As chairman of the Lamar University College of Engineering Advisory Council, Phil Drayer ’67 is helping bring to life the college’s motto — Imagine it. Design it. Build it. Improve it. He and his wife, Karen, are backing confidence in the college with a $5 million gift.
In celebration of their generous philanthropy, the Phillip M. Drayer Department of Electrical Engineering was named Oct. 22.
Of his leadership and the gift to engineering, Drayer said, “My goal is to do what I can to return the Lamar College of Engineering generally, and the electrical engineering department specifically, to national prominence for research in certain competencies and to see it produce top-notch graduates who can make a big contribution for many years to come.”
“This $5 million gift will transform the electrical engineering program and, ultimately, the college,” said James Simmons, president of the university. “It will enable us to recruit topquality faculty and students, provide research and scholarship assistance, and help the college to grow in many other ways.
“It will be a great honor to have the Drayer name linked in perpetuity with a great department, a great college and a great university,” Simmons said. “The endowment to fund the naming of the department will memorialize Phillip M. Drayer, thanks to a wonderful couple who, in their lives together, have made a commitment to philanthropy on a high level and to supporting excellence and opportunity for future generations.”
Honored as a distinguished alumnus in 2006, Drayer knows how to make a positive impact in business and in life. He also recalls how Lamar was ranked among the nation’s best small-college engineering programs when he attended. He hopes to see Lamar engineering achieve growing state and national recognition for its accomplishments and quality.
“I feel like the luckiest man in the world this morning,” Drayer said at the unveiling of the new department name, citing the people in his life, from his parents, to teachers, to colleagues and his wife, Karen. “If you don’t have an anchor at home, going through all the gyrations that are required to get to this point, I can promise you that this wouldn’t happen.”
Now “safely retired for about the third time,” you’ll likely find Phil Drayer serving a kill shot on the racquetball court, or serving on the board of some august organizations. In either case, his penchant for progress propels him.
Most recently, Drayer served as a member of Gov. Rick Perry’s original 17-member executive committee for the Emerging Technology Fund, helping direct the state-sponsored venture funds investment in new start-up technology companies in Texas.
Today, he continues service on the board of the World Affairs Council in Dallas and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. His civic-minded contributions include service on the board of governors for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Drayer has chaired Lamar’s Engineering Advisory Council since 2005 and is a trustee of the Lamar University Foundation.
Being able to make a multi-million-dollar gift to his alma mater might have seemed beyond the realm of imagination to this Beaumont native as he made the drive to California in 1967 to take a job with Teledyne Systems Inc. He had just graduated from Lamar with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and had worked at Teledyne the summer before, an opportunity facilitated by his brother Larry ’60, a Lamar graduate and an engineer there.
“I was always impressed by the education I got at LU,” Drayer said. “LU equipped me to go head to head with people from Cal Tech, MIT and Berkley. What I discovered was that after six months, they were all coming to me for answers. I got a much better education at LU than they got at those schools.”
At Teledyne, he worked on a Department of Defense contract to develop a fully digital, very high-speed navigation receiver for high-performance aircraft; soon, however, he began to develop a growing interest in a new technology called Metal- Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) that created wafer-thin transistors.
“I wanted to move into semiconductors and integrated circuit design because I felt there would be a good future there,” Drayer said.
Being a Texan, Drayer naturally looked to Texas Instruments for that opportunity. He got the nod to join TI’s MOS group and soon found himself as one of the original contributors to its MOS business in Stafford, Texas, near Houston. He would spend eight years with TI, starting as an integrated circuit designer for military applications.
In 1971, he would take MOS from the realm of military secrets to the commercial world as he led a team in developing the first volume production of the single-chip calculator. It would become the first MOS circuit to reach volume production at TI.
TI’s success propelled the company toward MOS solid-state memory, aiding the development of ever-smaller computer components, Drayer said. He advanced from design to leadership in manufacturing engineering, helping bring concept to commercial viability, then profitability. After successes there, Drayer joined a TI spin-off company—Mostech Corp.—that was created to advance and market emerging microprocessor technology. Drayer began as team leader of the company’s microprocessor designers, bringing its first products from the drawing board to life. Again, Drayer soon made a move from design to manufacturing, eventually running the company’s on-shore and offshore assembly and test operations.
That propensity to move from design to leadership roles is attributable both to opportunity and to preparation. While many of his peers were pursing advanced engineering and business degrees, Drayer attended night school at South Texas College of Law in Houston to earn a juris doctorate. With its concentration in corporate law, Drayer—and others—saw his legal background as a degree of distinction.
“I always wanted to start my own company, and I felt that my technical education and experience, coupled with a legal education, would provide me a unique background,” Drayer said. He remains a member of the State Bar of Texas.
In 1980, Drayer started his first company—EPI Technologies—a semiconductor contract manufacturer. “We were one of the early inventors of the contract manufacturing business,” Drayer said.
Soon, the Dallas company was making semiconductors for customers like TI, Motorola and Fairchild, as well as highly reliable circuits for the Department of Energy’s nuclear applications.
In 1990, Drayer “came full circle” when he took leadership of a company owned by Teledyne Industries—his first employer. “The semiconductor industry was going through another one of its severe recessions,” Drayer said. “Teledyne’s semiconductor group’s financial performance was bad and getting worse.”
He rescued the floundering high-tech company from a relentless pounding by the industry’s “boom-and-bust cycles.” In two years, a thorough restructure and turn-around was complete, and the once-shunned company was highly desirable.
“We ended up buying the semiconductor business from Teledyne,” Drayer said. Soon, a new company, TelCom Semiconductor, was created to develop a series of standard and semi-standard high-performance products destined for use in cellular phones, personal computers and other consumer products. The formula met success, the company grew, and profitability was up. In 2000, Drayer sold the company to Microchip of Phoenix, Ariz.
Drayer then took his combination of high-tech savvy and business acumen to the venture capital arena as president and CEO of Kalydus Equity Research Partners, a company providing equity research for Wall Street investment firms and the Bank of America. Perry tapped Drayer’s business acumen and high-tech savvy soon after that to help guide the Emerging Technology Fund.
“Rarely does a day go by that I don’t think that all I may have, or have accomplished, was in large measure because Lamar was there to give me a start,” Drayer said. “I can assure you that when I was a graduate in 1967 if someone had told me I was going to be standing here in the Phillip M. Drayer Department of Electrical Engineering, I would have thought they were absolutely crazy.”
