Biographies of Silicon Valley protagonists

A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"

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Lee Boysel

Lee Boysel (????, 1939?) studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan until 1963. In 1964 he migrated to California to work for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica (later renamed McDonnell Douglas). There he met Frank Wanlass of General Microelectronics (GMe) and learned about MOS technology. In 1965 Lee Boysel moved to IBM's Alabama laboratories to apply his MOS skills. In 1966 Fairchild hired Boysel from IBM to start a MOS group. Boysel perfected a four-phase clocking technique to create very dense MOS circuits, and in 1968 achieved a 256-bit dynamic RAM. In 1969 he founded Four Phase Systems in a former dentist's office in the infamous Whiskey Gulch area of East Palo Alto, but soon relocated to Cupertino. They initially built 1024-bit and 2048-bit DRAMs. In 1970 Four Phase Systems designed the AL1, an 8-bit Central Processing Unit (CPU), one of the earliest commercial microprocessors. Motorola acquired Four Phase in 1982. Lee Boysel became a private investor based in San Francisco.

History of Silicon Valley | Biographies | History pages | Editor | Correspondence