Harry L. Tredennick is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 manager, inventor, VLSI design engineer and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 who was involved in the development for Motorola's MC68000

Motorola 68000

The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...

 and for IBM's Micro/370 microprocessors. Tredennick was named a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to microprocessor design.

Education

Tredennick holds BSEE and MSEE degrees from Texas Tech University

Texas Tech University

Texas Tech University, often referred to as Texas Tech or TTU, is a public research university in Lubbock, Texas, United States. Established on February 10, 1923, and originally known as Texas Technological College, it is the leading institution of the Texas Tech University System and has the...

, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas in Austin.

Career

From 1977 to 1979, he was a Senior Design Engineer at Motorola

Motorola

Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...

, where he specified and designed the microcode and the controller core of the MC68000

Motorola 68000

The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor...

 microprocessor, one of the first microprocessors designed by structured VLSI design.

From 1979 to 1987, Tredennick worked on microcode and logic design for the IBM Micro/370 microprocessor at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Thomas J. Watson Research Center

The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM Research Division.The center is on three sites, with the main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles north of New York City, a building in Hawthorne, New York, and offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.- Overview :The...

. While at IBM, in 1983/1984 he took sabbatical leave to teach computer organization, chip design, and the Flowchart Method at UC Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

.

In 1986, Tredennick co-founded NexGen

NexGen

NexGen was a private semiconductor company that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD in 1996.Like competitor Cyrix, NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other companies for production...

 and was director of product development there in 1987-1988. NexGen later developed the Nx686 microprocessor which became the AMD K6

AMD K6

The K6 microprocessor was launched by AMD in 1997. The main advantage of this particular microprocessor is that it was designed to fit into existing desktop designs for Pentium branded CPUs. It was marketed as a product which could perform as well as its Intel Pentium II equivalent but at a...

 when the company was acquired by AMD in 1996.

As Chief Scientist of Altera

Altera

Altera Corporation is a Silicon Valley manufacturer of PLDs . The company offered its first programmable logic device in 1984. PLDs can be reprogrammed during the design cycle as well as in the field to perform multiple functions, and they support a fairly fast design process...

 Corporation from 1993 to 1995 he began advocating Reconfigurable Computing

Reconfigurable computing

Reconfigurable computing is a computer architecture combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing fabrics like field-programmable gate arrays...

 as an essential paradigm shift in computer science, a topic he has since spoken and published on extensively.

Since 1988, his own Tredennick, Inc. has been analyzing microprocessor industry trends and consulting on VLSI CPU design and reconfigurable computing. Tredennick is an advisor and investor in numerous pre-IPO startups and a member of technical advisory boards for numerous companies. Most recently he joined the board of Patriot Scientific

Patriot Scientific Corporation

Patriot Scientific Corporation refers to itself an "Intellectual Property licensing company." Founded in 1992, it is a Delaware corporation based in Carlsbad, California and is one of the publicly traded companies started by inventor Elwood "Woody" Norris...

.

In parallel to his professional career, Tredennick served as a pilot with the U.S. Air Force (active, reserve, and National Guard) from 1970–1984, attaining the rank of Major, as Aerospace Engineering Duty Officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1986-2000 at the rank of Captain, and on the Army Science Board

Army Science Board

The Army Science Board is a Federal Advisory Committee organized under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It is the Department of the Army senior scientific advisory body that was chartered in 1977 to replace the Army Scientific Advisory Panel...

from 1994–2001 and 2006 to present.

Publications

Tredennick has written several books and numerous articles in professional and trade magazines; inter alia, as a Contributing Editor of Microprocessor Report, and on the Editorial Advisory Boards for Microprocessors and Microsystems, for Embedded Developer's Journal, and IEEE Spectrum, as well as editing the Gilder Technology Report on leading-edge components. He has often appeared as panelist and keynote speaker on international conferences.

Tredennick holds nine U.S. patents on subjects ranging from microprocessors to reconfigurable computing.

Selected publications

• N. Tredennick: "Microprocessor Logic Design: The Flowchart Method." Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0135822975
• N. Tredennick: "Microprocessor-based Computers". Computer, Vol. 29 No. 10, October 1996, pp. 27–37.
• N. Tredennick: "Implementation Decisions for the MC68000 Microprocessor". Proceedings of the 3rd Rocky Mountain Symposium on Microcomputers: Systems, Software, Architecture. August 1979
• N. Tredennick: "The Case for Reconfigurable Computing". Microprocessor Report, Vol. 10 No. 10, 5 Aug 1996, pp 25–27.