Walter LeCroy

Walter was an Alabama native who from a young age had dual aspirations in science and photography. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama and spent his teen years in Decatur, Alabama, graduating from Decatur High School in 1952. Show more

As a young boy, he received a chemistry set from his parents and a camera from his uncles. The pull of photography was strong from the age of ten. At that time, he developed his own film using a flashlight and a red drinking glass in an improvised dark room.

As a teenager, Walter delivered newspapers and took pictures that appeared in the Decatur Daily and Birmingham News , sometimes on the front page and always bylined. He studied photography and journalism for a year at Alabama University, using his journalism major to gain access to the photographic darkroom to process his photos. After one year, he concluded that science would be a better vocation.

The guiding hand of his father and uncle led him to New York City. A chance visit to Columbia University with his uncle, who was selling ROTC uniforms, led to Walter filling out an application for admission. He was accepted. “If I were a native of New York, I wouldn’t have made the cut,” Walter speculated, “but they were interested in a kid from Alabama.” He studied physics and graduated cum laude in 1956 from Columbia College with a B.A. in Physics.

Upon graduation, Walter pivoted to instrumentation, working first at ITT Labs and then at Columbia University’s Nevis Labs in Irvington, NY as Chief Electronics Engineer. His job was to maintain, design and build electronics systems for high-energy physics (HEP) experiments at Columbia’s cyclotron and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Show more

"My interest in electronics came from working in the physics department lab," said Walter. "I could actually do electronics.

I got a kick out of that. It's a great way to learn. Maybe the best way." His reputation for designing fast electronics and data acquisition circuits led many future Nobel-prize winners to continue using his circuits after they left Columbia for other labs.

A chance order for instrumentation from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute led Walter to rapidly establish the Electro Nuclear Instrument Company in 1962. By early 1963, Walter was full time at his new company, and by 1964 he had renamed it LeCroy Research Systems Corporation, later shortened to just LeCroy Corporation.Show more

Walter wasn’t an accountant, a financier, a production manager or a salesperson. He had no business experience. He also had solidly established competitors such as Chronetics, EG&G and Scientific Systems

There was no reason for anyone to believe that LeCroy Corporation would last decades, much less lead the digital oscilloscope revolution, but Walter had an abiding curiosity, an appetite for risk and a desire to create something better for a market he knew well. It turns out he also had a good eye for talent, as witnessed by the many people who retired from LeCroy with 40+ year careers (some of whom are still with Teledyne LeCroy), and a few who passed 50 years of employment, along with many others who provided guidance and leadership during crucial phases of the company’s growth.

Early financing for Walter’s company was largely derived from an innovative arrangement with an import-export company owned by German immigrant Dieter Zander. Dieter offered to establish sales representation for Walter’s company and organize sales visits for Walter in Europe. This arrangement quickly produced more sales than the young company had resources to produce, and banks were not interested in providing financing. Walter and Dieter quickly established a handshake agreement to derive immediate cash from orders by selling them to Dieter’s company at 80% of face value. This arrangement known as “factoring” was used in other industries at that time but not in the electronics industry. Walter retained full ownership of the business and now had the financing to allow it to grow.

In 1965, LeCroy Research Systems Corporation received what most would consider a “lucky break.” In reality, Walter had prepared his company in advance and was just waiting for an opportunity to showcase it. Show more

His opportunity came when a Harvard University experiment produced evidence that challenged a pillar of quantum electrodynamics theory. A post-doctoral candidate at Columbia thought that the Harvard claim deserved double-checking. He needed equipment for his experiment to be run at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany and he needed it quickly because his scheduled time at DESY was not far away.

Nobody else could supply the equipment that fast – could Walter? Yes, Walter could and did. Walter’s instrumentation correctly measured the particle flow through the detectors at both low and high flow rates, recording the results on a carefully calibrated IBM-compatible tape recorder. Walter’s instrumentation helped disprove the Harvard University experimental result. The post-doctorate researcher was Samuel Ting, who went on to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976, just one of many Nobel Prize winners that relied on Walter LeCroy’s instrumentation to conduct their experiments. Walter’s company grew quickly afterwards, selling to universities and government labs such as Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), Fermilab, Princeton University, DESY, Brookhaven National Lab, University of Wisconsin and the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN).

The first twenty years of LeCroy’s existence was a golden age for high-energy particle physics experiments – there were many labs doing many different experiments and not many labs had the in-house expertise to design and build their own instrumentation. Show more

Walter’s new company evolved as the experiments did, from measuring a few photomultiplier tubes to acquiring hundreds of thousands of channels for particle detector measurements.

Early printed circuit board layout using black masking tape on sheets of mylar exposed outdoors in the sunlight, with through holes drilled using a Sears-Roebuck drill press, gave way to less time-consuming production methods. The products began to make extensive use of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) specially designed for particle physics applications that could measure pulses of current only a few billionths of a second long. With slight modifications, these same ADC designs could measure the size of any rapidly changing electrical signal, and they were later adapted for use in the first LeCroy digital oscilloscopes.

By the 1970s, LeCroy dominated the high-energy particle physics market and large competitors (EG&G and Chronetics) never recovered. Ultimately, particle physics experiments became larger, more expensive and more complex, and they were performed by fewer and larger labs. The larger labs were beginning to design and build their own instrumentation. Growth was slowing, and Walter knew that LeCroy needed new markets.

Walter’s company could claim to have designed the first digital storage oscilloscope in 1971 – the Model WD 2000, the “WD” being an abbreviation for “Waveform Digitizer.” The channel input was fanned out to 20 identical signals, each subsequently sampled 1 nanosecond (ns) apart set by cable delays. Show more

The 20 sample and hold outputs were then multiplexed into a single, 8-bit ADC. It was very fast for its day with 1 GS/s of sample rate and 100 MHz of bandwidth but was limited to 20 sample points with a 3-inch CRT display and fixed 1 volt 50 Ω full-scale inputs.

Many years later, one of these early oscilloscopes (only about 20 were built) was returned to LeCroy by a loyal customer who was happy to “regift” it to Walter LeCroy, and it became part of the Teledyne LeCroy permanent oscilloscope collection.

For years, Walter’s company had been designing the key components for digital acquisition systems and was closely watching analog oscilloscope evolution (or lack thereof). There were many things to dislike about analog oscilloscopes. First, they were only inherently useful for capturing very short events. Show more

Second, they relied on a precision trigger to begin an acquisition, unlike a digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) that can capture without a trigger event, prior to a trigger event or for a time delayed after a trigger event. Third, their display of a captured transient event was momentary, requiring clumsy recording devices (e.g., Polaroid cameras) to permanently record the event. Lastly, their displays were very small and dim – a result of the cathode ray tube (CRT) technology at the time – making it hard to see fast, single-shot (transient) events.

The first challenge was taking the ADC and digital acquisition technology that LeCroy was already using in the high-energy particle physics products and adapting them to use in a DSO. The second challenge was building the interface and display technologies around them, ensuring that the operation was familiar enough to someone who knew how to use an analog oscilloscope.

Design theory for what became the first full-function, self-contained DSO began in 1982. Walter led a series of meetings to outline the principles of how a digital-based oscilloscope should perform. He wanted it to be smart and simple, responsive and intuitive. Walter felt that discoveries and insights in the growing field of electronics required confirmation, as with physics, and precision measurements required redundancy. Therefore, ease of use and responsiveness in an instrument really mattered because confidence would come only with repeated measurements – the oscilloscope had to invite the user to make many measurements.

Walter also knew that a major opportunity for LeCroy was to provide a better oscilloscope display experience. In principle, inexpensive television-type raster-scan CRTs could be used, but those CRTs were optimized for drawing television images, not lines as would be needed for an oscilloscope. Walter needed a CRT that could draw lines. "I knew it could be done and I was noodling with it," Walter said. "Then I was in Toys R Us, and there it was, already done." What Walter found was the VecTrex video game, which featured a current-driven vector CRT display (remember, this was the early 1980s – you couldn’t use Google to browse the internet for CRTs). The display that LeCroy ultimately chose was a large vector CRT display with a yellow phosphor trace – a tradeoff in color to otherwise maximize size, brightness and focus, and minimize cost.

The Model 9400 came to market in 1985. It featured two 8-bit, 100 MS/s, 125 MHz channels with 32 thousand sample points (kpts) of acquisition memory per channel and a large 5” x 7” clear display. Not only did the Model 9400 establish LeCroy’s reputation for long-memory digital oscilloscopes (with acquisition memory that competitors would not match for many years), it also contained a variety of measurement and math toolsets unknown to users of analog oscilloscopes. LeCroy’s technologies for particle physics measurements had been adapted to a new use, and Walter’s vision for the future of test and measurement was realized – a digital oscilloscope with long acquisition memory that could do anything an analog oscilloscope could do, and much more in terms of real-time statistical, time and frequency domain analysis using automated measurements and math functions. The Model 9400 was a “bet the company” product for LeCroy Corporation – had the instrument failed, LeCroy would have likely failed as well. But the Model 9400 was an instant success, and Tektronix and Hewlett Packard (later Agilent and then Keysight Technologies) were scrambling to catch up to LeCroy with their own DSO models.

LeCroy Corporation’s early focus on designing and building very high channel count, modular data acquisition systems for high-energy particle physics experiments made it uniquely positioned to rethink how an oscilloscope should work as digital technology became pervasive. Show more

In the mid-1980s, companies like Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard dominated the market for analog oscilloscopes and saw little reason to innovate. The DSO that Walter brought to market didn’t just emulate the analog technology of the time – it extended the capabilities of the oscilloscope through mathematical processing of the digital data to provide much more information about the signals than simply viewing them could. "We try to make an engineer's life easier. We try to tell them what's going on," said Walter. "In my days, we (used) card and paper (to record data). When it was no longer possible to just eyeball it, the analytical part became important." What was important to particle physicists (capturing long acquisitions and analytically processing them to better understand behaviors) was increasingly important for electrical engineers, as well. Basically, Walter and the LeCroy Corporation thought of the oscilloscope as an analytical tool, whereas analog oscilloscope manufacturers saw it mainly as a visualization tool. It would take many years for established analog oscilloscope suppliers to provide similar acquisition record length, processing and analytics in their DSOs, while at the same time providing a fast, real-time response.

It can reasonably be argued that if Walter had not successfully executed his vision for the Model 9400 digital storage oscilloscope, other companies would have taken much longer to bring their first digital storage oscilloscopes to market. More than likely, DSO development would also have been burdened by a narrow, visual interpretation of what the DSO should provide to the user. Walter broke the mold and shook up the industry forever, and every electrical engineer, even those who don’t use LeCroy (now Teledyne LeCroy) oscilloscopes have Walter LeCroy and the Model 9400 to thank for the capabilities provided today in the digital oscilloscope they use, such as:
   - Long (deep) acquisition memories that are fully processed for measurements and math
   - FFTs (spectrum analysis) within the oscilloscope
   - Math functions within the oscilloscope, including chained math functions
   - Measurement statistics
   - Histogram distribution views of measurement sets
   - Measurement vs. time views of measurement sets
   - Large, high-resolution oscilloscope displays
   - Multi-grid displays to preserve signal resolution
   - Analog-like persistence views of digital data

Walter’s leadership of LeCroy Corporation into the oscilloscope market created impressive growth at the company – within five years, the company had nearly tripled in size, and oscilloscopes accounted for the majority of the company’s revenues.Show more

Walter hired additional leaders to guide the new product streams and manage the growth, all the while maintaining an active role in product design and development (he held several US patents for electronic circuits and instrumentation).

He rarely accepted the answer, "We can't do that." Rather, he encouraged his staff to innovate and was known to motivate the LeCroy engineers by telling them, "You people are not making mistakes fast enough!" In 1992, he received the John Fluke Award for "Excellence in Management and Leadership in the Test Industry." In 1994, LeCroy Corporation achieved new revenue records after releasing the 9354 Series of digital storage oscilloscopes, which provided 500 MHz of bandwidth at up to 2 gigasamples/second (GS/s) and 8 megapoints (Mpts) of acquisition memory. Walter became Chairman of the Board of LeCroy Corporation, then took the company public in 1995.

Walter cultivated an open, creative, entrepreneurial culture where he embraced outside expertise and pushed responsibilities as low in the organization as possible. He was also passionate about personal freedom and about producing products in the United States while competing worldwide. To this day, the vast majority of Teledyne LeCroy’s oscilloscope products are wholly designed, assembled and tested in the Chestnut Ridge, NY facility where the company relocated in the early 1980s.

In early 2002, the company moved from solely producing oscilloscopes in the mid-bandwidth range to releasing the WaveMaster 8500 high-bandwidth oscilloscope with 5 GHz of bandwidth. This product missed by days overtaking Tektronix for bandwidth leadership (Tektronix had a 4 GHz oscilloscope at the time and announced a 6 GHz oscilloscope days before LeCroy’s 5 GHz launch). LeCroy continued innovating by creating the first oscilloscopes to double the bandwidth (SDA 11000, April of 2005) and then triple the bandwidth (SDA 18000, May of 2006) provided by the core front-end amplifiers and ADCs, finally overtaking Tektronix as the supplier of the world’s fastest real-time oscilloscope (WaveMaster 830 Zi oscilloscope with 30 GHz of bandwidth, January of 2009). In October 2014, LeCroy released the world’s first real-time oscilloscope to reach 100 GHz of bandwidth (LabMaster 10-100Zi) — an achievement not yet matched by Tektronix as of this writing. LeCroy was also the industry leader in 12-bit high resolution oscilloscopes (HRO, 2010) and later trademarked as high definition oscilloscopes (HDO®) with the launch of the HDO4000 and HDO6000 Series in 2012). Walter was elected to the Electronic Design Hall of Fame in 2007.

In 2012, LeCroy Corporation was purchased by Teledyne Technologies and became the wholly owned division Teledyne LeCroy. Nonetheless, in Walter’s spirit, oscilloscope innovation has continued. Notably, Teledyne LeCroy shipped an 80-channel, 36 GHz bandwidth (40 channels at 65 GHz) oscilloscope in January of 2022 to the Telecommunications Research Organization (known as NICT) in Japan, which (as of this writing) is the highest bandwidth density oscilloscope (utilizing a single, high-speed clocking architecture) ever delivered to a customer.

The company he founded now employs more than 500 people in several US states and a dozen countries around the world.

Walter remained active on the board of LeCroy Corporation until the sale to Teledyne Technologies. He stayed involved with Teledyne LeCroy, visiting the Chestnut Ridge, NY headquarters and participating in strategic retreats. His annual visits to the company holiday party were much appreciated and loved by employees.

Walter lived life to the fullest outside of work, embracing music and theater – from bluegrass to Broadway – with great enthusiasm. He traveled to bluegrass festivals from the earliest days of such events and attended countless concerts, folk dances, and theater performances in and around New York City.Show more

Among his other avocations, he was a dedicated wine connoisseur and a student of history. He was also an avid skier, frequenting the slopes of Vermont and Switzerland, and he earned his pilot's license and flew himself on many of his trips throughout the United States. Eschewing accepted physical therapy methods involving weights and treadmills when they were prescribed at one point, Walter designed his own therapy program: learning to dance the Argentine Tango – a program which included a tango trip to Buenos Aires.

Photography was a life-long passion of Walter's. He also enjoyed woodworking and was a skilled furniture builder. A darkroom and a woodworking shop were standard features in his home, no matter where he lived, until the darkroom was eventually replaced by computers equal to the task of editing high-resolution digital photographs and printers capable of producing large-format editions of his work.

Walter was an active patron of the arts. He served on the board of the Rockland Center for the Arts for several years, and he was the founding board president of the Helen Hayes Theatre Company (HHTC) in Nyack, NY, serving in that capacity for seven years. During his tenure, the HHTC itself staged more than 60 productions and was deeply engaged in community outreach, working with many schools and youth organizations throughout Rockland County on their theatrical productions, and providing hundreds of performance and writing camps, workshops and programs for youth. One of the programs HHTC initiated was the Helen Hayes Youth Theatre, which continues to this day.

Walter was also instrumental in introducing a Young Astronauts program to elementary schools in Rockland County. This program engaged teachers and students in math and science through the study of space exploration. A mentor to many, he was generous with his support and was always there to help when he was needed – or just to share a moment of joy.

In 2005, he co-founded the Bastiat Society, an organization committed to advancing free trade, individual freedom and responsible governance. The Bastiat Society grew to over 28 chapters before joining the American Institute for Economic Research in 2017. He also served on the boards of several other organizations, including the Foundation for Economic Education where he spent a year as chairman.