John Albert SCHOEFF

1946 - 2022

John Albert Schoeff was born in Colfax, Washington, on August 3, 1946, to Mary Eleanor Schoeff and Donald Clyde Schoeff. Most of his early life was spent on the family wheat farm near Lacrosse, WA. He was valedictorian at Lacrosse High School, and he attended WSU majoring in electrical engineering where he was in the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Beta Kappa.

Summers were often spent driving trucks for wheat harvest with one summer at Bell Labs back east while in college working on microwave systems for the future cell phone industry.

While at his first job at Motorola and working on his Masters's Degree at Arizona State University, he met and married Mary Ann Koehnlein, a Methodist preacher's daughter from Indiana.

John's career included both design and management. He worked at three key semiconductor companies and did consult. He has 12 chip design patents. John's background includes the design of the largest number of early A/D and D/A converter chips of any designer. He redesigned and introduced an 8-bit digital-to-analog converter chosen to be used in the Voyager deep space probe and probably used in processing the images of the Grand Tour of the Planets. At PMI, Precision Monolithics, Inc., he designed the most flexible and most widely used D/A converter, the DAC-08, in 1975, which is still being manufactured and sold 50 years later.

He also designed the first chip to convert PCM digital code to voice for long-distance telephone networks and was used by Stromberg-Carlson. At AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, designed and introduced the lowest-priced and most flexible 12-bit DAC, commonly used in arcade video games.

ADI, Analog Devices Inc., offered John the position of Fellow (the highest technical level in the company) and to have his lab in Washington. Later the offer was repeated, but he could not take the first offer due to illness, or the second due to his father dying unexpectedly and a large farm estate to settle.

John had consulted for many clients on technical and legal projects, also functioning as an expert on several patent cases. John founded a startup company, CompuLab (Computer Circuit Laboratories Inc., in the 1980s in Spokane, WA.

John suffered from ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and passed away May 8, 2022, after a long illness.

John is survived by his wife of 52 years, two sons, John D. Schoeff and James D. Schoeff, daughter Bethany M. Schoeff, and two grandsons, Ethan and Logan Cotter. He also has a sister, Suzanne Murray, in Nevada.

Before his illness, he attended Life Center Church. He loved the Lord and was active in the Charismatic Movement. He particularly loved and supported Prison to Praise Ministries, a Christian prison ministry.

Any donations in lieu of gifts or flowers should be made to Prison to Praise Ministries, now known as Foundation of Praise (www.foundationofpraise.org).

A memorial service is being planned for this summer at the Dusty Bible Church.