Tuesday, May 13, 2003
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He Followed The Silicon Road
BY JAMES DETAR
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Choosing the road unexplored can often result in the biggest payoff — or so maintains
semiconductor pioneer Carver Mead.
Soon after Mead founded digital camera chipmaker Foveon Inc. in August 1997, the
company came to a huge fork in the road. Foveon's chief technologist had been working on
their first product. He came to Mead and said he had some "unusual" results.
Mead believes in being open with employees about what's going on. He told the
technologist to share his results at the company's weekly staff meeting the following
Monday.
"So he got up and talked about his results at the Monday meeting," Mead said. "There
were a lot of questions afterward. And then there was stunned silence. It was really, really
different from what we were doing at the time."
Mead made a decision on the spot. He asked if anyone had any more questions. When no
hands went up, he said, "Well, if I read this right, I think it means we bet the company on
this thing."
At that point, Mead said, "Everybody went 'gulp,' because it was really different. And it was
really a good thing. And we've done that three more times on this one guy's ideas."
Mead's ability to embrace change has paid off handsomely for Foveon, as it has for him all
of his life.
Foveon last year unveiled the X3 digital camera chip. The 16.8-megapixel device is getting
rave reviews.
Popular Science magazine last December named Foveon the Grand Award winner in its
annual Best Of What's New awards. And Time magazine named X3 as one of the best
inventions of 2002 in its Nov. 18, 2002 issue. Japan's Sigma Corp. uses the X3 in its high
performance SD9 digital camera.
Mead, now 69, is a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. He's also
the Gordon and Betty Moore professor of engineering and applied science at Caltech. He's
been a teacher there for more than 40 years. He was also employee No. 5 at Intel Corp.,
(INTC) and has founded or co-founded 25 high-tech companies.
In 1979, Mead and co-author Lynn Conway ignited a revolution in chip design. They wrote
the seminal text, "Introduction to VLSI Systems." Today, Intel, IBM Corp. (IBM) and many
other chipmakers use the VLSI chip design method.
In 1999, Mead received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize for Invention and Innovation, and
he was earlier awarded the Centennial Medal of the IEEE electronics trade group.
Mead says love of learning came very early to him.
"I actually think I was born with it. I was born in the Kern River hydroelectric project in
California," he said. His father and uncle worked on hydroelectric plants. Young Carver was
fascinated with machinery that generated electricity.
Making Connections
He says having people around who were willing to take the time to explain how things
worked created a thirst for learning in him.
"It was just the people connection, and the fact that there was all this fabulous technology
around, that got me interested," Mead said. "My dad would take me down to the power
plant to see it. And I would pester him to go."
Mead has had to overcome mighty big obstacles on the way to the top of his profession.
One of the biggest came when he was just a boy.
"Probably the most vivid thing in my young life was when I was out hunting with my best
friend and he dropped his gun and he shot himself. I lost my best friend when I was 13.
That was very hard," Mead said.
He determined at that young age that he had to go on with his life, however hard. He's
viewed most difficulties since as challenges to be met.
"I think in a way it's part of my being able to go on when things get tough," he said. "I've
been through a lot of tough times. That was the earliest really, really tough one. But there
have been a lot more."
Mead says he didn't have a plan when he started out, that he just followed his heart —
even when that got him in trouble.
"About every 13 years, I run out of gas doing what I've been doing," he said. "I've
contributed about as much as I'm going to contribute. I go through this midcareer crisis,
which I think I've had five of now."
He deals with such crises by learning to take stock and stay relaxed about his next move.
"Next time I could see that almost certainly I wasn't going to do the same thing forever,
even though I was enjoying it immensely. So it wasn't so hard" to make career changes, he
said.
Mead is now semiretired. And he doesn't run a lot of meetings. When he did, Mead knew
just how to get the discussion going.
"One of the important aspects of all those meetings was that we always had this thing
called 'confession,' " he said. "The principle being if something has failed, most people
don't want to talk about it. But those are the places where you learn."
He set an example by confessing his own mistakes. That gave others permission to do the
same.
"It's extremely important for a group to know that things haven't worked out. Otherwise,
everybody falls in the same foxhole," Mead said.
When errors do crop up, he says, it's no good to knock yourself out trying immediately to
overcome them. "I'll go for a walk, or go do some history, or I go down and work with one of
the companies," he said. "You can't just grind against the problem."
'Listen To The Silicon'
Failure's an integral part of success, Mead says. "You learn from every one of your failures.
I used to tell the students, 'You've got to listen to the silicon. It's trying to tell you
something.' "
If you build something or do something and it doesn't work out, he says, you can curse and
swear at it. Or you can learn from it.
"The physical world is perfectly willing to share with you how it works. If you listen. But if
you have your mind made up, you can go for years and not hear it," Mead said.
If he has to choose one critical ingredient of success, it's passion.
"I always tell people, 'Follow your heart, because you'll never excel at anything unless you
love it,' " he said. "It can't be because somebody's paying you a big salary or you're going
to be famous or blah, blah, blah. It can't be any of that.
"I've always told people I was the luckiest guy in the world because I've spent my entire life
being paid for doing the thing I love the most." |
