Carver Mead

Carver Andress Mead (born 1 May 1934) is an American scientist and engineer.

He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years.

A pioneer of modern microelectronics, Mead has made contributions to the development and design of semiconductors, digital chips, and silicon compilers, technologies which form the foundations of modern very-large-scale integration chip design.

Mead has also been involved in the founding of more than 20 companies.

Mead studied electrical engineering at Caltech, getting his BS in 1956, his MS in 1957, and his PhD degree in 1960.

Mead's contributions have arisen from the application of basic physics to the development of electronic devices, often in novel ways.

Moore and Mead began collaborating around 1959 when Moore gave Mead "cosmetic reject" transistors from Fairchild Semiconductor for his students to use in his classes.

During the 1960s, he carried out systematic investigations into the energy behavior of electrons in insulators and semiconductors, developing a deep understanding of electron tunneling, barrier behavior and hot electron transport.

In 1960, he was the first person to describe and demonstrate a three-terminal solid-state device based on the operating principles of electron tunneling and hot-electron transport.

During the 1960s Mead made weekly visits to Fairchild, visiting the research and development labs and discussing their work with Moore.

During one of their discussions, Moore asked Mead whether electron tunneling might limit the size of a workable transistor.

When told that it would, he asked what the limit would be.

Stimulated by Moore's question, Mead and his students began a physics-based analysis of possible materials, trying to determine a lower bound for Moore's Law.

In 1962 he demonstrated that using tunnel emission, hot electrons retained energy when traveling nanometer distances in gold.

His studies of III-V compounds (with W. G. Spitzer) established the importance of interface states, laying the groundwork for band-gap engineering and the development of heterojunction devices.

Mead is credited by Gordon Moore with coining the term Moore's law, to denote the prediction Moore made in 1965 about the growth rate of the component count, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor," fitting on a single integrated circuit.

In 1966, Mead designed the first gallium arsenide gate field-effect transistor using a Schottky barrier diode to isolate the gate from the channel.

As a material, GaAs offers much higher electron mobility and higher saturation velocity than silicon.

The GaAs MESFET became the dominant microwave semiconductor device, used in a variety of high-frequency wireless electronics, including microwave communication systems in radio telescopes, satellite dishes and cellular phones.

In 1968, Mead demonstrated, contrary to common assumptions, that as transistors decreased in size, they would not become more fragile or hotter or more expensive or slower.

Rather, he argued that transistors would get faster, better, cooler and cheaper as they were miniaturized.

His results were initially met with considerable skepticism, but as designers experimented, results supported his assertion.

He taught the world's first LSI design course, at Caltech in 1970.

In 1972, Mead and graduate student Bruce Hoeneisen predicted that transistors could be made as small as 0.15 microns.

This lower limit to transistor size was considerably smaller than had been generally expected.

Despite initial doubts, Mead's prediction influenced the computer industry's development of submicron technology.

In the 1980s, Mead focused on electronic modeling of human neurology and biology, creating "neuromorphic electronic systems."

Most recently, he has called for the reconceptualization of modern physics, revisiting the theoretical debates of Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and others in light of later experiments and developments in instrumentation.

Mead's contributions as a teacher include the classic textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980), which he coauthored with Lynn Conway.

He also taught Deborah Chung, the first female engineering graduate of Caltech, and advised Louise Kirkbride, the school's first female electrical engineering student.

Carver Andress Mead was born in Bakersfield, California, and grew up in Kernville, California.

His father worked in a power plant at the Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, owned by Southern California Edison Company.

Carver attended a tiny local school for some years, then moved to Fresno, California to live with his grandmother so that he could attend a larger high school.

He became interested in electricity and electronics while very young, seeing the work at the power plant, experimenting with electrical equipment, qualifying for an amateur radio license and in high school working at local radio stations.

Carver's work on MESFETs also became the basis for the later development of HEMTs by Fujitsu in 1980.

HEMTs, like MESFETs, are accumulation-mode devices used in microwave receivers and telecommunication systems.

When Mead's predicted target was achieved in actual transistor development in 2000, the transistor was highly similar to the one Mead had originally described.

Mead was the first to predict the possibility of creating millions of transistors on a chip.

His prediction implied that substantial changes in technology would have to occur to achieve such scalability.

Mead was one of the first researchers to investigate techniques for very-large-scale integration, designing and creating high-complexity microchips.