Al Charpentier

Albert "Al" Charpentier is an American electrical engineer whose semiconductor designs helped define Commodore's early home computers. After joining MOS Technology in 1975, he worked on integrated circuits including the original VIC video chip and became a leading designer of the VIC-II graphics chip used in the Commodore 64.

The VIC-II combined colour graphics, hardware sprites, scrolling and display control in a single custom chip. Working with Charles Winterble and the wider Commodore engineering team, Charpentier helped create graphics hardware that was both economical enough for a mass-market computer and flexible enough to inspire decades of games, demos and technical experimentation.
Charpentier left Commodore in the early 1980s and co-founded the company that became Ensoniq with Bob Yannes, Bruce Crockett and other former Commodore engineers. At Ensoniq he continued applying custom-chip expertise to affordable digital musical instruments, including the Mirage sampler and later synthesizers.