Michael Tompsett (born 1939) is a British-born physicist, engineer, and inventor, and the founder director of the US software company TheraManager. He is a former researcher at the English Electric Valve Company,[1] who later moved to Bell Labs in the United States. Tompsett invented CCD imagers and designed and built the first ever video camera with a solid-state (CCD) sensor.[2][3] Tompsett received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2017, with Eric Fossum, George Smith, and Nobukazu Teranishi.[4][5] Tompsett has also received two other lifetime awards; the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame 2010 Pioneer Award,[6] and the 2012 IEEE Edison Medal.[7] The thermal-imaging camera tube developed from his invention also earned a Queen's Award in 1987.
Tompsett is known particularly for his work on infrared imagers and CCD imagers. He pioneered compact, low power, high performance, and low cost solid-state infrared imagers, CCD imagers, and digital cameras and made contributions in several fields with patents and publications over an extended period of time. He is credited with applying the principle behind the charge-coupled device to invent the CCD imager, used in devices such as digital cameras.[8]
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- ^ "All-solid-state color TV camera, the first, is built experimentally" Electronic Design vol. 20 (1972) Archived 2017-02-16 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "2017 QEPrize Winners – Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering". Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Retrieved 2017-02-09.
- ^ Ghosh, Pallab (2017-02-01). "£1m Queen Elizabeth Prize: Digital camera tech lauded". BBC News. Retrieved 2017-02-09.
- ^ "2010 Award Winners | njinvent". www.njinvent.org. Retrieved 2017-03-10.
- ^ "IEEE Edison Medal Recipients". IEEE. Archived from the original on April 8, 2010. Retrieved 2017-03-10.
- ^ spectrum retrieved 23rd Dec 2009