Richard Francis Lyon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Richard F. Lyon.
Richard Francis Lyon (born 1952), is an American inventor, scientist, and engineer, noted for having invented the optical mouse. He has worked in many aspects of signal processing and was a co-founder of Foveon Inc., a digital camera and image sensor company.
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[edit] Life
Lyon grew up in El Paso, Texas, one of nine children. He received a B.S. from Caltech in 1974 and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1975.
Lyon has worked at a number of Silicon Valley companies, including Stanford Telecommunications, Xerox, Schlumberger, Apple, and Foveon.
[edit] Inventions
In 1981, Lyon built the first optical mouse, at Xerox [1] for which he holds two U.S. patents, now expired [2] [3].
He also did pioneering work in these areas:
- GPS: Lyon designed early Global Positioning System test transmitters.[4]
- Ethernet hardware: Lyon invented the first single-chip ethernet device.[5][6]
- Digital memory: Lyon did early work on static CMOS memory and designed the most efficient large CMOS address decoder.[7]
- Auditory processing: Lyon invented a cochlear model that is used as the basis of much auditory research today.[8]
- Digital color photography: Lyon invented optical and integrated-circuit techniques that allow digital cameras to be denser and more accurate.[9]
[edit] Miscellaneous
- Lyon was elected to be an IEEE Fellow in 2003 "for contributions to VLSI signal processing, models of hearing, handwriting recognition, and electronic color photography"[10].
- In 2005, Lyon was awarded the "Progress Medal" of the Royal Photographic Society, along with Carver Mead and Richard Merrill of Foveon, for the development of the Foveon X3 sensor[11].
- Lyon is one of the persons featured in George Gilder's book The Silicon Eye.
- Lyon is married to Margaret Asprey; they have two children.
[edit] References
- ^ Richard F. Lyon, "The Optical Mouse, and an Architectural Methodology for Smart Digital Sensors", Invited Paper, CMU Conference on VLSI Structures and Computations, Pittsburgh (Kung, Sproull, and Steele, editors), Computer Science Press, October 1981.
- ^ US Patent 4,521,772: Lyon, "Cursor Control Device", Jun.4, 1985.
- ^ US Patent 4,521,773: Lyon, "Imaging Array", Jun.4, 1985.
- ^ Richard F. Lyon and James J. Spilker, Jr., "Multisatellite Signal Simulators for the Global Positioning System", National Telecommunications conference, Dallas, Texas, December, 1976.
- ^ US patent 4,494,021: Bell, Lyon, and Borriello, "Self-calibrated Clock and Timing Signal Generator for MOS/VLSI Circuitry", Jan, 15, 1985.
- ^ US patent 4,513,427: Borriello, Lyon, and Bell, "Data and Clock Recovery System for Data Communication Controller", Apr. 23, 1985.
- ^ US Patent 4,796,227: Lyon and Schediwy, "Computer Memory System", Jan. 3, 1989.
- ^ Richard F. Lyon, "A Computational Model of Filtering, Detection, and Compression in the Cochlea", Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Paris, May 1982.
- ^ US Patent 6,078,429: Lyon, "Color separating prism having violet light component in red channel" June 20, 2000.
- ^ IEEE Fellows for 2003.
- ^ Mark Peters (November 6th 2005). Royal Photographic Society Award for Foveon sensor.
