Retirement and Return
On December 21, 1970, Widlar and Talbert resigned from National Semiconductor for no apparent reason. Widlar cashed in his stock option for $1 millon, and retired to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, at the age of 33. For four years he provided consultancy to the industry, but had not been formally employed anywhere for more than three years. His proud statement: "I don't work" caused him frequent troubles when crossing the Mexican border and eventually, Widlar created a set of fake business cards presenting him as a "road agent" for "Morgan Associates".
In November 1974 Widlar returned to National Semiconductors as a consultant. Robert Swanson, co-founder and chairman of Linear Technology, said in 2006: "I remember saying oh God, I don't want to deal with this guy. And I remember Sporck saying ah you're a young guy, you can do it. You know, you — you got enough energy to do it. So basically he worked for the analog group. Sort of he — he worked with Bob Dobkin who was his original protégé. And on a consulting basis, he turned out, you know, some very nice chips for National. But he was a consultant. He wasn't an employee." Richard Hodgson said in 1995: " lived up in the hills behind the campus I think someplace for a while when he was working for National and did the outback designs for them and he'd come back out of his cabin and whatever and go to work for Charlie Sporck for a while and then disappear back again either there or down in Mexico as far I knew ..."
Some of Widlar's designs mentioned by Swanson and Hodgson, like the LM12 power amplifier and the LM10 ultra-low-voltage amplifier introduced in 1978, remain in production in the 21st century. LM10 is capable of operating with a 1.1 volt power supply, thus instead of a conventional bandgap reference it employs Widlar's sub-bandgap circuit locked at 200 mV and the low-voltage Widlar output stage. For 10 years, no one else in the industry was able to produce a circuit that matched the LM10.
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