Robert Yannes

Robert "Bob" Yannes (born 1957) is an American Electronic Engineer who designed the SID audio generator chip for the Commodore 64 and co-founded digital synthesizer company Ensoniq. He designed the Ensoniq 5503 Digital Oscillator Chip which was used in both commercial synthesizers and the Apple IIgs home computer.

Robert Yannes graduated from Villanova University 1978. He started out as an electronic music hobbyist before being hired as a chip designer at MOS Technology which had become a part of Commodore. Al Charpentier recruited Yannes partly for his music synthesis knowledge. He has been infatuated by electronic music since the early 1970s. He claims the song Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer influenced him more than any other single song, and also lists Kraftwerk and Mike Oldfield among his influences.

He designed the MicroPET with help from Al Charpentier which became an unintended prototype for the Commodore VIC-20 home computer.

He designed the single-chip sound synthesizer voice chip SID (6581) with enough resolution to produce high-quality music. However, he was unable to refine the signal-to-noise ratio which he desired. He hoped the chip would find its way into polyphonic/polytimbral synthesizers. The SID chip was his first attempt at a phase-accumulating oscillator, the heart of all Wavetable-lookup synthesis. Time constraints hindered the design of the multiplexed oscillators in the SID, which used a lot of chip area, and as a result only a few voices could be fitted on the chip.

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