Henry John Orchard (May 7, 1922 – June 23, 2004) was a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at the
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and an authority on filter design and network theory. He died June 23 of 2004 at his home in
Santa Monica of
respiratory failure. He was 82.
In a monumental breakthrough publication (Electronics Letters, 1966), he explained the "secret" behind the low passband sensitivity of doubly loaded reactance two-ports and showed how to design active two-ports that retain this key attribute. Among Professor Orchard's key contributions was the development of a systematic process for the
computer-aided design
Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...
of filters. During the early years of computer-aided filter design, when the synthesis of a single circuit required several days of multiple-precision computation, his method had an important beneficial effect. He was instrumental in introducing into
switched capacitor A switched capacitor (SC) is an electronic circuit that implements a function by moving charges into and out of capacitors when electronic switches are opened and closed. Usually, non-overlapping clock signals are used to control the switches, so ...
filter design the bilinear s-z mapping, previously used solely in digital filter design, and in developing a methodology that allowed the use of arbitrary active-RC models for switched-capacitor filter syntheses.
External links
About Professor Orchard
{{DEFAULTSORT:Orchard, Henry John
2004 deaths
American electrical engineers
Fellows of the IEEE
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty
1922 births
20th-century American engineers