Nick Tredennick

Harry L. ("Nick") Tredennick is an American manager, inventor, VLSI design engineer and author who was involved in the development for Motorola's MC68000 and for IBM's Micro/370 microprocessors. Tredennick was named a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to microprocessor design.

Tredennick holds BSEE and MSEE degrees from Texas Tech University, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas in Austin.

From 1977 to 1979, he was a Senior Design Engineer at Motorola, where he specified and designed the microcode and the controller core of the MC68000 microprocessor, one of the first microprocessors designed by structured VLSI design.

From 1979 to 1987, Tredennick worked on microcode and logic design for the IBM Micro/370 microprocessor at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. While at IBM, in 1983/1984 he took sabbatical leave to teach computer organization, chip design, and the Flowchart Method at UC Berkeley.

In 1986, Tredennick co-founded NexGen and was director of product development there in 1987-1988. NexGen later developed the Nx686 microprocessor which became the AMD K6 when the company was acquired by AMD in 1996.

As Chief Scientist of Altera Corporation from 1993 to 1995 he began advocating Reconfigurable Computing as an essential paradigm shift in computer science, a topic he has since spoken and published on extensively.

Since 1988, his own Tredennick, Inc. has been analyzing microprocessor industry trends and consulting on VLSI CPU design and reconfigurable computing. Tredennick is an advisor and investor in numerous pre-IPO startups and a member of technical advisory boards for numerous companies. Most recently he joined the board of Patriot Scientific.

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