remembering Jon Barth
JOn Barth1937-2021
T

he engineering community lost a valuable asset this January with the passing of Jon Barth. His presence along with his contagious grand laughter will be very much missed at the ESDA symposiums and ESD work group meetings.

Jon was an inventor who always appreciated the challenge of an instrumentation problem. He started Barth Electronics in 1964 in his basement, with the design of a much needed high voltage, high speed attenuator for underground nuclear events at the Nevada Test site. After many successful years of designing and manufacturing high voltage instrumentation products for the national laboratories and the pulse power industry, Jon branched out into the ESD simulation and instrumentation industry. He leveraged his expertise with pulse power and manufactured the first commercial TLP machine for the ESD industry, which has been sold world-wide. His work has resulted in many patents in both the ESD and Pulse Power Industries. Authoring over a dozen ESD and Pulse Power Industry Papers, he was awarded the ESDA Industry Pioneer Award in 2006, and also the Nevada Exporter of the Year in 1991. He contributed as an active member in several ESDA Working Groups over the years, including Transmission Line Pulsing (TLP), Charge Device Model (CDM), System Level ESD, Transient Latch Up (TLU), and the Industry Council. He also served on the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for the ESDA mentoring authors. His willingness to bring to light technical deficiencies, and insight to address solutions, will be missed.

Jon Barth headshot
Jon often claimed he wasn’t a “Device Guy,” he was a “Measurement Guy.” But he always took an active interest if a test of a customer’s device showed it didn’t perform as they expected. He would always help customers to fully understand the tests and measurements to ensure customer confidence in the test data.

Jon was that person who was always invested in helping people. He would thoughtfully help anyone figure out a practical and economical solution to make a difficult measurement. On many occasions, he could be heard advising a potential customer, “you don’t need our product, you can simply do this or that, and you will get the data you need.” He exuded integrity.

As a trusted voice, we looked to him as our mentor. Jon was always willing to listen and share his insightful knowledge. Never afraid to make a mistake, he always encouraged his employees to try new ways to improve the product or process. He was always interested in what could be learned from a failed attempt. He often said he succeeded because he had first tried and found all the options that didn’t work. A philosophy, he attributed to a quote from Thomas Edison.

Quick to lend a helping hand to anyone in the community, he routinely helped students of all ages from kindergarten to grad students with an experiment or project. His inspiring quest for knowledge spanned a wide variety of topics, with special devotion and passion to science and engineering.

Jon was the “Measurement Guy,” but one thing that Jon might have found hard, if not impossible, to measure is the impact he himself had on this industry. He was an amazing, caring, and sharing individual who left this world as he wanted, with a soldering iron in his hand.

Barth Electronics is committed to continuing Jon’s tradition of providing quality state of the art ESD and Pulse Power products with the best in the industry service.

Jon’s son, John Barth will lead the effort with the many other long time employees to continue to build on his legacy with new products and services.

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