Timothy C. May

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For the cricket player, see Tim May

Tim May was an engineer and chief scientist at Intel at an early and crucial point in that company's history. He is retired as of 2003.

As an engineer, he is most noted for having solved the Alpha Particle Problem, which was affecting the reliability of integrated circuits as device features reached a critical size where a single alpha particle could change the state of a stored value and cause a single event upset. May realized that the ceramic packaging which Intel was using was made from clay which was very slightly radioactive. Intel solved the issue by adopting plastic packaging for their products.

Today, he is probably best known for his prolific posts to Usenet and related forums, where he has participated since the early days of the medium. While he has written many information-rich articles on subjects technical and mundane, some of his most memorable posts have been those where he espouses his unique version of libertarianism.

He authored an essay, "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy," that was included in a reprint of Vernor Vinge's True Names. In 2001, his work was published in the book Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (ISBN 0-262-62151-7). May co-authored the 1981 W. R. G. Baker Prize Award winning paper "Alpha Particle Induced Soft Errors in Dynamic Memories," published in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS on Electron Devices in January 1979 with Murray H. Woods.[1]