Carver Mead Earns Lifetime Contribution Award for Neuromorphic Engineering

Carver Mead (BS ’56, PhD ’60), Caltech’s Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, has been honored with a lifetime contribution award by the jury that confers the Misha Mahowald Prizes for Neuromorphic Engineering. Mead was presented with the award on April 23 at a ceremony during the Neuro Inspired Computational Elements Conference in La Jolla, California.

Mead, who has won many prestigious awards including the National Medal of Technology in 2002, is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on integrated circuits. He developed the process known as very-large-scale integration (VLSI), which enables the combination of thousands of transistors onto a single chip. However, Mead is also credited with being the father of neuromorphic electronic engineering, a field that takes inspiration from the computational processes of brains and neural processing to develop new approaches and means of electronic computing.

During the award ceremony, Tobias Delbrück (PhD ’93), professor of physics and electrical engineering at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, and a member of the prize jury, addressed Mead directly, saying, “The jury unanimously agreed that you should be awarded a special recognition of lifetime contribution to neuromorphic engineering for your establishing this entire field, which is now a whole community of people around the world—scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs—who try to take inspiration from the brain to build better electronic systems.”

The award citation reads, in part, “During the decade spanning roughly 1985-1995, [Mead] and his students at Caltech’s Physics of Computation Lab pioneered the first integrated silicon retinas, silicon cochleas, silicon neurons and synapses, non-volatile floating gate synaptic memories, central pattern generators, and the first systems that communicated information between chips via asynchronous action potential-like address-event spikes. His 1989 book Analog VLSI and Neural Systems and his CNS182 course taught these concepts and methods to a new generation of researchers. He co-founded companies to bring these and other research concepts to mass production. The generation of students he inspired now lead neuromorphic research and education in academia, government, and industry throughout the world.”

Mead’s discoveries led to the world’s first graduate program in computation and neural systems, which was established at Caltech in 1986. He has more than 80 patents to his name, has written more than 100 scientific publications, and has co-founded more than 20 companies.

During his acceptance speech, Mead said that it was very special to receive the prize named in honor of his late former student, Misha Mahowald (BS ’85, PhD ’92). Mead then noted that credit should be given to Mahowald for starting the field of neuromorphic engineering. “Actually, the silicon retina was Misha’s idea, and she basically dragged me into neurobiology. It wasn’t the other way around. She was probably the wisest person I have ever met, and I probably learned more from her than from any other single individual. [She was] an incredibly deep thinker … she was the one who started this field, and I was fortunate to partner with her in the process.”

At the same ceremony, the Misha Mahowald Prize was awarded to a team from the Sandia National Laboratories for its project, “Neuromorphic Advantage for Discrete-Time Markov Chain Random Walks.”

The Misha Mahowald Prize was created by and is sponsored by iniLabs, an organization based in Switzerland dedicated to the promotion of research and applications of brain-like computation.