Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Teradyne founder and tech titan d’Arbeloff dies

By Mass High Tech Staff

Teradyne Inc. co-founder Alexander d’Arbeloff died peacefully yesterday at the age of 80, according to his alma mater, MIT.

A 1949 graduate of MIT, d’Arbeloff was serving as honorary chairman of the MIT Corp., taking the lead in the school’s Calculated Risks, Creative Revolutions fundraising campaign. According to MIT officials, that campaign helped launch such facilities as the Ray and Maria Stata Center.

Along with his wife, Brit, who also attended MIT, d’Arbeloff established the d’Arbeloff Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and created the Fund for Excellence in MIT Education to support teaching innovations in science and engineering. The couple also supported a professorship in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.

D’Arbeloff was born in 1927 in Paris to parents who had fled the Russian Revolution a decade earlier, and his family eventually moved to South America in 1936, to New York two years later and to Los Angeles the following year, before returning to New York in 1940.

In 1960, d’Arbeloff co-founded Teradyne with former MIT classmate Nick DeWolf. During his tenure as president and CEO of Teradyne, which manufactures automatic test equipment and interconnection systems for the electronics and telecommunications industries, the company’s annual sales rose from $13 million to more than $1 billion.

In 1997, he was named chairman of the MIT Corp., having served as a member since 1989.

D’Arbeloff became honorary chairman of the corporation after stepping down as chairman in 2003. He taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. D’Arbeloff also served on the board of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

He is survived by his wife, Brit; daughters, Katherine and Alexandra; sons, Eric and Matthew; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at MIT at a later date.