Arizona Daily Star:
Tom Brown and his partner, Page Burr, really did start their company in Brown’s 600-square-foot garage in 1956. It grew into a high-tech electronics firm that employed 1,200 people and sold its products worldwide.
In August 2000, it was bought by Texas Instruments for stock valued at $7.6 billion.
Brown and his company invented a variety of micro-electronic parts that helped transform us from an analog world to a digital one.
The first commercial operational amplifier (op-amp) was developed by Brown himself in 1958 and the first monolithic 16-bit digital-to-analog converter for digital audio was developed by a Burr-Brown team in 1981. That invention led to development of digital CDs.
Burr left the company in 1958, but Brown led it for 44 years.
Brown, who died in 2002, continues to foster science in Arizona through the Thomas R. Brown Foundation.
Photo by Nokero