Akira Matsuzawa In his own words Life and Times of Akira Matsuzawa I 22 WINTER 2022 graduated with a master's degree in electronics from the Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University in March 1978 and joined Matsushita Electric Industrial Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2021.3127070 Date of current version: 24 January 2022 Co., Ltd. (currently Panasonic) in April of the same year. After one year of training for new employees, I was assigned to the semiconductor-development division of the Central Research Laboratory, and in April 1979, I started to work as an IC designer. My role was to develop ICs to realize digital video and TV systems, rather than to contribute to the semiconductor business. IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE Development of Bipolar ADCs for Digital TVs and Digital Video Systems (1979-1993) My first job was to design a video-rate 8-bit ADC for digital TVs and digital video systems. At that time, Matsushita had already developed 6-h-play functionality for Video Home System (VHS) video recorders. This required the impressive combination of various analog 1943-0582/22©2022IEEE