Carver A. Mead

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Over a 50-year career, Carver A. Mead has been the most influential thinker and pioneer in silicon technology. His contributions to microelectronics and integrated circuits have been truly foundational and far-reaching.

In the early 1970s, Mead saw that integrated circuits could only be designed through a deep understanding of device physics. To open the design process to a broader community, he invented structured chip design methodologies that reduced the complex constraints of device physics into simply-applied design rules. This made possible the design of increasingly elaborate chips. Mead also pioneered silicon compilers, tools that use his structured design methodologies to translate chip specifications into integrated circuits. Taken together, these techniques have enabled the development of the billion-transistor processors that drive the electronic devices – for example, in laptops, tablets, smartphones, DVD players, and hybrid cars – ubiquitous in our daily lives.

His deep knowledge of and insight into device physics led to another major innovation: the first metal semiconductor field-effect transistor using Galium Arsenide. By virtue of their improved performance and power-handling capability, these “MESFET” devices have come to be the standard high-frequency amplifier used in cell phones, radar, and satellite microwave communications.

Mead and Lynn Conway’s seminal textbook, Introduction to VLSI Systems, not only taught generations of engineering students chip design methodologies, but also advanced the frontiers of silicon technology by introducing the concept of scalable design rules, which facilitate the portability of chip designs. Mead and Conway also inaugurated the “MOSIS” multi-chip service, allowing students to validate their chip designs. Moreover, this multi-chip service demonstrated the feasibility of the fabless semiconductor industry, which allows chip companies to focus on research and development without the expense of building and maintaining factories. The explosive growth of the ICT industry, fueled by startup innovation, would not have been possible without this manufacturing model.

Well known in the semiconductor industry is Gordon Moore’s eponymous law, which predicts that transistor densities double every eighteen months. Carver A. Mead not only coined the name “Moore’s Law”, but also developed, through his study of fundamental physical laws, the scientific underpinning of this empirical observation, and used that research to predict limits on transistor scaling. At the pinnacle of his VLSI fame, Mead turned towards bio-inspired chip design. His vision was to understand biological neural systems by recreating them in silicon, which launched the field of analog neuromorphic circuit design. Based on this vision, Mead built the first silicon retina and silicon cochlea, which led to some of his entrepreneurial successes, including Synaptics, whose touchpads appear in most of today’s laptops.

The richness and diversity of Mead’s work is difficult to overstate. His work from structured silicon designs to device physics to neural engineering has propelled the entire semiconductor industry and enabled the vast array of computing devices that permeate our everyday lives.

BIO

Carver A. Mead (Bakersfield, California, United States; 1934), received his BS in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he would spend the rest of his academic life. He obtained his MS there in 1957, followed by his PhD in 1960. And it was there he began the teaching career that would culminate in his appointment as Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science.

Author of more than 200 scientific papers and over 50 patents, he has been distinguished with the National Medal of Technology (the highest honor for technological innovation bestowed by the U.S. Government), the Lemelsol-MIT Prize, the IEEE John Von Neumann Medal and a score more of accolades.

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Information and Communication Technologies, 4th edition

The best friend of 21st century man is the chip. An integrated circuit of millimetric dimensions formed by billions of electronic components, which has magnified our human capacity to communicate, learn, explore and feel. Chips are not only present in almost every human activity, they have also ushered in a new digital universe. But at the root of all this technological change is something as com-monplace as a conversation. Electrical engineer Carver A. Mead, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), remembers “as if it were yesterday” the day his friend Gordon Moore asked him what limit physics imposed on chip miniaturization. It was the late 1960s. “I was completely stumped,” Mead recalls. And the results were even more mind-shaking: “I couldn’t believe it. The smaller they got, the faster and more efficient they were. I thought this is way too good to be true.”

This finding galvanized the industry, and is one of the reasons Carver Mead was granted the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) category. But not the only one. For as the jury states in its citation, Mead has become “the most influential thinker and pioneer” of the silicon age.

Mead has become “the most influential thinker and pioneer” of the silicon age.
TUITEAR

His legacy is as wide-ranging as his curriculum vitae. He has studied everything from the most fundamental aspects of semiconductor physics up to information processing in the human brain, but is also a pathbreaking Silicon Valley entrepreneur, co-founder of a score of companies and author of more than eighty patented inventions. His passion is for understanding things and mastering the basic principles that govern their operation, but also for using this freshly acquired knowledge to build and operate new devices.

It is to Mead, the citation continues, that we owe “the development of the billion-transistor processors that drive the electronic devices ubiquitous in our daily lives.” He has also left his mark in the realm of industrial organization, and has undertaken technology-advancing research, including successful work on tactile devices like the touchpad that replaces the mouse in laptop computers. Mead spent his childhood in a secluded community in the woods of Sierra Nevada (California). But though this background provided little contact with theoretical science, he grew up with a keen understanding of the power of technology. His father worked in the big hydroelectric plants high in the mountains which supplied 70% of the electricity needs of the city of Los Angeles.

By his last years in high school, he was an electronics enthusiast scouting around for parts to build ham radios. “I wanted to get an education that would allow me to understand it better and to do leading-edge stuff, whatever that meant.” A school visit to two companies manufacturing vacuum tubes – the forerunners of transistors – convinced him that “there was a career in electronics.”

He won a scholarship to Caltech where he fell under the spell of Linus Pauling and Richard Feynmann, Nobel laureates in Chemistry and Physics, respectively. A course on the then novel transistors – discovered in 1947 – would put the seal on his decision. “I was so in love with transistor technology that I read everything I could get my hands on.” The following year, while still a student, it fell to him to teach the course, since Caltech had no tenured staff sufficiently expert in the new subject.

A few kilometers away, the first transistor companies were just beginning to take off, and Gordon Moore was co-founder of the firm that launched the first commercially viable integrated circuit. The boundaries between business and university were easily crossed, and one day Moore burst into the office of an astonished Mead and showed him his latest creations: “I had never seen so many transistors. I didn’t know there were that many transistors in the world,” he reminisces.

Moore’s inquiry about how small chips could get was not long in coming. And the conclusion that chips improved as they got smaller led them on to the next question: how to integrate hundreds of thousands of components on a tiny silicon surface? The solution was to create the first design programs for VLSI (very-large-scale integration) devices, made up of billions of parts.

This work was instrumental in systematizing design ofthe new, powerful chips. It also served to disseminate the technology and thereby multiply its impact and growth. In 1971, Mead began teaching the first VLSI design classes at Caltech, which rapidly won a name for themselves. With this training, even those ignorant of the underlying physical principles could design increasingly complex chips. Companies would no longer need to have a theoretical physicist on the team; just an electronic engineer who could follow Mead’s guidelines.

“In earlier times, integrated circuits were created by ‘wizards’,” Mead explains. “These were people who had an extremely deep knowledge of transistor physics, and it was indeed a very mysterious process by which an integrated circuit was created. Then we came up with a set of simple design rules which really demystified a lot of that.” These advances underlay the birth of a new kind of enterprise that centered its efforts on design while externalizing the production side, sparing itself the costly investment in manufacturing plants. This “fabless” (fabrication-less) model would play an instrumental role in the semiconductor boom.

But at the height of this success, Mead took a sideways leap into a whole new field, that of neuromorphic systems, with the development of the first silicon retina and cochlea. Among his patents are the sensors used in today’s digital cameras, systems facilitating the development of tactile technology, and signal processing systems for hearing aids.

Mead sums it up with this reflection: “It’s easy to have a complicated idea but it’s very, very hard to have a simple idea. Often that means thinking about things in new ways that aren’t just the way everybody else is thinking. And of course it doesn’t always work out.”

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