Carver Mead
Carver Andress Mead ( born May 1, 1934 in Bakersfield, California) is an American electrical engineer and pioneer of modern microelectronics.
Life
He is the " Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus, " the California Institute of Technology, where he has taught for more than 40 years. Previously, he had here already studied Electrical Engineering and the Bachelor of Science (1956 ), the Master of Science (1957 ) and doctorate (1960 ) obtained.
Carver Mead published in 1980 together with Lynn Conway, the widely-read book Introduction to VLSI systems. This book was very important for the breakthrough of the world's rapidly expanding micro chip design revolution that established under detachment from the microelectronics technology scene the microelectronics design methods as an independent science and the emergence of the industry for tools (software) for electronic design automation led.
Carver Mead developed in 1966 the first gallium arsenide MESFET transistor, now a mainstay of wireless electronics. Be first he said the lowest power dissipation limit of the size of transistors advance by introducing the concept of scalability on the way to submicron technology. He was the first predicted millions of transistors on a single chip, and developed the first methodology for the development of very large, highly complex integrated circuits. He taught the first VLSI Design course worldwide. He created the first silicon compiler.
He developed the methodology Collective Electrodynamics and is also pioneering the use of floating gate transistors for non- volatile storage in neural networks and other analog circuits. Together with Professor John Hopfield and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, he studied, "anticipate " animal brains (english compute ). This trio catalyzed three areas: neural networks, neuromorphic engineering, and physics of the computer. Following Karl Stein book learning matrix Carver created the first silicon retina and microchips that can learn from experience and founded here the first companies to apply these technologies, such as Synaptics, and Foveon, Inc. for the development of image processing CMOS sensors, for example for digital cameras. Important here is his book Analog VLSI and Neural Systems from 1989.
Carver Mead is attributed to have coined the term Moore 's Law for Gordon Moore in 1965 published forecast of the growth rate of the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit.
Trivia
Carver Mead has an extensive collection of high-voltage insulators made of glass.