Received 8 September 2020; accepted 28 September 2020.
Date of current version 7 January 2021.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JMW.2020.3028277
Carver Mead: “It’s All About Thinking,”
A Personal Account Leading up to
the First Microwave Transistor
PETER H. SIEGEL
(Life Fellow, IEEE)
(Special Series Paper)
THz Global, La Canada, CA 91011 USA
Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 USA
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109 USA (e-mail: phs@caltech.edu)
ABSTRACT
This article is the second in a continuing series of biographical pieces on individuals who have
made significant contributions to microwave science, technology and applications over the course of their
careers. It is intended to bring to the reader, especially those new to the field, a portrait of an individual who
serves as a role model for the community and a detailed description of their accomplishments. At the same
time, it tries to bridge with commonality, the experiences of the subject with those of the scientists, engineers
and technologists who are following in their footsteps or hope to establish a similar record of success.
The articles are composed only after an extensive face-to-face interview with the subject and are helped
immensely by additional input and editing by the subjects themselves. The focus of this article is Caltech
Professor Carver A. Mead, perhaps best known for his ground breaking work on VLSI design techniques, but
also for the first demonstration of the GaAs MESFET and the originator of Moore’s Law. However, Professor
Mead has contributed so much more, and to so many disciplines other than electrical engineering. From
his own description of his interests and focus, he is a chameleon of knowledge, scrambling into, blending
with, and then distinguishing himself in a new field every thirteen years or so, over a career spanning seven
decades and still going. At age 86, his latest paper, on an intuitive approach to electromagnetically coupled
single-electron quantum systems, was just published this summer. Although we cannot do justice to all his
contributions, we hope the reader will see something of the polymath in Professor Mead as we focus just
on his earliest work, where he single handedly conceived, constructed, and tested the world’s first Schottky
barrier gate transistor in his modest laboratory at Caltech.
INDEX TERMS
Carver Mead, California Institute of Technology, MESFET, transistors, microwave history.
Carver Mead
1
grew up as an only child under what most
people would classify as significant social isolation. He was
1
This article was compiled after a series of two interviews with Professor
Mead on August 26th and 27th, 2020. Normally, the interviews would have
been face-to-face, but Covid 19 restrictions forced their conversion into video
conference sessions. Although the author has been associated with the Cali-
fornia Institute of Technology since the late 1980’s he did not know Professor
Mead personally before this interview, although he occasionally passed him
in the elevators and hallways of the Moore Electrical Engineering building on
campus, where Professor Mead spent a large part of his time. After delving
more deeply into Professor Mead’s background, and especially after the series
of interviews with him, the author’s admiration has only grown stronger. I
think anyone who reads this article will feel the same awe and inspiration,
and perhaps feel that science is in good hands so long as people like Carver
Mead are given free rein to act upon their curiosity.
born in 1934, at a hospital in Bakersfield, California, then
thirty miles from his home along the north fork of the
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
VOLUME 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2021
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SIEGEL: CARVER MEAD: “IT’S ALL ABOUT THINKING,” A PERSONAL ACCOUNT LEADING UP TO THE FIRST MICROWAVE TRANSISTOR
Kern River, where his father Arnold Mead, and his mother,
Grace, lived at the remote Kern River 3 Hydroelectric Power
station. At age 2, he moved even further from “civilization”,
relocating to one of the Big Creek Power Plants in the Sierra
Mountains, an approximately two and a half hour drive north-
east of Fresno, California. Arnold Mead had heard about good
long term job openings for power station operators in the late
1920’s, the start of the great depression in the US. After some
intensive self-studying, he was able to trade his position as
a delivery driver for life in the beautiful, but isolated moun-
tains of California. The Meads lived in a small community
of some 14 families in Southern California Edison provided
cottages for the staff who monitored and maintained the vast
series of hydroelectric power stations strung across Califor-
nia’s mountain rivers. Two of these power station “camps”
shared a single room elementary school with one teacher and
about 20 children for all of grades 1–8. The classwork was
divided by age group with the lone teacher moving from
group to group for the in-person instruction, while those not
receiving a lecture worked on their own. Some of the cleverer
of the younger age group (and you can already guess that
Carver was one of these) could listen in on the lessons being
given to the older children when they were bored with their
own assignments. Carver’s mother helped out as a part-time
school bus driver and Carver himself (his unusual first name
comes from his father’s best friend, whose middle name was
Carver), seemed perfectly adapted and satisfied with his situ-
ation. When he wasn’t outdoors hiking, fishing or hunting, he
passed his free time learning about power station technology,
especially electronics, both via his father’s annual tours of the
facility and from “show and tell” components brought home
for examination and use in various projects. Carver was also
able to order books off a list that were mailed to him from
the nearest library. He became very interested in radios and
naturally, which I attribute at least partially to his isolation,
was attracted to the ham (amateur radio) community
2
. With
help from one of his neighbors and an uncle, who were both
active hams, and with savings he had accumulated from odd
jobs, including trapping and selling furs via mail to Sears
Roebuck and Company, Mead was able to purchase and build
up radio transmitter and receiver equipment by tapping the
vast supply of cheap war surplus electronics available at the
time. He set himself up in the 40 meter band, where he could
reach Asia and Europe with Morse code, and by age 15 had
acquired his license and call number: W6HJQ.
When he graduated from 8th grade his parents decided to
send him to high school in Fresno, rather than to the more
local facility – a 60-plus minute bus ride down the mountain.
Carver was able to move in with his grandmother who lived
on the north side of the city, a short bicycle ride from Fresno
High School. He was lucky to find that there was one elective
class offered on electronics taught by Sherman Hewitt, which
2
The term “HAM” referring, since the 1920’s, to amateur radio operators,
is not an acronym but rather a slight applied to telegraphy operators with poor
coding skills who were called – ham fisted, i.e. amateurs [1].
he signed up for all 4 years. Carver’s self-taught background
in amateur radio served him well in Fresno. He was able to
add a commercial radio operator’s license to his amateur ham
credential, and thus get work after school as a transmission
engineer in one of the five commercial AM radio stations
in Fresno at the time. He also helped out at an electronics
repair shop. Upon joining the ham radio club in Fresno, he
began meeting college-aged adolescents and technically in-
clined adults, who recognized Carver’s drive and ambition
to learn about and understand electronics. They suggested he
look beyond Fresno to a really good technical university upon
graduating high school. His applications to both Stanford and
Caltech were accepted, and fortunately for Caltech, he arrived
in Pasadena to begin his freshman year there in 1952.
Although Carver claims he was way over his head as a
freshman when compared to students who had come from
much more rigorous academic backgrounds, he managed
to hold his own, although he is not proud of his grades.
Double Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling – Chemistry 1954 and
Peace Prize 1962 – was his freshman chemistry professor and
remains his most admired teacher ever. Pauling’s intuitive
approach to conveying quantum concepts stayed with Carver
for his entire career and later helped spawn a ten year quest
to change the way physics was taught at Caltech. Even at
this time, he had a reputation for asking tough questions of
his professors and approached his coursework by trying to
gain an understanding that went beyond the mathematical
formalisms. His parents’ modest financial means meant that
Carver had to work throughout his years at Caltech. He had a
variety of in-school, after-school and full-time summer jobs,
including working as a technician for the physics department.
This proved to be a fortunate hardship, as it exposed Carver to
graduate students who he could ask for advice, but also who
he could compare himself with, and as a result realize that
his understanding of physics and math was not as severely
constrained as his grades might indicate. In his junior year,
Carver was working at a nearby Pasadena company, Consol-
idated Engineering Corp.
3
That made sonic transducers for
the oil and gas industry. He asked his boss if Consolidated
would donate some of the transducers he was working on
to Caltech to be used in an undergraduate EE lab course he
was interested in setting up. They agreed, and the lab was so
successful that Carver became the Teaching Assistant for the
course while still in his senior year at Caltech. This was his
first exposure to teaching, and he loved it.
After completing his senior year, Carver had intended to go
out and search for a job in the electronics industry, but EE
professor Hardy Martel (another of Carver’s admired mentors
whose “strength was in his basic, intuitive grasp of ideas and
how things worked,” [2]) argued in favor of continuing on to a
Master’s degree in anticipation of a much higher career salary
scale. At this point, David Middlebrook (noted author of
An
3
Founded by Herbert Hoover Jr., a graduate of Caltech and son of US Presi-
dent Herbert H. Hoover, later Consolidated Electrodynamics and a subsidiary
of Bell and Howell.
270
VOLUME 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2021
Introduction to Junction Transistor Theory
[3] and a founder
of modern power electronics) had just arrived at Caltech from
Stanford and was teaching electronics, and specifically tran-
sistor theory and design. Mead took, and loved his class, and
hooked up with Middlebrook, who became his advisor. At this
point Carver also got a chance to lecture a bit as a teaching
assistant for an undergraduate introductory electronics class,
which earned him some money and which he really enjoyed.
When his Master’s degree was complete Carver wanted to
continue on for a PhD. However, the department was skeptical
of his abilities to succeed based on his less than stellar aca-
demic grades. They devised a “mini” oral exam for him, which
some on the committee hoped would allow them to deny him
a slot. However, Mead did so well, he not only was accepted
into the PhD program, but the mini oral became a fixture at
Caltech that all future Master’s students would have to pass
before being admitted for a PhD. Carver stayed with David
Middlebrook that year and together they began thinking about
the physics of the transistor junctions, especially understand-
ing the behavior of minority carriers.
In his second year of grad school, Middlebrook took off for
a sabbatical and Mead was asked to teach the graduate level
transistor course. When he began, he had a very hard time
trying to teach the class the way Middlebrook had taught it.
The students were more senior and there were even a group
of professional engineers attending who did not appreciate
his attempt to be a “little Middlebrook.” After a long hike in
the mountains he had an epiphany that would have a major
impact on his teaching career – he decided to approach the
course material through a more intuitive understanding of
the concepts, following up with the rigorous mathematical
models and the application of equations, only after a sound
grasp of the underlying physics had been obtained. A good
example of this method can be found in one of Mead’s recent
lectures on his unique approach to general relativity [4]. He
also appreciated deeply, and tried to communicate that real
world problems could almost never be solved exactly, in spite
of what most physicists and engineers were taught, and that
understanding the limits of the models and the approximations
that would have to be employed was critical. By the end of
the semester he had won over the students and realized that
his own approach to learning hard material could also be a
valuable tool for others. His later classes, many text books,
and even his papers were all approached from this viewpoint.
Already married with children, Carver was very pleased
when Middlebrook introduced him to some folks at Pa-
cific Semiconductors (later TRW Semiconductors, and now
Northrop Grumman Space Technologies) in nearby Culver
City, California who were looking for some long term consul-
tants for their transistor development program. Mead worked
with James Buie (noted inventor of TTL logic) and others
at Pacific Semiconductor for more than 5 years (throughout
his graduate school days). It helped support his family and
exposed him to state-of-the-art commercial design and fabri-
cation people – a strategy he would continue throughout his
long career.
In his third year of graduate school, Mead found his thesis
topic – the physics of fast transistor switching and charge
storage effects, and he began experimenting on his own. Mid-
dlebrook was busy with his second book focused on tran-
sistor amplifiers [5], and Carver was pretty much left to his
own devices. Guided by John Linvill’s approach to transistor
modelling – which separated the small signal linear minority-
carrier behavior from the highly non-linear junction equations
[6], Mead derived a detailed model for charge distribution and
junction behavior that could be used to design and character-
ize real world devices for logic circuits and switching power
supplies [7], [8], [9].
Near the end of his thesis work in 1959, the EE department
at Caltech was in transition, and Carver, with his now very
extensive experience and industry connections in modern tran-
sistor technology was asked if he wanted to stay on as a faculty
member. Supporting three children who were solidly at home
in Pasadena, it was a natural choice, although even then, it was
not typical for graduate students to take permanent positions
at their graduating institutions. As it turned out, it was good
for Mead and good for Caltech in the long run.
Carver had just experienced another epiphany around this
time, when Leo Esaki (1973 Nobel Laureate, and inventor
of the Esaki tunnel diode) came to Caltech to give a talk on
his newly discovered tunneling device. This demonstration of
quantum mechanical behavior in a solid-state device brought
Mead back to his early classes with Linus Pauling, and he
became very interested in understanding the phenomenon. He
started experimenting with highly doped germanium and then
switched to aluminum-aluminum oxide-aluminum [10]. By
understanding in detail the barrier physics, Mead was able
to create triodes and vacuum emitter diodes that worked with
majority carrier tunneling. These later became known as the
first hot electron devices [11].
In 1962, Carver hooked up with William Spitzer who had
just come over to Pasadena (Bell and Howell) from Bell Lab-
oratories and was setting up a lab to work on barrier devices.
Carver asked Spitzer if, while he was waiting for his lab
to be equipped, he would like to team up on some experi-
ments at Caltech. Together they did some ground breaking
studies of photoemission [12], band gaps [13] and barrier
height measurements [14], which helped Carver get some
much needed recognition in the burgeoning solid-state de-
vice community. He was also helped by mentor and friend
Albert Rose of RCA (photoconductivity expert and TV tube
pioneer, 1979 Edison Medal winner). The detailed study of
thin metal-insulating-metal barriers, and metal-semiconductor
“Schottky” junctions, occupied Mead for the next 15 years and
he has more than 80 refereed papers on this subject [15].
During this early period of Mead’s appointment at Caltech
two other significant contacts appeared unannounced at his
office door [16]. One was Arnold Shostak, who was a pro-
gram manager at the Office of Naval Research. After hearing
what Mead was working on, Shostak asked him if he wanted
some research funding (this will be a shock to anyone work-
ing in science today!). Mead had a start-up grant from the
VOLUME 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2021
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SIEGEL: CARVER MEAD: “IT’S ALL ABOUT THINKING,” A PERSONAL ACCOUNT LEADING UP TO THE FIRST MICROWAVE TRANSISTOR
University that totaled something like $3500. Shostak was
offering $10K-$15K. All he asked for was a short proposal
and a budget – neither of which Carver had generated before.
With some help from Caltech contracts (grants office), he had
his first government funded research program and it continued
for the next 15 years.
The second knock on the door came in early 1960, from
Gordon Moore (Caltech PhD and founder of Fairchild Semi-
conductor and Intel). Carver had not met Moore before, but he
did know about Fairchild. Moore wanted to know what Mead
was working on, and then he offered him two large manila
envelopes full of discrete transistors which he thought could
be useful for lab classes (2N697s and 2N706s, two of Moore’s
early successes – the 2N697 was Fairchild’s first marketed
transistor and came out in 1958). The two men immediately
hit it off, and Gordon invited Carver up to Fairchild for a tour
and a talk a few weeks later. This began a weekly consult-
ing gig that would last until Moore and co-founder Robert
Noyce left to form Intel in 1968. On his trips to Fairchild,
Carver would meet with Moore before and after his day at
the Fairchild lab and he got to know the technical staff well,
collaborating with Andrew Grove (who was teaching a similar
transistors class to Mead’s at UC Berkeley and finishing his
very well-known textbook [17], which Carver helped review),
Bruce Deal and Edward Snow [18]. This strong relationship
and interaction with the Fairchild engineers, and with Moore
in particular, would extend through to this day.
As mentioned earlier, one of the topics that Mead and
Spitzer were working on involved measuring the barrier
heights of various metal-semiconductor interfaces. For III-V
materials the barrier height was nearly independent of the ap-
plied metal contact even though the work function of the dif-
ferent metals was changing significantly. This was attributed
to semiconductor surface states that could absorb significant
charge from the metal without much change in the surface
energy (Fermi level pinning). However, for most II-VI mate-
rials, Cadmium Sulfide in particular, the barrier energy var-
ied directly with the metal work function. Mead and Spitzer
worked with a mixed crystal of Cadmium, Sulfide-Selenide
with varying concentration of sulfide, and found a transition
where the Fermi level pinning disappeared. They attributed
the change to a quantum state transition from distributed
to localized wavefunctions (ionic to covalent transition) and
wroteitupfor
Physics Review Letters
[19]. The paper caused
a ruckus, with half the reviewers not believing the measure-
ments could be correct, and the other half not realizing there
was anything new in the revelation. It took a chance meeting
with John Bardeen (BCS theory, transistor inventor, two time
winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics – 1956 and 1972) who
was visiting Caltech for a talk, to settle the issue in favor of
Mead and Spitzer. Their second paper on the subject, evalu-
ating additional semiconductors, was less controversial [20]
and confirmed their explanation that blended quantum theory
with traditional crystallography. This very careful measure-
ment, plus a first principles understanding of the observed
phenomena, is steadfast in all of Mead’s work. The focus
on metal-contacts [21], especially Schottky barriers and tun-
nel junctions [22], which blend the quantum and electronic
worlds, led to the demonstration which is the principle subject
of this bio-review: the first microwave transistor.
The week of November 22nd, 1965 had Carver in Dallas
Texas where he was regularly consulting at Texas Instruments
(at the same time he was also consulting for rival Fairchild,
all above board
, in case you were wondering). He was talking
with materials chemist, Louis Bailey at TI who was working
on epitaxially grown GaAs, and he asked Bailey if he had ever
grown any doped GaAs on insulating substrate material. Most
of the time the epitaxial layers were grown on heavily doped
substrates for eventual use as bipolar devices. As it turned out,
Bailey had a small sample of epitaxially formed n-type GaAs
on a semi-insulating wafer. Carver was hoping to try out an
idea he had been thinking about for a while: to make a field
effect transistor with a Schottky barrier gate rather than a p-n
junction. The goal was to try to avoid introducing minority
carriers to the depletion channel when the gate junction is
forward biased because it is a very slow process to remove
them, and this has a dramatic impact on the switching speed
of the transistor. Even in forward bias, as would occur in the
“on” period of a “class C” amplifier, a Schottky gate would
not introduce any majority carriers and the recovery time
would be vastly improved. The Schottky gate also has an ideal
reverse bias characteristic with very low saturation current.
When Carver returned to Pasadena, he spent Thanksgiving
day in the lab etching down the epitaxial layer on his very
tiny one wafer sample, step-by-step, until he could see punch
through from a metallic contact at 10V. The process he was
using was a rough timed chemical etch employing methanol
and bromine, and although 10V was a bit high, he had already
gone through several etch, metalize, and measure steps (using
C vs V to get the doping and depletion layer thickness) to
reach to this point. He decided to stop, and using a heated
Rapidograph (old style liquid ink drafting pen) filled with
black wax, he drew a stripe across the wafer to define the
active area of what would be the source-drain region, and
then carefully etched through the epitaxial region and down
to the semi-insulating GaAs everywhere else – remember he
had only one tiny wafer! Next, and incredibly, he spot-welded
two straight edged razor blades to small cross pieces to make
a mask for a very narrow gate. The blade edges were so
closely spaced that they formed a diffraction pattern along
their almost touching edges. Using this makeshift mask, he
then evaporated a very thin (a few microns wide) aluminum
gate electrode through the gap in the blades and along the mid-
point of the mesa. He then soldered Indium-Mercury ohmic
contacts to the mesa on opposite sides of the gate, to form
the source and drain. Remarkably the device functioned and
Carver was able to record beautiful FET I-V curves, given that
the transistor operated at 10V. He wrote up the short paper
and submitted it to
Proceedings of the IEEE
in December
[23], calling the new device a Schottky Barrier Gate Field
Effect Transistor, which later became the MESFET (metal-
semiconductor FET). Photos of the MESFET and original
272
VOLUME 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2021
FIGURE 1.
Photo of the first GaAs MESFET chip, as wired up on a
microscope slide.
figures of the performance that were part of the paper [23]
are shown in Figures 1–3.
Carver tried to patent the device and also to interest both
Fairchild and TI in the new invention. The patent search re-
turned prior art by Julius Lilienthal from 1925 [24] and 1926
[25] which had a concept for a FET device, but could not
possibly have worked for material reasons, and another later
patent from Bell Labs that also was not functional. The patent
attorney suggested trying to reduce the scope of the invention
to III-V materials only, but Carver did not think it was worth
the effort at the time (note: Carver has more than 80 patents
now). As to getting the silicon gurus of the day interested
in the new high speed transistor idea – that too fell flat, and
except for one more demonstration using GaSe [26], Carver
went back to his junction work. A year or two later, a Japanese
representative from Fujitsu he recollected, visited Mead’s of-
fice bearing a gift for his published MESFET invention, which
was now apparently the basis for a whole new line of high
speed commercial devices in Japan! Even though Fairchild
and TI ultimately decided to stick with silicon based devices,
Fairchild did try out the MESFET concept, and within a year
after Carver’s paper, Hooper and Lehrer reported operating a
GaAs MESFET above 3 GHz [27]. The MESFET has been
going strong ever since, both in silicon and III-V materials,
and has been a workhorse for GHz communications. Its later
derivative, the HEMT (high electron mobility transistor) has
now reached frequencies above 1 THz [28]!
Although Mead did not gain financially from this particular
creative and heroic single-handed effort over a Thanksgiving
holiday, it is only a very small part of what he has contributed
to both engineering science and to the semiconductor industry,
and I have no doubt he is satisfied with the rewards he, his
students, his many professional colleagues, and the world
have reaped from his insights and his accomplishments.
After the invention of the MESFET, Professor Mead started
on a career path that is almost certainly better known to most
engineers, covering modern VLSI design, programmable
logic, high power silicon carbide devices, limits on large
scale integration (Moore’s Law), helping set up the first pub-
licly available MOS wafer foundry (MOSIS), developing the
first silicon retina devices, early CMOS imagers, neuromor-
phic circuits, an approach to teaching fundamental physical
FIGURE 2.
Photomicrograph of the first MESFET.
FIGURE 3.
Reproduced figures from Mead’s MESFET paper [23]. Top:
Transistor configuration on GaAs wafer. Middle: Schottky gate IV curve.
Bottom: Transistor IV curves.
processes through electrodynamic principles, and most re-
cently an intuitive formulation of electromagnetically coupled
single-electron quantum systems [29]. Papers, talks and de-
scriptions of all of these contributions from Mead’s long and
very fruitful career in science and engineering can be found on
VOLUME 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 2021
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SIEGEL: CARVER MEAD: “IT’S ALL ABOUT THINKING,” A PERSONAL ACCOUNT LEADING UP TO THE FIRST MICROWAVE TRANSISTOR
his website [30] and you can learn more through his many in-
terviews and YouTube video talks [31]. One of Carver’s many
mantras, and perhaps the most visible secret of his success is:
“It’s all about thinking.” However, for this series, and for this
journal in particular, in which our intent is to reach out to both
engineers and scientists, it seemed appropriate to close with a
quote from Professor Mead that I hope all of our colleagues
take to heart:
“I’ve never made a distinction between science and engineering.
To me it was all figuring the thing out and being able to do things
with it. And if you’re doing what you think of as science, you have
to figure the thing out and make the experiment work, which is all
engineering work. And if you’re doing what you call engineering,
you have to figure out the fundamentals so you know what to build,
and that’s science. So to me they could never be pulled apart ...”
[16 page 14].
SUBJECT BIO
CARVER MEAD
(Life Fellow, IEEE) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.
degrees in electrical engineering from Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1956,
1957, and 1960, respectively, and the honorary doctorates from the University
of Lund, Lund, Sweden and USC, Los Angeles, CA, USA, in 1987 and 1991,
respectively. He taught at Caltech for more than 40 years before retiring in
1999 as Caltech’s Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and
Applied Science, Emeritus. Some of his pioneering contributions include
electron tunneling, semiconductor interface energies, invention of the MES-
FET, scaling of technology, structured very-large-scale-integrated (VLSI)
circuit design, the first VLSI circuit design course, physics of computation,
neuromorphic VLSI circuit systems, and collective electrodynamics. He also
pioneered the Silicon Foundry concept and the Fabless Semiconductor busi-
ness model. Among his many honors and awards are the National Medal of
Technology, BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, NAE Founder’s Award,
IEEE John von Neumann Medal, Walter Wriston Public Policy Award, ACM
Allen Newell Award, IEEE Centennial Medal, and the Lemelson-MIT Prize.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National
Academy of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of
Inventors (NAI). He is a member of the Computer History Museum, a Foreign
Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and among
others. He now lives in the Seattle area with his wife, Barbara, while also
continuing to work in his Caltech lab regularly where he is engaged in a col-
laborative research project on high-temperature superconductivity. Website:
carvermead.caltech.edu
REFERENCES
[1] Wikipedia, “Amateur radio.” Accessed Aug. 30, 2020. [Online]. Avail-
able: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio
[2] M. Woo, “Hardy C. Martel, 85,” Caltech Media Relations, Apr. 3, 2012.
[Online]. Available: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/hardy-c-
martel-85-4251
[3] R. D. Middlebrook,
An Introduction to Junction Transistor Theory
,1st
ed. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley, Jan. 1957.
[4] C. Mead, “G4v: An engineering approach to gravitation,” Ca-
JAGWR Seminar, LIGO Laboratory, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA,
Apr. 21, 2015. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
XdiG6ZPib3c
[5] R. D. Middlebrook and C. A. Mead, “Transistor AC and DC amplifiers
with high input impedance,”
Semicond. Products
, vol. 2, pp. 26–35,
1959.
[6] J. G. Linvill, “Lumped models of transistors and diodes,”
Proc. IRE
,
vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 1141–1152, 1958.
[7] C. A. Mead, “Transistor switching analysis part 1,”
Semicond. Products
,
vol. 3, no. 9, pp. 43–47, 1960.
[8] C. A. Mead, “Transistor switching analysis part 2,”
Semicond. Products
,
vol. 3, no. 10, pp. 38–42, 1960.
[9] C. A. Mead, “Transistor switching analysis part 3,”
Semicond. Products
,
vol. 3, no. 11, pp. 28–32, 1960.
[10] C. A. Mead, “Operation of tunnel-emission devices,”
J. Appl. Phys.
,
vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 646–652, 1961.
[11] C. A. Mead, “Transport of hot electrons in thin gold films,”
Phys. Rev.
Lett.
, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 56–57, 1962.
[12] C. A. Mead and W. G. Spitzer, “Photoemission from Au and Cu into
CdS,”
Appl. Phys. Lett.
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gineering & Applied Science, Emeritus,” California Inst. Technol., Se-
lected Publications, 2016. Accessed: Sep. 3, 2020. [Online]. Available:
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[22] C. A. Mead, “Tunneling physics,” Colloquium on Solid State Devices,
Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA, Feb. 20–21, 1961. [Online]. Available:
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[23] C. A. Mead, “Schottky barrier gate field effect transistor,”
Proc. IEEE
,
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CA272437A, 1925.
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[26] S. Kurtin and C. A. Mead, “GaSe Schottky barrier gate FET,”
Proc.
IEEE
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[27] W. W. Hooper and W. I. Lehrer, “An epitaxial GaAs field-effect transis-
tor,”
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[30] C. A. Mead, “Carver Mead, Gordon & Betty Moore Professor of
Engineering & Applied Science, Emeritus,” California Inst. Technol.,
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Jun. 7, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/channel/
UCPZvrtffxEZ7KZQ9dYCG0xg
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