page_title: James R. Biard
section_title: The MOS ROM
hierarchical_section_title: James R. Biard / Career / Texas Instruments / The MOS ROM
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of a MOS Binary-to-Decimal Decoder circuit designed by Bob Biard and Robert Crawford at Texas Instruments Inc. Within the matrices, aluminum leads over the oxide surface cross at right angles to the diffused regions.
context_page_description: James R. "Bob" Biard is an American electrical engineer and inventor who holds 73 U.S. patents. Some of his more significant patents include the first infrared light-emitting diode, the optical isolator, Schottky clamped logic circuits, silicon Metal Oxide Semiconductor Read Only Memory, a low bulk leakage current avalanche photodetector, and fiber-optic data links. He has been on the staff of Texas A&M University as an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering since 1980.
context_section_description: In 1964, TI's Opto branch developed a monolithic visible LED element consisting of a 3x5 array of red LEDs capable of displaying the numbers 0-9. The device was lacking a means of driving the array, so Dr. Biard and Bob Crawford (from the MOS branch) designed a P-channel MOS circuit using binary coded decimal inputs to turn on the appropriate 15 output lines. The MOS circuit worked on the first pass and was implemented into a simulated cockpit altimeter. TI displayed the altimeter in a booth at a New York IEEE show and convention. Biard and Crawford filed a patent for their device (U.S. Patent US3541543) on July 25, 1966, referred to as the "Binary Decoder". This was the first time a Read Only Memory had been made using MOS transistors. By the late 1970s, MOS ROM devices had become the most common example of nonvolatile memory used to provide the storage of fixed programs in digital equipment such as calculators and microprocessor systems.
  In 1986, TI filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) charging 19 different firms with violating US tariff laws by importing 256K and 64K dynamic RAM devices, which infringed numerous TI patents including US Patent 3,541,543. Per the request of Texas Instruments, Dr. Biard testified before the ITC in Washington D.C.; however, the judge determined that the firms did not violate TI's patent rights.
caption: MOS Binary-to-Decimal Decoder
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