Did you know that one man can be credited with many of the Information Age’s most significant advances in the tiny circuits that enable the internet and cell phones around the world?

That’s Carver Mead, who is 90 this year — and there will be a special celebration for him at COSM, on Friday, November 1 at 2:00 pm.

Tech philosopher George Gilder will host the festivities and Chris Diorio, CEO of Impinj, and Lloyd Watts, founder and CEO of Neocortix, will offer some reflections on his remarkable career.

For example, when Mead started out as an electrical engineering prof at California Institute of Technology (CalTech), his early work focused on solid state electronics, in particular the design of microchips. In 1969, he and a colleague proposed very large circuits (VLSI) that would enable millions of transistors to work together on a single silicon chip.

“But that can’t possibly work!”

As a profile at MIT recounts,

The electronics industry was almost universally skeptical about analog VLSI. Within ten years (1978), Mead had made VLSI circuits a success and had published the essential textbook on their design, “Introduction to VLSI Systems.” Within another ten years, when Mead published his second major book on the subject (1989), “Analog VLSI and Neural Systems,” custom design of microchips using VLSI circuits had become, as it remains today, universal. Because Mead uses VLSI as a way of teaching both microchip design and general principles of computing in his books and in the classroom, his work has inspired a whole generation of technology innovators. – “Carver Mead”

And yet that system is, CalTech tells us, the cornerstone of the computers that we rely on today.

The Kyoto Prize

Dr. Mead has over 40 patents and many awards. Chief among them though is probably the Kyoto Prize — in engineering, that’s equivalent to the Nobel — in 2022 for the VLSI:

As the design of VLSI systems grew ever more complicated with the increase in the number of transistors per chip during the 1970s, Mead developed a new way to divide the design process of VLSI systems into logic, circuit, and layout designs, and to separate them from the manufacturing process. In so doing, he laid the foundation for the automation of the design process for VLSIs, which in turn opened the door for rapid development in the industry. – CalTech, June 17, 2022

His secret? He told Steve Lohr at New York Times, “Listen to the technology; find out what it’s telling you.”

When he was 70, he expanded on that philosophy for MIT Technology Review,

To understand reality, you have to understand how things work. If you do that, you can start to do engineering with it, build things. And if you can’t, whatever you’re doing probably isn’t good science. To me, engineering and science aren’t separate endeavors.

In that interview with Spencer Reiss, he added something surprising.

Research is not a left-brain thing, says Mead

Research, he told Reiss, is a matter of love:

Once you figure out something, then you construct an elaborate rationale – the talks you eventually give that make it all sound so simple. Until then, I get angry when people ask me what I’m working on, because I have no way yet to express it. (September 1, 2004)

Mead’s later research has focused on technology that mimics the human brain and nervous system. The Lemuelson team comments,“He is not the first electrical engineer to work in this field, but over ten years ago, Mead had already succeeded in creating an analog silicon retina and inner ear. He believes that by focusing on the nervous systems’ sensors first, he can best understand how its central processing unit works.”

Moore’s Law

We are told that it was Carver Mead, some time around 1970, who gave Moore’s Law — about the rapid growth of computing power — its name. Perhaps more to the point, he helpedput it into action. Earlier this year, in connection with his Watson Lecture at CalTech, he reflected, “It’s wonderful when you can be a part of an evolution process that takes the society to another level. That’s a thrilling thing. And I’ve been fortunate to be able to be, in one way or another, connected with that sort of thing.”

Register for COSM 2024 here soon to get the Just in Time rate.

You may also wish to read: Renowned chemist James Tour to speak on new “sci-fi” material. Tour is speaking at COSM 2024 on his work with graphene which, despite its astounding qualities, originates in pencil lead. As developers ponder how to produce graphene in large quantities, trend watchers wonder whether Silicon Valley will one day be Graphene Valley.