Richard Francis Lyon

Richard Francis Lyon (born 1952), is an American inventor,scientist, and engineer, noted for having invented the optical mouse.He has worked in many aspects of signal processing and was a co-founder of Foveon Inc.,a digital camera and image sensor company.

Life

Lyon grew up in El Paso, Texas, one of nine children.He received a B.S. from Caltech in 1974and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1975.

Lyon has worked at a number of Silicon Valley companies,including Stanford Telecommunications, Xerox, Schlumberger, Apple, Foveon, and Google.

Inventions

In 1981, Lyon built the first optical mouse, at Xerox [Richard F. Lyon, "The Optical Mouse, and an Architectural Methodologyfor Smart Digital Sensors", Invited Paper, "CMU Conference on VLSI Structuresand Computations", Pittsburgh (Kung, Sproull, and Steele, editors), ComputerScience Press, October 1981.] for which he holds two U.S. patents, now expired [US Patent 4,521,772: Lyon, "Cursor Control Device", Jun.4, 1985.] [US Patent 4,521,773: Lyon, "Imaging Array", Jun.4, 1985.] .

He also did pioneering work in these areas:
* GPS: Lyon designed early Global Positioning System test transmitters. [Richard F. Lyon and James J. Spilker, Jr., "Multisatellite Signal Simulators for the Global Positioning System",National Telecommunications conference, Dallas, Texas, December, 1976.]
* Ethernet hardware: Lyon invented the first single-chip ethernet device. [US patent 4,494,021:Bell, Lyon, and Borriello, "Self-calibrated Clock and TimingSignal Generator for MOS/VLSI Circuitry", Jan, 15, 1985.] [US patent 4,513,427:Borriello, Lyon, and Bell, "Data and Clock Recovery System for Data Communication Controller", Apr. 23, 1985.]
* Digital memory: Lyon did early work on static CMOS memory and designed the most efficient large CMOS address decoder. [US Patent 4,796,227: Lyon and Schediwy, "Computer Memory System", Jan. 3, 1989.] [cite book | title = Logical Effort: Designing Fast CMOS Circuits | author = Ivan Sutherland, Bob Sproull, and David Harris | url = http://books.google.com/books?id=hGVWzQmQYP0C&pg=PA196&dq=lyon+intitle:logical+intitle:effort&ei=habZRtGvFoKmowKO3eySCw&sig=KqMoFo5Bf08JfHlTnidc0EAITB0 | year = 1999 | isbn = 1558605576 | publisher = Morgan Kaufmann ]
* Auditory processing: Lyon invented a cochlear model that is used as the basis of much auditory research today. [Richard F. Lyon, "A Computational Model of Filtering, Detection, and Compression in the Cochlea", "Proceedings IEEE International Conference onAcoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing", Paris, May 1982.]
* Digital color photography: Lyon invented optical and integrated-circuit techniques that allow digital cameras to be denser and more accurate. [US Patent 6,078,429:Lyon, "Color separating prism having violet light component in red channel" June 20, 2000.]

Miscellaneous

* Lyon was elected to be an IEEE Fellow in 2003 "for contributions to VLSI signal processing, models of hearing, handwriting recognition, and electronic color photography" [cite web | url = http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/fellows/2000/2003_l-z.html | title = IEEE Fellows for 2003] .
* In 2005, Lyon was awarded the "Progress Medal" of the Royal Photographic Society, along with Carver Mead and Richard Merrill of Foveon, for the development of the Foveon X3 sensor [cite web| url = http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/news/articles/story_5015.html | title = Royal Photographic Society Award for Foveon sensor | author = Mark Peters | date = November 6th 2005] .
* Lyon is one of the persons featured in George Gilder's book "The Silicon Eye".
* Lyon is married to Margaret Asprey; they have two children.

References

External links

* [http://www.dicklyon.com Lyon's technical home page]
* [http://www.svpal.org/~dickel/OK/OtisKing.html Lyon's Otis King Patent Calculator page]