Robert Heath Dennard (September 5, 1932 – April 23, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and inventor.

[2] One night while lying on the couch and pondering a presentation given by his peers earlier in the day, he had a notion: What if he could store a bit of information in a single transistor?

DRAM was instrumental in changing the world of computing through faster and higher capacity memory access.

The scaling theory he and his colleagues formulated in 1974 postulated that MOSFETs continue to function as voltage-controlled switches while all key figures of merit such as layout density, operating speed, and energy efficiency improve – provided geometric dimensions, voltages, and doping concentrations are consistently scaled to maintain the same electric field.

[5] Awards and Recognition In 1984, Dennard was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for pioneering work in FET technology, including invention of the one transistor dynamic RAM and contributions to scaling theory.