs (“Charge Transfer Devices”) with C.H.Sequin that was translated into Japanese and Russian.
With a background in imaging, Dr Tompsett knew that the real hurdle in digital imaging was to convert video signals with at least 8-bit precision, with low power, at video sampling rates (5Ms/s) and at low cost. He had always wanted to integrate this function onto the CCD imager itself. He introduced the concept of pipelining in a patent that he filed in 1977 for a CCD analog-to-digital converter (ADC). This concept was later demonstrated in an MOS circuit by B-S Song, M. Tompsett and K.Lakshmikumar, although others were also working on MOS pipeline structures at that time. However the real break-through was his invention of a 2 step recycling ADC, that folded the pipeline into one element. This concept was implemented by Dr Bang-Sup Song working with Dr Tompsett, and included error correction. This led to the very first viable silicon integrated video ADC that sold $25M in the first year of manufacture. This structure can now be found in all digital scanners, CCD cameras, mobile phones etc.
TheraManager, and started a medical software company, that has customers nationwide, and which he continues to run.
English Electric Valve Company
The English Electric Valve Company or EEV, is a specialist component and sub-system designer, developer and manufacturer. As e2v it has 6 European and US manufacturing facilities and its HQ in Essex, England....
, who later moved to Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
in America. He is best known as the inventor of Charge-Coupled Device
Charge-coupled device
A charge-coupled device is a device for the movement of electrical charge, usually from within the device to an area where the charge can be manipulated, for example conversion into a digital value. This is achieved by "shifting" the signals between stages within the device one at a time...
(CCD) Imagers used for imaging in devices such as digital cameras. Tompsett designed and built the first ever digital camera.
Dr. Tompsett blazed new trails in several technological areas. These have all been and continue to be of immense technical, commercial and social benefit, but because they were in different areas, he has not received the full recognition for his body of accomplishments. He has displayed technical leadership on the international stage, and is well-known particularly for his pioneering work on infrared imagers and CCD imagers. He has provided leadership in various fields and to the people who worked with him over the years. Pioneering inexpensive, compact, low power, high performance and low cost solid-state, infrared imagers, CCD imagers and digital cameras are all singular achievements. Dr. Tompsett has made significant individual and original contributions in several fields with significant patents and publications over an extended period of time.
Technical Accomplishments
Dr. Tompsett is distinguished by having made major singular technological contributions in several different specialty areas including Materials Science, Night Vision, Charge Coupled Devices and Integrated Circuit Design over a lifetime of work. His total contribution must therefore be aggregated. In general the people that know his work in one area do not know his contributions in the others. He is indeed responsible for significant invention, development and leadership of 6 major and socially beneficial enabling technologies all in use today. These include the in-situ monitoring of deposited epitaxial films, inventing un-cooled night-vision thermal imaging camera tubes and un-cooled solid-state thermal imagers, the invention and first development of CCD Imagers and CCD cameras, the development of MOS mixed analog-digital integrated systems, and the invention of the first integrated video analog-digital converter. All of the above demonstrate technical originality, versatility and persistence. He initiated the ideas himself without prompting from others, and in most cases developed them into products and production, thereby managing to create long standing contributions.Early Career
As a Ph.D student at Cambridge University in England, Dr. Tompsett built a Reflection High Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED) system with energy filtering and demonstrated its utility in studying the surfaces of materials and sub-atomic thickness thin films. While at EEV Ltd in England, he then built the first in-situ ultra-high-vacuum RHEED system to study in-situ the structures of deposited thin-films of lead oxide that were needed to make Plumbicon television camera-tubes. He initiated consulting with VG Systems Ltd to make a commercial system, the first of which was sold to IBM Labs and used by Dr. Leo Esaki to make the first hetero-junction high-frequency transistors. Systems of this type continue to be used routinely to monitor the growth of III-V and II-VI epitaxial layers by Molecular Beam Epitaxy for solid-state Light Emitting Diodes and lasers.Also while working with the EEV Company, Dr. Tompsett became aware of a mechanically scanned liquid nitrogen cooled single-pixel scanner for infra-red imaging that was a massive piece of apparatus, very slow and lacked resolution. He decided that electronic scanning and room-temperature operation should be his goal for thermal and night-vision applications and invented the un-cooled Pyroelectric Vidicon Camera Tube, that is patented solely in his name. This concept used electron beam scanning of a thin wafer of a pyroelectric material placed inside a vacuum tube. Small changes in temperature produced tiny changes in voltage across the wafer that the electron beam could detect. He published predictions of the performance that were subsequently obtained after a successful development. The tube won a British Queen’s Award in 1987. Night-vision thermal imaging cameras using these tubes have been deployed by the military and in civilian applications for firefighting, and search-and-rescue operations world-wide. Even 25 years later he was invited to write 2 book chapters in this area.
Dr. Tompsett then made a second invention in which he described an electronically scanned all solid-state Infrared imager, where a pyro-electric layer forms the gate electrode for an integrated array of MOS transistors. This patent predated the invention of the CCD and the development of a viable MOS technology. Today, integrated solid-state un-cooled night-vision imagers using pyro-electric materials have higher performance when seeing in the dark and smoke, and are much smaller in size and use less power than the tube cameras.
With these 2 inventions Dr Tompsett cracked the size/speed/power bottleneck in thermal imaging. They created two enabling technologies that have led to products with continuing major military and commercial impact. Interestingly enough, DARPA in January 2011, more than 40 years later, revived his vision and put out an RFP for a mobile-phone sized night-vision solid-state imager with a life-cycle cost less than $500.
Bell Laboratories
Dr. Tompsett moved to Bell Laboratories in 1969 with the explicit goal of developing solid-state visible imaging devices. His first contribution was to solve a major reliability issue on silicon vidicon camera tubes that he quickly diagnosed as being caused by 200V X-rays that caused a shift in the oxide “flatband-voltage”. This effect later became a major challenge in developing rad-hard MOS devices for use in space.Charge Coupled Device
When the charge coupled concept was co-invented by Boyle and Smith, Tompsett immediately designed the first charge coupled device (CCD). Smith wanted to keep the structure a pure MOS structure, but Tompsett insisted that a practical device needed an input and an output diode, so that is what he designed, and the device worked. Boyle and Smith received a patent for the very basic concept and cited memory as an application, without any mention in the claims about imaging. They had no insight into its application to imaging, and took no part in the invention, or subsequent development of CCDs or CCD imagers. It was Dr Tompsett who first invented the imaging application for CCDs and received the first patent for CCD imagers issued in his name alone. The citation for the award of the Nobel prize in physics in 2009 incorrectly attributed the imaging invention and work to Boyle and Smith and was a travesty.Dr. Tompsett was the driving force for the development of CCD imagers, as well as making significant contributions to the physics of CCDs, and exploring their application to memory and filters. As supervisor, he led the development of CCDs at Bell Laboratories and became a world leader. His group was the first to demonstrate CCD linear imagers, television imagers and cameras. Other contributors were W.J. Bertram, D.A.Sealer, who worked on linear imagers, and C.H.Sequin on area imagers. It was Tompsett with his assistant E.J.Zimany who created a series of CCD cameras. The first one yielded the first discrete-pixel CCD color image, which was of his wife and was featured on the cover of Electronics Magazine in January 1973, 3 years before a camera, that is erroneously claimed by Steven Sasson at Kodak as being the first. Dr Tompsett’s CCD work culminated in 1976 with the first full television-resolution CCD camera. One of the structures in his original patent is still the basis for the design of astronomical and nuclear event imagers. He wrote the book on CCDs (“Charge Transfer Devices”) with C.H.Sequin that was translated into Japanese and Russian.
Mixed Analog Digital Integrated Circuitry
When AT&T no longer had a need for imagers, after the demise of Picturephone, on his own initiative, Dr. Tompsett transferred his attention to another area closer to the needs of AT&T. He set out to reduce the size, power and cost of a then new piece of equipment, a data modem. He was aware of the work at UC Berkely on the design of an MOS amplifier (under Prof. Gray) and an MOS capacitor digital-to-analog converter structure (invented by Prof. Hodges et al). He had tried without success to make viable recursive filters using CCD structures, but had been intrigued for many years by a paper proposing switched capacitor filters. This concept was also being explored at Berkeley (under Prof. Brodersen). No one had taken the initiative to integrate all these aspects into a viable mixed analog digital integrated circuit. Dr. Tompsett saw the need and the potential, and initiated and led the development of an integrated circuit data-modem using MOS technology. System expertise and filter design was provided by Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Friend and their groups in the systems area, whose help he enlisted. The project almost foundered on the fact that the dynamic range required for analog data transmission was much higher than that of the circuits that could be designed with MOS. This led to his invention with E.J. Zimany of an Automatic Gain Control circuit in MOS for which they were granted a patent. This fortunately enabled the successful development of the chip, which was already being designed into systems for the compelling reasons of power, size and cost. The resulting solid-state data modem using MOS silicon switched capacitor filters was the first MOS mixed analog-digital integrated chip to go into manufacture anywhere. Solutions to the issues of noise, crosstalk and automated testing were all pioneered in this development and the chip continues to be used in low-speed secure modems. Many people contributed to the mixed analog-digital technology, which is now ubiquitous, but Dr Tompsett had a significant impact.With a background in imaging, Dr Tompsett knew that the real hurdle in digital imaging was to convert video signals with at least 8-bit precision, with low power, at video sampling rates (5Ms/s) and at low cost. He had always wanted to integrate this function onto the CCD imager itself. He introduced the concept of pipelining in a patent that he filed in 1977 for a CCD analog-to-digital converter (ADC). This concept was later demonstrated in an MOS circuit by B-S Song, M. Tompsett and K.Lakshmikumar, although others were also working on MOS pipeline structures at that time. However the real break-through was his invention of a 2 step recycling ADC, that folded the pipeline into one element. This concept was implemented by Dr Bang-Sup Song working with Dr Tompsett, and included error correction. This led to the very first viable silicon integrated video ADC that sold $25M in the first year of manufacture. This structure can now be found in all digital scanners, CCD cameras, mobile phones etc.
Other Inventions
Dr. Tompsett continued to work in the mixed analog-digital technology, which has now grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. For example he led the development of the first MOS single-chip telephone chip, reduced the cost of coder-decoder chips by more than an order of magnitude, and led the development of the low-frequency/high-frequency analog interface chip for the first Nokia GSM mobile phone.Nobel 2009 Controversy
The 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded with the citation: "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor" to Boyle and Smith. The Nobel citation reads explicitly on Tompsett’s invention of CCD Imagers disclosed in patent number 4,085,456. The Nobel Committee and others have overlooked the fact that this patent exists. This patent is in Dr. Tompsett's name alone and records the first invention of both linear and television types of CCD Imagers. Although Boyle and Smith have the patent for the CCD concept as applied to serial memory, there is no mention of imaging in that patent or any other patent of theirs. Therefore, the credit for that belongs to Tompsett, who had already made significant inventions of night-vision imagers before coming to Bell Laboratories. At Bell Laboratories, Tompsett not only invented CCD imagers, but made the first CCD, and developed the first CCD imagers and cameras. Neither Boyle nor Smith had any role in any of the CCD, CCD imager or CCD camera developments at Bell Laboratories. It is also unrecognized that Tompsett also invented the break-through video digitizing circuit that made CCD imagers and digital photography viable.Subsequent Work
After leaving Bell laboratories Dr Tompsett directed a 140 person Electron Device Research Division for the Army Research Laboratory for 6 years, and which also involved him in other government scientific activities.TheraManager, Practice Management and Electronic Medical Records Software
He then developed a highly reviewed all-in-one Practice Management and Electronic Medical Records software calledTheraManager, and started a medical software company, that has customers nationwide, and which he continues to run.
Awards and honors
- Tompsett was elected Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in 1987.
- Tompsett received the 2010 Pioneer Lifetime Award from the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame.
- Tompsett received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on engineers and inventors in 2011.