Henry Sour Katzenstein was an American physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

 and entrepreneur. He founded a company called Brooktree in 1983 to commercialize a new architecture for digital to analog converters

Digital-to-analog converter

In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter is a device that converts a digital code to an analog signal . An analog-to-digital converter performs the reverse operation...

 that he developed.

The company name was taken from the street name where Dr. Katzenstein lived at the time he invented the then-novel circuit arrangement.

The company's first product to reach the market was an 8-bit CMOS

CMOS

Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a technology for constructing integrated circuits. CMOS technology is used in microprocessors, microcontrollers, static RAM, and other digital logic circuits...

 D/A converter intended for video applications. Introduced in early 1985, the first "VideoDAC" had an output clock rate of up to 75 MHz and 1/4 LSB

Least significant bit

In computing, the least significant bit is the bit position in a binary integer giving the units value, that is, determining whether the number is even or odd. The lsb is sometimes referred to as the right-most bit, due to the convention in positional notation of writing less significant digits...

accuracy—3-8 times better than typical contemporary devices. A headline in the 27 June edition of Electronic Design called the device "trailblazing".