Mr. William (Bill) David Mensch, Jr.,

An American engineer born in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, is the founder, chairman and CEO of the Western Design Center (WDC) of Mesa, Arizona. He graduated with an associate's degree from Temple University in 1966, and received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1971. He has taught classes at Arizona State University, including courses on system-on-a-chip (SoC) IC design. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. Before founding the Western Design Center in 1978, he held design engineering and management positions at Philco-Ford, Motorola, MOS Technology and Integrated Circuit Engineering. A central person in the creation of the Motorola 6800 and MOS Technology 6502 families of microprocessor chips, he has later worked primarily on extending and expanding the latter architecture at the Western Design Center. The Western Design Center produces a hobbyist computer system called the Mensch Computer, based on the 65816 microprocessor and running the Mensch Works suite of software. He was the sole IC design engineer of the 6820/21 PIA, which was the first peripheral IC to have bit-programmable I/O. Along with three other engineers at MOS Technology, He holds the patent on the decimal correct circuitry on the 6502 CPU. He was responsible for the basic circuit design, transistor sizing, instruction decode logic (wishing to minimize the number of levels of logic so as to achieve higher speed operation), oscillator design and buffer design. His first major effort along with his team at the Western Design Center was the development of the WDC 65C02, a bug-fixed version of the 6502 CPU implemented in CMOS circuit technology (the original 6502 was made in NMOS). Later, a fully compatible, 16-bit extension of the 6502 family, called the 65816, was to become an important product of the company. (Further information on related products is available in the article about WDC.) The Mensch Computer is a computer system based on the WDC 65C265 microcontroller (which implements both the 16-bit instruction set of the W65C816/65816 microprocessor, as well as the 8-bit instruction set of the 6502 microprocessor) and produced by the Western Design Center. In 2004 he was inducted in the Computer Hall of Fame (hosted by the San Diego Computer Museum, part of the San Diego State University Library), and in 2005 was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Arizona's College of Engineering. As of 2006, he is still involved with design engineering at WDC in addition to his work as CEO. He has written the upcoming Terbium processor family's data sheets and will be making the major RTL design decisions associated with that processor architecture.