Austin, Texas ? Bernard V. Vonderschmitt, who co-founded Xilinx Inc. at the age of 60 and helped pioneer the fabless semiconductor industry "because I didn't have any money to build a factory," died Wednesday in his hometown of Jasper, Ind. He was 80.
Vonderschmitt had moved back to Jasper last year after retiring as chairman of the board of Xilinx, where he remained chairman emeritus.
Trained as an electrical engineer, Vonderschmitt worked for 34 years at RCA Corp., where he was picked by its legendary leader, David Sarnoff, to head the development of color television in 1953. The NTSC transmission standard developed by Vonderschmitt's team over 18 months remains in use today.
He also led the development of CMOS technology at RCA, and was instrumental in licensing CMOS to research groups in Japan and Taiwan. Those contacts served Xilinx well in the mid-1980s, several years before the dedicated foundry business took hold, allowing Xilinx to tap Seiko-Epson as its initial foundry.
"He was a very unique person," said Wim Roelandts, who took over from Vonderschmitt as CEO of Xilinx in January 1996. Unlike many of today's spotlight-seeking CEOs, Roelandts said, Vonderschmitt was "the total opposite. He was a very unassuming man, who deflected praise and always said the credit belonged to other people. Because of that I don't think he gets the credit he deserves. He was one of the giants, one of the last survivors of the early days of high technology."
The youngest of 10 children, Vonderschmitt grew up on an Indiana corn farm and was educated in a one-room schoolhouse and then a small high school. He went on to earn a BSEE degree in 1944 from what is now the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Ind., where he was awarded the Hemingway Medal for top scholastic honors. He served in the United States Navy during World War II and then went to work for RCA.
In a video interview conducted by Rob Walker for the Silicon Genesis project (silicongenesis.stanford.edu) Vonderschmitt recalled how Sarnoff and RCA were in competition with CBS, which had developed a mechanical approach to color television that involved a rotating wheel. After the FCC approved the CBS method, Sarnoff convinced regulators to give him time to develop an electronically based approach, and asked Vonderschmitt to lead the effort.
"I would put Sarnoff in the category of visionary," Vonderschmitt told Walker. The team had only 6 MHz of bandwidth approved by the FCC to work with, but Sarnoff imposed no limits on the budget. "Everybody worked as hard as they could, and that was the beginning of color television," Vonderschmitt recalled.
After witnessing various business failures at RCA ? first in color televisions, then mainframe computers and video disks ? Vonderschmitt was chosen to run the company's solid-state division from 1972 to 1979. There he learned how important sustained capital investment was to a company's success.
"We couldn't get capital," he said in the Silicon Genesis interview. "We couldn't obtain capital to implement some of the process technologies that developed at David Sarnoff Research Labs. We also were unable to expand the business from a marketing and sales standpoint, as we knew we had to do."
At age 55, he left RCA to earn an MBA from Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., and then joined Zilog Inc., where he was responsible for microprocessors, including efforts to license the 8000 architecture. Vonderschmitt recalled how Zilog, then owned by Exxon, had some of the same management problems as RCA, including a lack of investment.
Watching the early development of gate arrays, Vonderschmitt teamed up with the inventor of the field-programmable gate array, Ross Freeman, and a marketing expert, Jim Barnett, to found Xilinx in 1984. He served as its first president and, from 1994-96, chief executive officer.
At Xilinx Vonderschmitt built on a relationship forged a decade earlier, when he was part of the team that licensed RCA's low-power CMOS technology to Seiko-Epson for use in the Japanese company's digital watches. There he met a device-engineering manager, Saburo Kusama, who is now the president of Epson Corp.
Vonderschmitt and Kusama reached a deal in 1984 that presaged the rise of the dedicated foundry business several years later. Xilinx would provide some capital and its specialty process to Seiko-Epson, and Seiko-Epson would provide wafers ? a relationship that continues to this day, even though Xilinx's main foundry is now UMC Corp.
"Bernie had the ability to really connect with people one on one, much more so than in front of a big audience," said Dennis Segers, the president of Matrix Semiconductor Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.), who worked at Xilinx for eight years and became a board member. "He understood that partnerships, such as the one he established with Seiko-Epson, were between individuals. For a long time, the agreement between Xilinx and Seiko-Epson was no more than two pages of paper, because it was between Bernie and Kusama-san."
Vonderschmitt married a Japanese woman, the sister of an engineering professor in Japan. He was, Roelandts said, "deeply impacted by Japanese culture, an influence that continues today at Xilinx in terms of the [Japanese-inspired] attitudes toward layoffs and building consensus."
He also believed in telling the truth. Ron Wilson, semiconductor editor at EE Times, recalls an interview some years ago with a Xilinx product-marketing manager who was reluctant to talk about power consumption and density issues ? two weak points of the early FPGAs.
After Wilson had made "about two attempts to find out what the actual number of logic cells in the device was, Bernie turned to the product manager, very cross, and said, 'just answer the question!' That was Bernie," Wilson recalled.
Roelandts described Vonderschmitt as a deeply religious man. He also was a charitable one, donating a building to Rose Polytechnic and contributing heavily to a children's shelter located near Xilinx headquarters in Silicon Valley, and to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
Roelandts said Vonderschmitt developed a detailed database of high-technology startups in Silicon Valley and spent countless hours advising young entrepreneurs, including people leaving Xilinx.
"He never talked about his own technical accomplishments," said Segers of Matrix. "He was a person who put people first, and corporate strategies and business arrangements were definitely second."
Private funeral services were planned for late last week; Xilinx said that public memorial services will follow. Vonderschmitt is survived by his wife, Theresa; a brother, Ralph; and two sisters, Dolores and Genny.