About Robert H. Dennard
Robert Heath Dennard (September 5, 1932 – April 23, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. == Biography == Dennard was born in Terrell, Texas. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, in 1954 and 1956, respectively. He earned a Ph.D. from Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1958. His professional career was spent as a researcher for International Business Machines. Single Transistor DRAM At the time of the invention, Dennard and his colleagues were fixated on a bulky, costly memory system that used a series of six transistors to store just 1 bit of data. One night while lying on the couch and pondering a presentation given by his peers earlier in the day, he had a notion: What if he could store a bit of information in a single transistor? The insight was the catalyst for DRAM — Dennard’s most important innovation. In 1966 he invented the one transistor memory cell consisting of a transistor and a capacitor for which a patent was issued in 1968. It became the basis for today's dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and almost all other memory types such as SRAM and FLASH memory.
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