Michael Tompsett (born 1939) is a British-born physicist, engineer, and inventor, and the founder director of the US software company TheraManager.
[2][3] Tompsett received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2017, with Eric Fossum, George Smith, and Nobukazu Teranishi.
[9] In 1969, he moved to New Jersey with his wife, and joined AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he made the first charge-coupled device (CCD), and led the development of CCDs.
In the 1980s Tompsett applied himself to finding a solution to a major challenge to reduce the size, power, and cost of digitizing video signals from imagers and scanners.
[11] After taking early retirement from Bell Labs in 1989, he joined the US Army as Director of Electron Device Research for six years.
[13] Tompsett made technological contributions in several different specialty areas including materials science, night vision, charge-coupled devices, and integrated circuit design over a lifetime of work.