Lee Boysel (December 31, 1938 – April 25, 2021) was an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur. While at

Fairchild Semiconductor Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of int ...

, he developed four-phase logic and built the first

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

with over 100

logic gate A logic gate is an idealized or physical device implementing a Boolean function, a logical operation performed on one or more binary inputs that produces a single binary output. Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, ...

s, and designed the Fairchild 3800 / 3804 8-bit ALUs. Boysel designed the first microprocessor used in a commercial product, the Four-Phase Systems AL1. He founded Four-Phase Systems to commercialize the technology, and sold the company to Motorola in 1981. Boysel was a graduate of the University of Michigan.

Patent litigation with Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments claimed to have patented the microprocessor, and Lee Boysel in response assembled a system in which a single 8-bit AL1 was used as part of a courtroom demonstration computer system, together with ROM, RAM and an input-output device.

References

American electronics engineers University of Michigan College of Engineering alumni 1938 births 2021 deaths {{US-electrical-engineer-stub