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Evaldo (Marty) Miranda

aul is a legendary person. I first heard about the legend who created many innovative circuits, then met the creative Paul with a passion for

circuits as if they had their own life story to tell which he wanted to discover and herald. An IEEE Fellow, a prolific inventor with over one hundred patents and billions of dollars in cumulative sales of

products he designed, co-designed, and contributed to with his patents or mentorship, Paul has made a tremen-dous impact to companies that he served as well as the industry itself as his circuit ideas have spilled into the minds of designers all over the world, most notably the Brokaw Bandgap voltage reference cell.

Born in the Midwest and educated in Tornado alley, it is a twisted fate that Paul has created the most steady and widely used reference circuit in the world which has sur-vived decades and seems destined to eternity. With a sharp and voracious mind focused on discovery and learning,

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2013.2266073

Date of publication: 16 August 2013

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The Great Adrian Paul Brokaw

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Paul held up to many traditional values such as dedication, hard work and a love for story-telling, but he also added humor, specially from Scott Adams and Greg Larson. When working on a new circuit or idea, Paul would explain it as if it had a life of its own with a story to tell and a life to carry on, possibly in a funny way.

One of Paul’s best known axioms is that “the silicon will give the answer to the question you didn’t ask”. Cre-ating a circuit involves understand-ing its many aspects and how it truly works beyond the way one may think it should. To help visualize thermal and shot noise, Paul would use yellow ducks bopping randomly in a pristine pond to illustrate thermal noise fol-lowed by more ducks flowing down a river and launching over a waterfall to exemplify shot noise. His memos and talks were punctuated with technical details and explanations immersed with humor into titles such as “Nice Little Amplifier”, “Negative Current Limits – What is the beef?”, “A Few New Tricks From an Old Dog”, “Sheer-luck Ohms and the 33dB Solution”, and the “X-File”. While presenting, he would start with a light joke and then build it to a crescendo with turns and twists along the way pointing out crit-ical details and some traps that could doom the circuit to failure while lead-ing the audience to the final point. And there were the poetic, tongue-and-cheek moments of riddles such as “Chip busters”, “Vbe (with apolo-gies to Doo Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Doo)” and finally the appearance of the “Beta Blocker Blues”.

I met Paul around 1990 when ADI acquired Precision Monolithics Inc (PMI). Paul was well known for his extensive work in analog circuits and had a reputation for being tough in design reviews. Paul would dissect the circuits in many different ways

and ask poignant questions. He didn’t expect someone to know the answers to all the questions but he would expect the presenter to have explored critical points and understood its cause-effect links because the “sili-con will give the answer to the ques-tion …”. Despite that reputation, Paul would have his office door open to anyone who had a question or a long circuit discussion. Once people got to know Paul, they would see past the tough inquisitor that attacked every circuit in sight as if they had something to hide. They would see his endearing and humorous ability to educate and expand one’s view of their own questions. It is often said that if you go to Paul with one ques-tion, you would return with ten new questions as he opens one’s eyes and mind to the surrounding issues with one thought answered while opening many more opportunities.

We worked on circuits late into the night and would go for a mid-night pizza. Still, Paul would wake up around 5 AM the next morning for his regular daily swim. In those late night pizza dinners, Paul mentioned many aspects of his childhood, col-lege years, work in the Air Force and later making instruments to be launched into space as part of NASA programs, some still in orbit. He also worked as a TV salesman. Back then, they would drive around neighbor-hoods with TVs on the back of a truck and leave them in people’s home on a trial basis. But the most interest-ing one was that somehow two blind gentlemen wanted to buy a TV, and they convinced Paul to sell it to them.

In a paper he presented at ISSCC, Paul joked that his paper had more organizational block diagrams then transistors. First, he deliberately drew the circuit with block dia-grams driven by the positive supply,

VP, at the top which was placed pur-posely far away from ground level. The next slide had only transistors that accomplished all the functions described in the previous block dia-gram headed by the VP but with less transistors then functional blocks. He got a chuckle out of the audience that clearly understood the humor. At the end of the presentation, his longtime friend Bob Pease came to the microphone and put him on the spot. With a stern voice, Bob announced that transistors labeled Q1, Q2, Q3, etc. had been patented by National Semiconductor. The large conference room was tensely quiet. Paul with a bit of a smile, said that Analog Devices had prior art on using transistors labeled Q1, Q2 and Q3, and the audience broke into a loud laugh as if Paul had diverted Bob’s question with a simple joke about the labeling of the transistors as opposed to the configuration in which they were connected.

A sharp mind with devious incli-nations to learn and enlighten life, Paul is well-known for breakthrough concepts and ideas, passionately committed to his art of circuit design. At the same time, Paul has touched the career of many engineers leaving a mark of dedication and excellence. His accomplishments and contribu-tions are a historical legacy recorded in textbooks and will continue to proliferate and improve products in many years to come.

About the AuthorEvaldo (Marty) Miranda is a Sr Principal Design Engineer at Ana-log Devices Inc. He joined ADI in 1991 after the acquisition of Precision Monolithics Inc. Marty has worked in various technical and management positions at ADI releasing more than 30 products for applications in ana-log-mixed signal, power and thermal management with 13 patents granted and 1 pending. He received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from the Univer-sity of Kansas while on scholarships from the IIE and OAS (Organization of American States).

Paul is well-known for breakthrough concepts and ideas, passionately committed to his art of circuit design.