Founder Experience Summary.

IC Design Services was founded in 1984 as a contract linear integrated circuit design company. The president of IC Design Services is Paul Tomlinson. After receiving a B.S.E.E and M.S.E.E from Texas Tech University where he had the honor of studying under Dr William Portnoy, a student of John Bardeen, Paul joined Texas Instruments as a product engineer specializing in communication IC's. These devices contained a mix of pure analog and logic circuits and are considered among first mixed signal Integrated Circuits. Next, Mr Tomlinson joined the Quinco Consulting as a research engineer working on computer applications to Psychology. After several years developing man-machine interface hardware and real time data acquisition/control software, he joined Power Monolithics, a power management start-up company, as a design engineer. At PMI he helped build the company revenue from zero to 35 million USD/yr and designed many leading edge switching regulator products including the first 8 Ampere fully integrated monolithic switching regulator. He resigned from PMI in 1984 as manager of the design, product, and applications engineering groups to start IC Design Services, a product development company specializing in analog integrated circuits.

During the 1980's IC Design Services focused on the rapidly growing market for computer mass storage systems and designed products such as low noise thin film pre-amplifiers and Endec's for customers such as Texas Instruments, Western Digital, and Cherry Semiconductor. A technology/marketing study preformed for one of our customers indicated that digital signal processing based servo technology would drive mass storage capacity and the company began developing CMOS based "servo" integrated circuits for Texas Instruments that were used by Companies such as Quantum, Maxtor, and Seagate. IC Design participated in the development of wafer process technology, circuit design strategies, and physical layout rules for CMOS based power integrated circuits that enabled products incorporating reference systems, A/D, D/A, switched capacitor signal processing, switching regulators, and motor control circuits in a Multi-Watt high junction temperature environment... aka the power mixed signal IC.

Beginning in the late 1990's semiconductor feature size reduction and the wireless revolution produced some analog centric integrated circuits with more that a million components and design specifications over 200 pages. Time to market and short product life cycles created demand for statistical design methodologies and production release yields within 7% of defect limited digital IC's. IC Design expanded into "design to cost" system partitioning and development of VerilogA models for Top down development approaches.

Mr. Tomlinson has published papers in the areas of switching regulator design and computer applications to psychology. He has received three Patents in the areas of Hard Disk Drive Electronics, Induction Motor Control,and CMOS power Circuits.