Albert Vinal – Visionary Engineer, Mathematician and Scientist

• Born in 1928, Albert (Al) Vinal was drafted into the Army Signal Corp where he earned a Distinguished Service Award for his role in design and extension of military radar capabilities.  He graduated from MIT in 1954 with a BSEE and later earned a MSEE from Syracuse University.
  
  
• In 1956, Al joined IBM to work on control systems and various memory technologies: He earned an Outstanding Invention Award for fundamental work in solid state memories.  As IBM’s designate, Al then worked on co-development of high speed memory technologies with Fairchild Semiconductor’s Robert Noyce, who ultimately co-founded Intel.  Al later moved to Research Triangle Park to continue earlier work on twin track head devices for disk drives, as well as to apply his talents to the emerging bar-code scanner technologies.  Upon retiring from IBM in 1987, he had collected over 70 patents.
  
  
• Al Vinal founded Thunderbird Technologies in 1989 as Chairman and Chief Scientist. He authored 29 patents on fundamental design techniques for high-speed memories and high-performance transistor design.  Al’s high-speed memory designs include fundamental improvements to circuit and associated transistor design, and his inventions have become common in high-speed logic circuits. Al Vinal passed away in 1994: His work at Thunderbird Technologies continues today under the steady hand of, Dr. Drew Vinal, his son. The team is increasingly focused on research and development of Fermi-FET® transistors, a patented architecture suitable for all digital and analog/mixed-signal bulk silicon processes. THUNDERBIRD® and Fermi-FET® are registered trademarks of Thunderbird Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.”