Timothy C. May

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Timothy C. May , better known as Tim May (born December 21, 1951 in Bethesda , Maryland ; † December 13, 2018 in Corralitos, California ) was an American computer engineer and senior scientist at Intel in the early history of the company. He retired in 2003 and died in his home on December 13, 2018.

Discovery of alpha particle effects on computer chips

As an engineer, May was best known for identifying the cause of the "alpha particle problem," which affected the reliability of integrated circuits as device features reached a critical size at which a single alpha particle changes the state of a stored value and could trigger a single event upset . May found that the ceramic sleeves used by Intel were very weakly radioactive . Intel solved the problem by increasing the charge in each cell to reduce their susceptibility to radiation and by using plastic sleeves for their products.

May co-authored the 1981 IEEE WRG Baker Award paper "Alpha-Particle-Induced Soft Errors in Dynamic Memories", which was published in January 1979 in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices in collaboration with Murray H. Woods.

Writings on cryptography and data protection

May was a founding member of the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list and was one of the most active writers there. From the 1990s through 2003, he wrote extensively on cryptography and data protection.

May wrote an extensive FAQ on cypherpunk, "The Cyphernomicon" (with his earlier piece "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto"), and his essay "True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy" was included in a reprint of Vernor Vinge's novel True Names . In 2001, his work was published in the book Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nathaniel Popper: Timothy C. May, Early Advocate of Internet Privacy, Dies at 66. The New York Times , December 21, 2018 .;
personal data
SURNAME May, Timothy C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES May, Tim
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH December 21, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Bethesda , Maryland
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 2018
Place of death Corralitos, California