Michael McCorquodale named 2012 UBM Electronics ACE Innovator of the Year

“Without McCorquodale’s vision, unwavering persistence, and leadership in the face of decades of thinking to the contrary, CMOS oscillators would not exist today.”

McCorquodale and man Enlarge

After nearly 15 years pursuing an idea that others thought a dead-end, Dr. Michael McCorquodale (MSE PhD EE ’00 ’04) is earning awards for his vision and leadership in bringing a new technology to market.

He was named Innovator of the Year at the 2012 UBM ACE Awards event, and the company for which he is General Manager, Integrated Device Technology (IDT), received an Ultimate Products award in the category of analog ICs.

This is the first year that the EE Times ACE (Annual Creativity in Electronics) Awards joined with the EDN Innovation Awards to create a single event, called the UBM Electronics ACE Awards. Their goal is to “showcase the best of the best in today’s electronics industry, including the hottest new products, start-up companies, design teams, executives and more.”

In the EDN article, “ACE Awards Innovator of the Year: Michael McCorquodale,” Rich Pell wrote:

The Innovator of the Year Award goes to the individual who brings leadership, creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking to technology, a product, or a business, and this year’s winner is no exception. Two truisms come to mind when thinking about Michael McCorquodale, general manager of the silicon-frequency-control business at Integrated Device Technology. The first: If you want to be successful, find a big problem and solve it. The second: If you want to get engineers to do something, tell them it can’t be done – or that you think one of their peers can do it better. 

Today, CMOS oscillators are replacing quartz devices in volumes in excess of tens of millions of units a month and achieve performance levels no one ever believed possible. Without McCorquodale’s vision, his continuous innovation to realize that vision, unwavering persistence, and leadership in the face of decades of thinking to the contrary, CMOS oscillators would not exist today and would not be transforming the industry.

The product which earned IDT its Ultimate Products award is the 3LG family of CrystalFree CMOS oscillators. This technology is the fruition of more than a decade of research by Dr. McCorquodale, initiated when he was a graduate student here at Michigan.

Dr. McCorquodale received the University of Michigan College of Engineering Recent Graduate Award in 2009, and offered a talk about entrepreneurship to students while he was here. Read more about Dr. McCorquodale and his path from EECS, to his startup company, Mobius Microsystems, and finally to IDT (which acquired Mobius in January 2010).

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