Dennard began his career in an era when technicians fed punchcards into computers so big that they filled rooms and required their own air conditioning systems.
Dennard's revolutionary achievement was to reduce RAM to a memory cell with only a single transistor.
RobertDennard's invention of one-transistor dynamic RAM (DRAM) was a core development in the launch of today's computer industry, setting the stage for development of increasingly dense and cost-effective memory that continues even today at the heart of every succeeding generation of computers.
Ironically, Dennard says the inspiration for his development of the single-transistor DRAM emanated from a presentation by in-house competitors in the Research division at a 1966 conference "that really discouraged me" because "they were talking about all the great things they were doing" with thin-film magnetic memory.
RobertDennard was a young Texas-bred scientist (with a Ph.D. from Carnegie Institute of Technology) who thought he knew where he was headed when he arrived at IBM in 1958.
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