Professor Kenneth Carless (K.C.) Smith was educated at the University of Toronto where he received a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Physics, a Masters of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in physics.
After completing his PhD, Professor Smith joined U of T’s Department of Electrical Engineering, now the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), as an Assistant Professor in 1960 before leaving for the University of Illinois where he became an Associate Professor.
At the University of Illinois, he was a member of the design team and later chief engineer of the Illiac II and consultant for Illiac III computers. Here, Professor Smith recognized that the with the need to design complex transistor circuits, heavily physics-based models were too cumbersome. In response to this challenge Professor Smith developed simple and intuitive transistor models that could be used in the rapid design of complex circuits.
When he returned to U of T, where he reached the rank of Full Professor, Professor Smith used these simple models and design approaches in a highly innovative course on digital circuit design. This course was taught to generations of graduate students, helping to position ECE at U of T as an international leader in circuit design. Professor Smith notably co-invented, along with Professor Adel Sedra — K.C.’s former graduate student — the current conveyor: a groundbreaking circuit component akin to an operational amplifier.
In 1982 with Professor Sedra, he co-authored a seminal textbook called Microelectronic Circuits. Better known as Sedra/Smith, this book established a new way for teaching electronic circuits to undergraduate engineering students. Sedra/Smith has been translated into ten languages and is currently in its eighth edition. With more than one million copies in print, it remains the most widely used textbook on the subject.