Events
IEEE AP/CAS/ED/MTT/SSC Seminar
Title: From Rocks to Chips: Stories of the Transistor
Speaker: Professor Tom Lee
Stanford University
Date: Friday, June 23, 2023 @ 1:00-2:00PM PDT
Location: Qualcomm AZ Auditorium (10155 Pacific Heights Blvd, San Diego, CA 92121)
In Person only
*Non-Qualcomm Employees*: Please arrive 10-15 minutes earlier to find parking. Proceed to the front lobby of Building AZ and continue past the lobby to AZ Auditorium. No badge is required to access the auditorium.
Abstract:
The discovery, then invention, of the transistor sits almost exactly midway between Ferdinand Braun's discovery of solid-state rectification in 1874 and the modern era of gigascale ICs. As with other epoch-shattering inventions, the story of the transistor isn't quite as neatly linear as some recountings might suggest. Very few newly-minted EEs have ever heard of a point-contact transistor, and even those few are unlikely to know that these devices often exhibited a negative current gain (beta). This talk will answer questions such as, "What was an alloy-junction transistor? What were surface-barrier transistors? What was the hometaxial process? What happened to germanium devices? How can you build a single-transistor, non-switching voltage inverter?" Retracing some of the steps of the pioneers generates important insights into the nature of innovation, as well as a much deeper appreciation of the role of chance. As the end of lithographic scaling seemingly positions us on the threshold of a major technological discontinuity, it is perhaps helpful to study the story of the previous one.
Speaker biography:
Thomas Lee received his degrees from MIT, where his 1989 thesis described the first CMOS radio. He established the Stanford Microwave Integrated Circuits Laboratory in 1994, after having worked at Analog Devices, Rambus and other companies. He's helped design PLLs for several AMD and DEC microprocessors, and founded Matrix Semiconductor, ZeroG Wireless and Ayla Networks, among others. He is a Ho-Am (Samsung) Prize laureate, an IEEE and Packard Foundation Fellow, has won "Best Paper" awards at CICC and ISSCC; an Honoris Causa doctorate from U. of Waterloo (2013); and the 2021 IEEE Gustav Kirchhoff award. He was awarded a U.S. Secretary of Defense Medal (2012) for his work as Director of DARPA's MTO, and served as a Director at Xilinx up to its acquisition by AMD in 2022. He owns thousands of vaccum tubes, hundreds of oscilloscopes, and countless obsolete semiconductors. No one, including himself, quite knows why.
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