January 23, 2007 IEEE SCV EDS Meeting:

"The History of the Integrated Circuit: A Random Walk"

Speaker: Professor Tom H. Lee, EE Department, Stanford University
Subject: "The History of the Integrated Circuit: A Random Walk"
Location: National Semiconductor Building E Auditorium,
      2900 Semiconductor Drive, Santa Clara, CA 95051.  
      See the NSC Campus driving directions
      and the NSC Building E location map
Time: 6:00 PM - Pizza , 6:15 PM - Lecture
Speaker Contact: Jayasimha Prasad

Abstract:

This talk will describe the early development of ICs starting from the Braun's rectifier to present day microprocessors.

Most of us have learned a truncated, linearized version of semiconductor history. This is only natural; a technical education needs to focus on the relevant bits. However, an unfortunate side-effect is that students are left with the impression that technology always progresses along a more or less predictable trajectories.

As with any human activity, the path to the chip involved many dead-ends, titanic egos, ideas that were before their time, and ideas that will never be of any time.

This talk is an extended version of a 2006 IEDM luncheon presentation. It will describe some early pioneers, like Braun (who discovered rectification in naturally-occurring metallic sulfides in 1876); Austin (who first observed negative resistance in galena, prior to WWI); Pickard (who patented the silicon point-contact rectifier in 1906); Losev (who built solid-state amplifiers and RF oscillators in the 1920s); Lilienfeld (who patented numerous FET-like devices in the 1920s and 1930s; he is also the father of the modern electrolytic capacitor); Grondahl (who discovered rectification with cuprous oxide semiconductors in the mid-1920s), and others.

Clearly, the history of semiconductors before the modern silicon era is as rich as it is obscure.

Biography:

Thomas H. Lee received the S.B., S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1983, 1985, and 1990, respectively.

He joined Analog Devices in 1990 where he was primarily engaged in the design of high-speed clock recovery devices.

In 1992, he joined Rambus Inc. in Mountain View, CA where he developed high-speed analog circuitry for 500 megabyte/sec CMOS DRAMs.

He has also contributed to the development of PLLs in the StrongARM, Alpha and AMD K6/K7/K8 microprocessors.

Since 1994, he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where his research focus has been on gigahertz-speed wireline and wireless integrated circuits built in conventional silicon technologies, particularly CMOS.

He has twice received the "Best Paper" award at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), co-authored a "Best Student Paper" at ISSCC, was awarded the Best Paper prize at CICC, and is a David Packard Foundation Fellowship recipient.

He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of both the Solid-State Circuits and Microwave Societies.

He holds 35 U.S. patents and authored "The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits", now in its second edition, and "Planar Microwave Engineering", both with Cambridge University Press.

He is a co-author of four additional books on RF circuit design, and also is a co-founder of Matrix Semiconductor.

Tom Lee has been teaching analog and RF IC design at Stanford University since 1994. He has collected thousands of vacuum tubes, for reasons that remain elusive to him and to his wife.

For more information on   Professor Tom H. Lee - Stanford University

For more information on   Stanford Microwave Integrated Circuits Laboratory

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