Dr. David A. Thompson

Retired Director, Advanced Magnetic Recording Laboratory at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, He received his B.S. degree in 1962, M.S. degree in 1963, and his Ph.D. degree in 1966, all in Electrical Engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, PA, He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1988. He became an IBM Fellow in 1980, and in 1992 he received the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, "for pioneering work in miniature magnetic devices for data storage?" In 1993 he was awarded the Inventor of the Year award by the New York State Patent, Trademark and Copyright Law Association, Inc., for his contributions to magnetic data storage technology. He was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame in 1996 for his pioneering in the design and development of thin film magnetic head technology for use in high-density data storage. He and Dr. Lubomyr Romankiw were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in a ceremony on May 2, 2012. They were honored for their invention of a technique that produced the first practical and manufacturable thin film magnetic head, which increased the density of data stored on magnetic disks which enabled magnetic disk storage devices to be produced smaller and less expensively than previously possible. They patented their thin film inductive transducer invention (U.S. Patent #4,295,173), and this technique, along with two other patented inventions (#3,921,217 and #3,908,194) and a new through mask electroplating process and tools, enabled an industry estimated to generate more than $35 billion in annual sales. It also has facilitated very small and sensitive magnetic disk storage devices able to store increasingly greater amounts of information. Today, a disk drive in a typical desktop computer can store up to 400 gigabytes (or 400 billion bytes) of data. He holds over 20 patents and has published over 30 scientific papers.