Robert H. Dennard, 2005 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Ach...

Robert Dennard, who grew up in rural Texas and started school in a one-room schoolhouse, says he had a lot of time to think and read and contemplate. He recounts that he was always looking for better ways to do things, such as a faster way to chop kindling for the stoves. He later brought this penchant for improvement to IBM, where he developed the one-transistor dynamic random access memory (DRAM)—the paragon for low cost digital memory, ubiquitous in the computer industry today. At IBM, he also developed a significant theory on electronic device scaling, which has been a driving force in microelectronics. For these achievements, Dennard is the 2005 recipient of the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award.