Yannis Tsividis' Early Contributions to MOS Filters

In the 1970s, when the bipolar transistor was the undisputed king of analog integrated circuits (ICs), most electrical engineers regarded the MOS transistor as a second-rate device for ICs: it was a good switch, but a mediocre amplifier. As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, under the supervision of Paul Gray, Yannis Tsividis had a very different vision. He saw the MOS transistor as the future star for mixed-signal ICs and was excited to prove to the world he was right. The opening gambit was his thesis work demonstrating the first fully-integrated MOS opamp. This single achievement propelled him to the top of his generation of researchers and earned him a Berkeley PhD degree, a teaching appointment at Columbia University and a consulting position at Bell Laboratories.