Franc Rode

Dr. France Rode was born on November 20, 1934, in Nožice. He decided to study electrical engineering. Due to the desire to get to know the world after graduating in 1960, Rode left Yugoslavia and went to the United States. He received his master’s degree in biomedicine in 1962 from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. After graduation, he moved to California, wherein in 1962, he joined Hewlett Packard. This is where his remarkable scientific journey began, most marked by the inventions of the pocket calculator in 1971 and the time and attendance card.

For his first eight years at Hewlett-Packard, Dr. Rode designed digital measuring instruments. When it turned out that computing skills, if built into a frequency counter, could improve the accuracy of measurements by a factor of 1000, he was entrusted with the task of realizing the idea. Under his leadership, the “Computing Counter” HP-5360A was created. It was the first instrument with a built-in processor. The idea to incorporate processors into a measuring instrument changed the design principle of measuring instruments. The HP-5360A also resulted in HP starting to internally manufacture bipolar circuits for its own use. Dr. Rode designed and manufactured the masks for the first integrated circuit.

For the next 12 years, he was engaged in the development of new products. Among these tasks was the HP-35, the first pocket calculator. Dr. Rode was involved in the design of the entire computer program. The HP-35 was a massive challenge for those times, but the project was completed in a surprisingly short time, and the computers were on sale after just one year. In the project approval phase, they wrote that the project would be successful if they sold 10,000 pocket calculators in the first year of production, but they sold ten times as many.

In 1979, Dr. Rode founded Sielox Inc. with a colleague based on his patent for an electronic lock. In the fall of 1982, he left his job at HP and devoted himself entirely to the manufacture of electronic locks and security devices. The identification key was a card known today as RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification). Checkpoint Systems Inc. acquired Sielox in 1986, where Dr. Rode served as vice president of research and development until 1990.

In 1990, Dr. Rode accepted a job at Trimble Navigation Ltd and led a project for the blind landing of aircraft based on GPS (Global Positioning System). With the idea of incorporating GPS into a mobile phone, he founded eRide Inc. in 1999 with two other colleagues and manufactured integrated circuits that are still used today for navigation in telephones and cars.