The Silicon Eye 0393057631, 9780393057638

Citation preview

GEORGE GILDER

HHmmI

USA

ISBN 0-393-05763-1

$22.95

CAN. $32.00

Thanks tion,

to the digital

technology revolu-

cameras are everywhere— PDAs,

phones, anywhere you can imaging chip and a lens. Battling two-billion-dollar market

is

to

put

an

usurp

this

Silicon Valley

a

company, Foveon, whose technology not only produces

become

a

superior image

the

eye

artificially

in

may

also

but

intelligent

machines. Behind Foveon are two legendary figures

who made

possible: Carver

the

Mead

personal computer

of Caltech,

one

of the

founding fathers of information technology;

and Federico Faggin, inventor

of the

CPU— the

chip that runs every computer.

George Gilder has covered the wizards

of

high tech for twenty-five years and has an insider's

knowledge

of Silicon Valley

and the

unpredictable mix of genius, drive, and luck that can turn a start-up into a Fortune 500

pany. The Silicon Eye of

some

of the

is

a rollicking narrative

smartest— and most colorful-

people on earth and their race entire industry.

com-

to

transform an

PUBLISHED TITLES

THE

IN

ha

NTE RPR

I

S E SERIES

George Gilder

The

Silicon

Tim

Eye

Parks

Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Ken Auletta Media Man: Ted

Turner's Improbable

Empire

Rich Cohen

Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock

&

Roll

FORTHCOMING TITLES Richard Rayner California Capitalists

Stanley Bing

Rome: The Rise and

Fall of the First

Multinational Corporation

James Buchan

Adam

Smith

Jagdish Bhagwati Terrified by Trade

GEORGE GILDER

BY

The Party That Lost

Its

Head

Men and

(with Bruce

Chapman)

Marriage

Visible

Man

Wealth and Poverty Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise

Microcosm Life After Televsion

Telecosm

The

Silicon

Eye

The Silicon

Eye

George Gilder

& S

Atlas Books

W. W. Norton

8c

Company

New York London •

© 2005

Copyright

by George Gilder

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions. \V. \V. Norton

&

Company.

Inc..

500

Fifth

Avenue.

Manufacturing by The Courier Companies.

New York. NY

101 10

Inc.

Book design by Chris Welch Production manager:

Amanda Morrison

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gilder.

The

George

p.

cm.

—

date.

F.,

George

silicon eye

Gilder,

(Enterpr>

Includes index.

ISBN 0-393-05763-1 1. i

Foveon (Firm)

Santa Clara County

i

3. Digital

electronics.

Electronic digital computers.

5.

8.

(hardcover)

High technology industries

2.

Visual perception.

9.

4.

I.

California

Photography

6. Artificial intelligence.

Cellular telephones.

Federico. 1941-

—

Title.

II.

Valley

Digital

7.

Computer

Mead. Carver.

10.

Enterprise

— Santa Clara — techniques. vision.

11. Faggin,

(New York, NY.

HC107.C2H5334 2005 _ 338. "62 367'09-94 3—dc22 1

2004030994 \\. \Y.

Norton

& Company.

Inc..

500

Fifth Avenue.

New

York.

N.Y 10110

www.wwiMHton.com \\. \\.

Norton

& Company

Ltd.. Castle

House. 75/76 Wells

Street.

London

WIT 3QT

"-90

.

For Louisa

Contents

Prologue

Who

Is

Carver Mead?

13

THREE MEN AND A CAMERA Delbrtick Bursts In

23

The Fourth Camera Merrill's

View

31

47

The Charged Competition Annealing Neurons

57

63

THE FORGOTTEN FOUNDER FF

69

Beyond the Tobermory

Silicon

Gate

87

The Hopfield Net

93

jj

Part

THE CAT AND THE CAMERA

Three 1

U

Carverland

101

in

Michelle 1

2

Misha

1

D

Synaptics

139

4

The Analog

Perplex

Seizing the

Sword

16

125

The Cat

147 159

175

Teleology at Oxford

White Rabbit

Part '

ZU

Four

Merrill's

185

193

FOVEON

Magic

201

Lyons Den of Many Colors

209

Photokina 2000 and Beyond

ZZ

Foveon's Disruptive Challenge

Holy Kammoli! Foveon

RAW in Vegas

Epilogue

Camera's End

Glossary

287

Acknowledgments Index

303

251

299

277

261

223

233

The Silicon

Eye

Carver

Mead and

Federico Faggin in 1988 in front of a giant model

of a microprocessor resembling Faggin's historic designs. At the time,

Faggin was

CEO

and Mead was chairman of Synaptics, a company

devoted to creating a

new

kind of microprocessor inspired by the mas-

sively parallel operations of the

human

brain. Courtesy of Foveon.

Prologue

Who

//

—"^

"|

D

Carver Mead?

Is

eath Valley Nuts and Sweets/' beckons the neon sign.

Amid

mountains,

the lunar desert in a little

rimmed with remote

shop claiming

to

be "the most

beautiful gas station in the world,'' a sixty-nine year-old

named Carver Mead assumes century pilgrim.

among

the gas

The glow from It is

ently

full

the sign

falls

of the electrical debris. is

this

hunched on

mind

woman

—an

array of appar-

might intrigue a teenaged

of an airport security guard.

sits

October 2003, haplessly trying

this before.

relics?

And

midst of Death Valley in early

to catch

13

A

patiently in the car in front

She has been through

at a dive in the

phone.

his rental car.

Carver Mead, collector of electrical

he doing

prayerfully

his cell

on the backseat of

electrical devices that

small middle-aged blond

is

is

trying to get reception

tinker or strike terror in the

what

he

of arcane century-old technology

random

Who

the iconic pose of the twenty-first-

A trim bearded figure,

pumps

man

up with the world?

i

George Gilder

4

following his own visions and disciplines, whims and raptorial will, Mead has always managed to remain ahead. Although known

little

outside the silicon valleys of America, he has been

the leading intellectual figure in four decades of American electronics,

through

three

generations

fastest-advancing

of the

gauntlet of world technology. Crucial to his lead has been his intuitive sense of phase, his special feel for the timing of the

crests

and

and troughs of opportunity

history.

His intuition

is

in life

nicely

and

electricity,

summed up

exhortation, ''Listen to the technology; find out

in his

what

science

famous telling

it is

you" (meaning to go with the flow of the basic physics rather than twist

it

to

own

your

desires).

Born the son of an engineer tric

in a

Southern Pacific hydroelec-

plant in Kern Valley in California's

come

to learn of the

tentous relationships

power was

in phase,

immense power

among

its

High

Sierras,

Mead had

of electricity and the por-

phases in the plant.

When

the

with the crests and troughs aligned between

the generator and the line, electricity the eighty miles to Los Angeles.

would rush

But

between the generator and the transport

if

reliably

down

the waves of force

line

were out of phase,

the voltage shift could blow up the plant.

The Gordon and

Betty

Moore

professor of science and engi-

neering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in

Pasadena,

Mead

early in his career

the millions of watts of

power

had moved

his

in his father's

concerns from

domain

to the

nanowatts (billionths of a watt) of power in exotic microelectronic devices. In

1963 he

built the world's fastest transistor.

He

The

Eye

Silicon

15

researched the proposition about the rate of advance of semi-

conductor technology, doubling every eighteen months, that he

named Moore's Law

Gordon Moore. He con-

after its author,

ceived the chip design technologies that soon dominated the industry.

He

proposed and taught a historic course on computa-

tional physics with the late

Feynman, with

whom

Nobel Laureate physicist Richard

he shared a belief that electromagnetic

waves can move both ways

He

in time.

wrote an important book

on quantum theory and superconductivity called Collective Electrodynamics. Crucial in ships.

Whether

all

these pursuits were phase relation-

they resonated and grew, or dissipated

mined whether useful

The waves

—whether and dispersed —

the waves of force were in alignment

effects

deter-

were achieved.

of influence from his classes at Caltech often

impelled

Mead

advising

Moore

issued, he spent

north to Silicon Valley. at Intel,

much

From

his early years

where Mead wore the seventh badge

of his career

commuting

to the

Bay Area

and guide

their endeavors. His quiet

voice, steady gray eyes, trim goatee,

and swirly colored open-

to consult with his students

necked

shirts

When

became

familiar in the high councils of the indus-

As

to await

an

alignment of the phases of his thought with yours, he pauses.

He

try.

he says something, you

listen.

if

thinks before he speaks, and as he thinks he radiates, and the radiation

reaches the listener and opens his mind for the

impending

idea.

During the course of

his career,

tened attentively enough to act on his concepts.

many have

He

lis-

has served

as a founder of twenty companies.

Prominent among the twenty

is

a photographic

imager com-

George Gilder

16

pany

off

Mead lens

Zanker Road

in

Santa Clara

named Foveon, where

serves as chairman of the board. Imagers take light from a

and transform

it

into electrical signals containing an image.

new

Until early in the

century, nearly

all

cameras were analog,

using film that directly transcribed the image into a visible pic-

But

torial pattern.

this is a digital age. In digital

direct chemical analogies of a scene;

numerical values of the

light colors

you don't make

you translate

and

intensities,

it

into a set of

which can be

processed by computer into the desired picture that you choose to print out.

In

September 2003, one month before Meads stop

Death

imagers that converted the picture into a pattern

Valley, digital

of bits

in

and bytes

to

be stored on a computer memory exceeded

the unit sales of the usual analog film imagers for the

first

time.

Sold in 2003 were close to 35 million digital cameras. Incorporated in cell phones were a rapidly growing additional 10 million digital imagers.

Seven years before,

in 1996,

new

Mead founded Foveon

He

to

an imager for

this

imager chip

superior to any other imager in the world.

many

is

experts

in

era.

launch

devoutly believes that Foveon's

agreement are analysts

at

several

Among leading

photography magazines in Japan and the United States, John

Markoff of the azine,

New York Times,

futurist

and the photography team

Yet here

it

was seven years

the market for

new

at

John Dvorak of PC mag-

Consumer

after the

Reports.

company's founding, with

imagers exploding, and something at Foveon

was way out of phase. Of the nearly 50 million microchip imagers sold in 2003, the Foveon device

commanded

a share of

The

Silicon

the market less than one-tenth of

pany was an interim

scientist,

1

17

percent.

Running the com-

CEO who planned to return to his previous

role as chief financial officer.

nent chief

Eye

Richard Lyon, the company's emi-

was often on the phone, embroiled

in solv-

ing technical problems for purchasers of the Sigma camera that

used Foveons imager. Morale was declining. The most prominent board member, Federico Faggin, the Silicon Valley legend

who

built the first microprocessors at Intel thirty years before,

had chosen

to take a vacation

inventor of the imager, with

with his wife in China. The key

Mead, was an engineer named

Richard Merrill, recently returned from a photography tour in Africa.

The key designer

of the crucial software systems

and

imaging algorithms for the device was chief scientist Lyon.

was regaling the industry with learned speeches on the

He

history of

photography.

Conducted by Lonergan Richards

of

Redwood

City, a leading

new

Silicon Valley executive search firm, the quest for a

was foundering. With the venture investors

capitalists

and company

on the Foveon board bickering over future

one knew how

to

choose among Lonergan's

which included major

figures

CEO

strategy,

no

set of candidates,

from leading semiconductor com-

panies such as Intel and Micron.

Mead, however, to leave the

is

company

often a contrarian, and he had his reasons to its

own

devices for a spell. In the midst

of this critical transition, he chose to turn off his cell set out

with his

"life

partner," Barbara Smith,

on a car

phone and trip

across

the country. Said to be hidden deep in the Appalachians in

North Carolina were intriguing power-line

artifacts that

could

George Gilder

[8

aid

Mead's new

power

efforts to write a history of the creation of the

had served

grid that his father

For ten days,

Mead and

for a lifetime.

Barbara had found no relevant

But on the eleventh, deep

in the

mountains where no one had

meddled with the equipment, they began and

nal original amplifiers

the power grid of 1909

work

tems worked. Everybody had is

an incredible

uncover "phenome-

was

No

one knew how these

sys-

wrong,"

it

home

up

Mead

New Mexico,

weeks,

Mead

and across

to

a rental car with the arti-

in California

Death

decided to check his

down

phone

His Verizon service only stored three of the messages that a

woman named

for

know whether

was

it

messages.

But one

a voice mail

to

Mead

a thing or a person."

be Phil Bond, the undersecretary of

"Has anyone talked

more than two

from

Porter.

"She alluded to a Fillbond or something," didn't

40

into Texas

calls at a time.

somehow got through was

Mildred

Interstate

down

Valley. After

cell

"To find this

said.

through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Tennessee,

and

made

stuff

North Carolina. "This

in

thrill." Filling

they set off for their

facts,

to

insulators," the key devices that

not covered in any of the histories.

stuff

relics.

Commerce

It

recalls. "I

turned out to

for Technology.

you?" she asked as the

cell

phone

crackled. "I

can't hear you," said

She wanted

to

Mead, hunched by the gas pumps.

know: "Can you do a film

for the presentation?"

"What presentation?" Mead asked. "You don't know!" said Porter. Within a few minutes,

managed

to learn that

Technology

to

White House.

he was

a recipient of a National

be awarded by President George

Mead

Medal

W Bush

of

at the

The

In the East

Silicon

Eve

Room ceremony a month

19

later in early

November,

Bush would yawn through many of the presentations. But he was concerned about the future of U.S. manufacturing and

When

employment.

he heard of Mead's twenty companies, he

exclaimed, "Wow. That's what

we

need.''

Sure. But the president did not

there in the

White House

Foveon was indeed

project.

that

a

failure in his

company

vital to

and manufacturing employment.

petitiveness

retrieve leadership for the

Mead, standing

after a fall of travels

was on the verge of a

researches,

know

United States

in

It

and

historical

most promising

American comwas targeted

cameras and

to

digital

cell-phone imagers, long lost to such Japanese firms as Sony, Fuji,

and Canon. But

tions, in the

energy and

this

company

creativity,

most promising of American innova-

into

was

which Mead had poured the most

still

drastically out of

phase with the

market.

With

its

roots in a research project twenty years before at Cal-

tech in a field called neural networks, developing into a com-

pany called Synaptics through the and emerging

at

Foveon

imager had once seemed

late

1980s and early 1990s,

at the turn of the century,

likely to

Mead's new

be a capstone of his career. Yet

U.S. technology had suffered through a devastating crash in the year 2000. Attempting to bring the Foveon imager to market, the

company had found

the possible U.S. customers, from

Kodak

to

Motorola, in disarray, and the Japanese camera titans such as

Canon and Nikon for their

unwilling to rely on a small American start-up

key imager technology.

cesses, failure at

Amid

Foveon seemed a

century dawned over Death Valley.

all

the honors and suc-

distinct possibility as the

new

Part

One

THREE MEN AND A CAMERA

Nobel Laureate

on the beach

Mead

Max Delbriick playing backgammon with

at

his son Tobi

Baja in 1977. Physicist Delbriick pushed Carver

into biology

and Tobi became Mead's student and a founder of

Foveon. Tobi Delbriick

1 Delbriick Bursts In

Carver

Meads

path to the Foveon camera began one

spring day in 1967

Mead

when Max

the door between physics and biology. Storming

into his Caltech office with a

down

Delbriick burst open for

a challenge

on

his

bang and

a flurry, Delbriick hurled

desk that lasted the young professor

for

a lifetime.

A

burly

briick

man

had gained

with heavy hornrims and robust humor, Delhis doctorate in physics in the early

1930s with

quantum theory pioneer Max Born and then had joined arch Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. There he had

with the responses of living things to phototaxis. Defecting to biology, he icine in inal

1969

—two years

work conducted

All his

view,

and

days as a

life,

at

after his

become

light, a field

would win

meeting with

a

patri-

intrigued

then called

Nobel

Mead

in

—

med-

for orig-

Caltech.

Delbriick was ready to question the established

his questions

quantum

were seldom solemn. In

theorist

his

he authored an irreverent

*3

Denmark satire of

George Gilder

24

quantum theory formed

—"The

Copenhagen Faust"

—

that

for the physicists at Bohr's Institute in

was

per-

1932 with the

twcnty-six-year-old Delbriick himself serving as a top-hatted

master of ceremonies. At the other end of his career, studying the brain in his book

Mind from Matter?

the sixty-nine-year-old

Delbriick jibed at the neuroscience of his biologist colleagues.

Their efforts to explain the mind as mere material brain, so he wrote, resembled nothing so struggle to extract himself

own

much

as

"Baron Munchausen's

from a swamp by pulling on

his

hair."

Now

in

1967 Delbriick wanted Mead's opinion on

a recent

outpouring of scientific papers comparing the electronics of ion transfer through nerve channels in the brain with the electrical

behavior of transistors. Thirty-one years old, the lean, sprucely

bearded at

on

Mead was

already a professor of electrical engineering

Caltech with a growing reputation as a world-beating expert transistor physics.

'These guys are saying that a nerve membrane works transistor. Is this right?"

Delbriick asked

ferring electrical signals through

Mead

membranes

like a

brusquely Trans-

in the

human

nerv-

ous system, the nerve channel in biology corresponds on a superficial level to the conductive

channel

in a transistor, a tiny

switch or amplifier of electricity invented at Bell Labs in 1947

and used by the millions today Currents in both seemed to researchers "I

assumed

rise

in every

advanced microchip.

exponentially with voltage, and

that the processes

were the same.

don't know, I'd have to look at the papers,"

curtly.

At the time,

Mead

did not

know who

Mead

replied

the imperious pro-

The

Silicon

Eye

25

was and envisaged papers from

fessor

biologists with a faint

distaste. "All right/' said Delbriick, "here they are."

He

tossed a formi-

dable pile of printouts in front of Mead. "I'll

look at them,"

Mead

said doubtfully.

During the next week, apprised of the identity of the intruder

and

rising to the gauntlet hurled

papers.

Quickly warming

to

on

the

his desk,

Mead

subject,

he found himself

perused the

increasingly dubious of the confident calculations and comparisons

between electronic and

biological functions.

He

called

Delbriick and commented, "Those papers were interesting, but the model they are using

is

really garbage."

"In that case," Delbriick responded, "we'll have to find out

what's true."

Thus began lowing a at

summer

Konstanz

1971,

a long relationship

Mead

in

between the two men.

studying electrical currents in nerve channels

Germany with

Delbriick ally Peter Lauger in

designed a special electronic device for plotting the

conductance of nerve channels using "black

These recently invented

artificial

the physiology of the nerve

lipid

membrane. Using

membranes conductive, Mead showed

membrane

special catalytic to

make

that the flow of current

did not increase exponentially with voltage,

but that the number of connections across the

The

bilayers."

structures exactly reproduced

molecules acquired by Delbriick that were known

across a

Fol-

brain turned voltage not directly into

membrane

power but

did.

into con-

This finding became the prevailing wisdom in the

field

and deepened Mead's relationship with Delbriick, which

also

nectivity.

George Gilder

26

led to a tutorial link with Delbruck's son Tobi at Caltech. After

Delbruck's death,

a kind of uncle to Tobi

and Tobi

of the founders of Foveon Corporation.

became one

The

Mead became

elder Delbriick focused

Mead on

Delbriick called transducer physiology:

all

the subject of what

that goes

on

ceptual process between the physical inputs and the icant output,

all

in a per-

first signif-

the transformations that happen between sense

and symbol, between the blinding rush of electromagnetism on the eye and an intelligible image in the mind. Delbriick that

what we perceive

(the

image of the world)

is

showed

radically dif-

ferent from

what we receive

Vision

more than photodetection. As MIT's Anya Hurlburt

is

far

and Tomaso Poggio put

it

(the flood of

waves on the

years ago, "Vision

is

retina).

not a sense but an

intelligence."

Biologists

knew

little

about these transducer processes

beyond rough vectors of connectivity between the retina and the cortex that to vision.

seemed

Mead

to assign nearly half of the brain's resources

believed that he had found ways to model

perceptual functions. tions

were some

He assumed

fantastic,

that in general brain func-

mostly analog, concoction of currents,

chemistry, and timing, with baffling labyrinthine links

them, "high fan-in and fan-out"

Although past

silicon

some

—

lots of

among

connections to and

fro.

technology could not yield analog

devices with densities remotely comparable to brain tissue, by the early 1980s

work

Mead was moving

that rendered "toy" retinas

kind of neural net-

to create a

and cochleas out of very

scale analog-integrated circuits, or analog

large-

VLSI. These were

chips that used thousands of transistors not as digital

number

The

Silicon

Eye

27

crunchers but as sensors and collectors of real-world inputs.

Mead and

his

team created electronic cochleas

that

would prove

useful in hearing aids and also contrived a series of retina chips.

Although

still

vastly simpler than the brain, these

offered the glint of

new

Once you

insight into perception.

build something, you understand

in a

it

way

models

you never

that

can through speculation or mere measurement. And once you understand something, grasp tions,

you can build

it

its

underlying physical founda-

ever better. This

is

the virtuous cycle

of industrial creation that began with Delbriick's transducer

challenge.

The process digital is

ultimately led to the creation of

imager for a

digital

camera. The

rise of

what

is

called a

the digital camera

the most sudden and transformative industrial event since the

emergence of the personal computer. After the provision of series of

new

digital storage devices,

(CD) and the

video disc (DVD), and after the prolifera-

camera opens up the world of electronics

eye.

of

such as the compact disc

around the globe of the wired and wireless Internet, the

tion ital

digital

Anywhere

human

dant

that the

vision

digital

and

network can reach

vigilance, art

product of the

new

and

is

to the

now

insight.

than the idea, even the phrase,

no such

thing.

The

a possible site

It is

the ascen-

millennial decade.

digital

digital

the camera addresses what

is

camera. There

camera

is

is,

more

after

all,

an oxymoron because

chiefly an analog problem: the

challenge of creating within a machine a model colors, shapes,

dig-

power of the

Yet nothing reveals the hypertrophy of the digital idea

really

a

—an analog—of

and textures from the world outside

it.

George Gilder

What

a so-called digital

images from

camera does

to convert analog

is

light detectors into three arrays of tiny dots called

pixels, or picture

elements. In most digital cameras, each pixel

bears a numerical value for the intensity of one of the three pri-

mary at

colors

each

—

red, green,

pixel, the

and blue.

each

pixel,

it

but one color

Gauging only one of three colors

computes the actual mix of

of the value of colors of neighboring pixels. it,

all

conventional digital imager throws away two-

thirds of the light at the outset. at

Filtering out

colors

on the basis

As Carver Mead puts

the digital camera "guesstimates" the colors.

Carver Mead's obvious, but profound, insight that eventually led to

Foveon Corporation was

and use the

to

banish the

—the substance of

silicon itself

kind of permanent film, like a retina.

determined scientist,

From

to avoid

From

digital

guesswork

a microchip

the outset,

—

as a

Mead was

throwing away information. As Foveon chief

Dick Lyon, explains, they wanted "no guessing

at all."

the beginning, they resolved to "measure every color at

every pixel." In the Foveon camera, every pixel would register real features of the

image rather than

digital simulations of

At Caltech, long before Foveon was a gleam

and

his team, inspired

by Delbriick, learned

goal of silicon "film" not by trying to build a

in his eye,

how

Embracing the

computer

that

silicon as the physical layer,

undertook a deep twenty-year exploration of ties.

its

Mead

to achieve this

be better than an eye, but by building an eye, actually a in silicon.

it.

would retina,

Mead

analog capabili-

The Foveon camera began not by attempting

to

transcend

analog processes or render them irrelevant, but by exploring

both the biology of the

computers.

human

eye and the limitations of digital

The

Silicon

Eye

29

Computers can perform instantaneous calculus and

create

models of short-term weather or store and search the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a disk-drive database. But

they cannot see. Even today, recognizing a face glimpsed in a

crowd across an

image processing than together.

The

and

all

the supercomputers in the world put

pursuit of a fully successful camera, therefore,

must begin with brain,

two human eyes can do more

airport lobby,

human

a study of the

this study, for all the

retina

and the human

grander claims of brain science,

has only just begun.

Now being used

in

cameras

for the first time, the first

based on a serious study of the is

the Foveon X3.

The

story of

human its

retina

imager

and neural system

creation combines themes of

neural science and engineering with a tempestuous narrative of

business history.

many

From Delbriick and Feynman

to

Mead and

his

students and colleagues, led by Richard Lyon and Richard

Merrill, the story brings together

some

of the

paramount

both in the history of Silicon Valley and in the research nity at Caltech.

It is

a story of

minds and

brains,

figures

commu-

and the

still

mysterious transductive interplay between them, in conflict and creation, in

triumph and self-destruction.

Foveon chief

scientist

Dick Lyon with

his

high-school yearbook displaying the panoramic

product of his third camera, huilt sixteen.

His fourth camera

industry. Dick Lyon

may

when he was

transform the

The Fourth Camera

As

a high-school youth,

Dick Lyon showed scant

an incipient revolutionary or dasher of icons.

signs of

He was

a

nice kid with crisp, smooth features, dancing eyes, and short

brown

hair

brushed neatly

to the side.

You could see the

eyes dance in a photograph he had concocted for the yearbook

where

his face reflected clearly in the bulge of a shiny faucet in

a basin in the physics laboratory.

He was head

photographer of

the yearbook for two years, a good job for a dutiful teenager

who

respected his elders and the equipment. In other pictures in his yearbook, nearly

you could see the eyes of some of the

The cute blond and smiling

pictures, definitely

no

black and white,

dancing around him.

Leslie, for example, holding the

in the

Math Club and

girls

all

huge

Math Club photo and decorous

in

slide rule

many

other

was intrigued by Lyon. President of both the

the Science Club, teachers pet and polisher, with

signs of a fierce Edisonian scowl or

Feynman

mischief, Lyon

looked twinkly, a bright, well-behaved teenager of the 1950s.

V

George Gilder

32

Except

it

was not the 1950s, but

a proxy: the late sixties

Roundup,

earlv seventies in El Paso, Texas. In his yearbook, the

1970 high-school

for his

class, signed

many

by

girls call

"Einstein" and in a neat, leaning-over-backwards pen, pay ble tribute to his brains

better

and bright

future.

But

and were not especially impressed.

was not up

gently imply, he

to the

and

his parents

him

humknew

Intellectually, they

standard set by several of his

brothers.

"You should ask

me

Da\id," says the dad.

about

Why

Tom and Jim and Bob

was

I

.

.

.

yeah and

focusing on Dick anyway?

"Dick couldn't even spell 'diaphragm' correctly for his Westinghouse Science Prize application," recalls the

'Tm not

saying he was slow or anything, and he usually could

But he

spell.

messed up on 'diaphragm.' And

really

the expert on cameras.

Ellen,

is

ration

and made

there wasn't

all

The Lyons basement on

Most

in the house.

much room

that

lived in a

his sister,

Eastman corpo-

to

But no question,

That wasn't

at issue.

to start with.

modest structure with

and no

a garage

L.

Lyon,

Jr.,

and

his writer-editor wife

their nine children kept the

of the kids

would

star

Willie Ingles as

Dad

academically

at

Austin High

did before them, and go on to gain

science degrees at major universities. to

work

at

Verna

scene mostly under con-

School in El Paso, study algebra and precalculus under

went

And

a quiet El Paso street, called Fillmore Avenue,

where William

trol.

Went down

a collection of early Kodaks."

Dick took the most room

Mae. and

mom.

A

civil

Airs.

math

or

engineer, Ellen

Eastman Chemical Corporation and became

intrigued with cameras. David, Jim,

Tom, and

Bill

would go

to

The

The

Princeton.

Eye

Silicon

33

oldest, David, a mathematician,

now

does busi-

New

ness consulting at Aurora Market Modeling in Manchester,

Hampshire.

Bill

Lyon

III

applies advanced

jections at the Prediction ied in

mathematics

to business pro-

in Santa Fe.

Jim also stud-

Princeton and went on to work at Microsoft

Redmond, Washington.

A

Unix

badge" in

at

Company

math

at

star at Bell Labs,

Sun Microsystems

(right

behind

the "eighth

Bill Joy).

He

helped

Unix-based operating system that became

adapting the

1988, he also

Solaris. In

Tom would become

became famous

in Silicon Valley for

leading an engineering group in an overnight redesign of the

executive offices of

Sun CEO, Scott McNealy, and

his top assis-

tant into an indoor one-hole golf course, complete with sand trap to

and water hazard. The can-do

Tom was

doing what he could

CEO around the Sun headquarters, but finally

keep the golfer

gave up and defected, to found the IP Router-switch Ipsilon,

company

which was bought out by Nokia.

Brother Bob, a Cornell man, also became a serious star

at

Sun, leading the team that created Sun's search software and industry-standard

dominance

in

Network

File

System (NFS), keys

networked business computing.

to Sun's

When Sun

failed

to follow his ideas for multiprotocol storage systems, however,

he went on

to

co-found the prominent computer storage

ware company Legato, now owned by storage

were well behaved

All these kids really

or

keep up with

Tom and Bob

David and

at

home.

titan If

soft-

EMC.

Dick could not

his two-years-younger brother, Jim, in

math

in the intricacies of getting rich in software, or

Bill in

abstruse business consulting,

maybe

that

was

George Gilder

34

why he went

was why he worked so hard,

trying to get in

on the ground

the physical layer, building things and tearing

One

day

Dick had

floor.

it

floor,

apart. his office at

and was

trying to put

Mr. Lyon was chief engineer

Power Company, but he found

that

that the four-year-old

entirely dismantled the door lock

back together on the

them

home from

Power Company and discovered

El Paso

it

1956, Mr. Lyon returned

in

Maybe

Caltech rather than the Ivy League.

to

at the

hard to reassemble the thing so

the door would lock again. Mr. Lyon

hoped

Dick had

that

learned a lesson. But a year later Dick would be at work dis-

mantling the radio.

At the age of

ten,

Dick went with

his father to his office at El

Paso Power, where he showed the young boy the $100,000

Leeds

&

Northrup computer that controlled the generators

two power plants and transmitted output data back computers have two key aspects

tral office. All ital.

Analog functions connect the computer

essentially continuous characteristics,

radiations of light

bers,

all

to the cen-

—analog and

to the real

dig-

world of

such as flows of

fluid,

and sound, temperatures and pressures. The

screens, mice, scanners, microphones,

put devices are

at

and other input and out-

basically analog. Digital

computing

is all

based on binary on-off codes that can be shuffled

at a

numpace

of billions of computations per second in digital processors.

Mediating between these two worlds

numbers ers

—

are

complex devices called

(ADCs) and

Almost poses

—

all

—analog flows and

analog-to-digital convert-

digital-to-analog converters

processing

is

now done

chiefly simulations

— there

digital

(DACs).

digitally.

are entire

But

for

some pur-

computers using

The

Silicon

Eye

35

analog continuous voltages and currents to represent continuous

phenomena. Based on

real-world that Mr.

and gun-aiming device

a radar

Lyon had used during World War

II,

the Leeds

&

Northrop machine was an analog computer with a complex feed-

back system.

power

Its

electricity

purpose was

to simulate the flows of high-

through the circuits of the power grid with

flows of low-power electricity through the circuits of the puter.

The computer would compare

com-

the simulated values with

desired values and then "feed back" the differences or deltas to control the real

and the

power

lines.

The machine kept

the generators

balanced and loaded

tie-lines to other utilities

to a level

of the "lowest feasible incremental cost."

Lyon had persuaded

computer

As

in 1956,

a child,

and

his boss to it

had paid

buy the Leeds

for itself in less than a year.

its

intricate

a

dome. Dick

modern computer also

watched

or

camera the

fly

model airplane

parts,

under radio control.

were physical or analog machines, using real-world

materials and functions tal

size of the Astro-

closely for years in the garage as his

be assembled into planes that could

All these

you could proba-

today,

father plied a metal turning lathe to form to

this

arrangements of internal gears

and Selsyn motors. Using these devices

make

Northrup

Dick Lyon had been intrigued by the power of

analog machine and

bly

&

—inputs and outputs—

rather than digi-

numbers. Watching his father work with these machines,

Dick Lyon was learning

to

be an engineer

touch with the

in

physical foundations of his creed.

Now, however, back

in the utility

the entire project of raising this boy

room next

seemed

to

to the kitchen,

be getting out of

— George Gilder

36

hand. In there, with the washer-dryer and the water heater, Dick

had hung curtains and and dangled films

set

five

up

a developing

tank as

tall

he was

as

He had

feet long with laundry pins.

spread out boxes of cheap lenses, Kodak E-3 Ektachrome guidebooks, cans of black paint, and other

now

the whole toxic operation

where

it

Mom") were

full

siblings should

come

as a last straw,

in

On

What

if

in the garage using Dad's

the

A&W

one of

from the El Paso heat and take

he was

and

into the kitchen,

nine one-gallon

of malodorous chemicals.

Root Beer jugs

to

was overflowing

debris,

it?

was getting mixed up with food preparation.

kitchen table ("Don't worry,

Now,

—what was

his

a swig?

metal lathe

shape Plexiglas into pulleys to attach to the motor he had

stolen out of Mrs. Lyon's

handheld mixer. Soon they would

have to move out, eat

Pecos Bob's, and convert the whole

house into

at

combined darkroom and

a

laboratory.

What

all

did Dick

think he was doing?

Mr. Lyon had to admit that his son showed some promise in engineering feat of

stuff.

Dick had read about

photographing a bullet

with the noise of the gun.

ment he found

He

in flight

by triggering the camera

built a strobe light out of equip-

in his dad's garage

and

a

Xenon

ordered from the Allied radio catalog.

coil

Harold Edgerton's

Dr.

flash

and

trigger

set

up the

Then he

apparatus to photograph a Ping-Pong ball as his father hit

it.

But

Mr. Lyon and his son could not coordinate the equipment, including the Ping-Pong paddle, the well

enough

debris.

way

It

was

—more

in the dark. frustrating.

scientific

—

to

The

ball

ball,

and the strobe

kept getting

Dick decided photograph

it

lost

light,

amid the

would be better any-

a flying

moth.

The

Silicon

Eye

37

Delivering the El Paso Times and the Herald Post, he had

money by age

saved up enough

Olympus still

Pen-F.

He would

twelve to buy his

Dad tions

tried to

beam, and

The moth would

fly

out

persuade young Dick that making the connec-

would pose serious problems of impedance. Connecting a

would resemble linking

would need

a high

came home from

Dick

to lower the current to a

could accept. But by the time Mr. Lyon

a contraption using a light-sensitive

photo

one of the few vacuum tubes that Lyon ever used.

Rather than working with a direct wire connection, the actuator on automatic doors.

through a

to his strobe

the office that evening, Dick had bypassed the

impedance issue with cell resistor,

on the wires

a drinking straw to a firehose.

impedance source

level that the transistor

like

then

set off the exposure.

tiny transistor with the high currents light

camera, an

trigger the shot with a transistor,

a rarity in household experiments.

of a box, through a light

first

light

strobe flash. Mr.

beam focused on Lyon

still

it

functioned

The moth would

fly

make

the

the photo cell and

has several sharp pictures of the moth

in flight.

At the high school, though, the tivated by snapshots. trived

Moths

girls

in flight,

photo of a water drip in the

air,

were not

even an ingeniously condid not impress them. By

the time Dick was a sophomore, he had

crowd-pleasing strategy. tures

—pictures

the goal of

that

He

would

sufficiently cap-

embarked on

a

more

decided to make really gigantic pic-

wow

everyone

at

Austin High. With

becoming head photographer of the yearbook, he

set

out to contrive panoramic color shots of school scenes and events. Since he could not afford to

buy

a professional

pano-

George Gilder

38

ramie camera, he would have to build one from scratch. Mr.

Lyon had given him some an

In

effort to

ideas.

synchronize the exposure of the film with the

around

a tuna-fish can. Well,

tripod, the

it

was

at

a beginning.

This was his dad's idea, and

it

it,

as the

got

him

each point the image would be moving,

tures.

film

Attached to a

can could be turned by a hand crank that also moved

the lens around the film, exposing site.

35mm

young Lyon wrapped

rotation of the camera, the

Dick

however, that

recalls,

"it

was

a

camera scanned the started.

But because

made

blurred pic-

it

good idea

turned around: By fixing the tuna can and using

it

if it

were

to drag the

film around a roller to reverse the direction relative to the lens

movement and then can,

I

got the film

movement behind

rotating the

whole camera around the

movement synchronized with the lens

get the picture exactly, but

—

Anyway, Lyon showed himself

seem an Einsteinian all

moving

sun.

He

to

You may not

did.

be capable of what might

feat of conceiving several objects in El Paso

in relation to

figured that

the local image

for a sharp picture."

you may be sure he

fixed

if

one another, a piece of

the focal length of the lens

diameter of the tuna can, a

realistic picture

and the

film,

matched the

could be exposed.

Dick took several black-and-white pictures with the contraption. It

was

his first

panoramic camera.

This system never performed to his satisfaction, though, since the negatives

—an inch wide and

—were

a foot long

enlarge but not big enough to enable contact prints. to replace the

motor was

at

too big to

He

decided

crank with a small electric motor (Mom's mixer hand). With the mixer blades removed,

its

speed

The

could be varied and fingers.

He

Kodak

the

Edmund

used

aerial

would not

He

39

grind, blend, mince, or

chop

his

across

film

single-element lens from

the

box of cheap lenses went

for

$5 through

constructed a balsa-wood-and-plywood box for

He

the camera.

Eye

simultaneously to rotate the camera and pull

Scientific ("a

the mail").

tially

it

it

Silicon

painted

black. Trying out the device,

it

he

ini-

botched the coordination between the rotation of the

camera and the

film, yielding tall

skinny images. Working in

the garage, with the lathe, he contrived Plexiglas pulleys that

worked with

ball bearings to adjust the

movements, so

that

the one motor could accomplish the two rotation speeds for

and the camera. Finally the device began

the film rollers

producing handsome black-and-white pictures. That was Lyon's major camera number two. Black and white, however, would no longer do the 1968,

when Dick began

are

color,

brown and

in color. For a yearbook,

he noted, "even

gray."

in El Paso,

to

was hard enough just

to get

more demanding than

fatefully learn

Lyon had planned a

them

and hues. At the time,

it

an accurate-enough exposure (much

for black-and-white negatives)

do precise time and temperature control

that

would

light of the

also have to matrix the colors, integrating

for all the intermediate brightnesses

panorama

where most things

measure the intensity of

three primaries, blue, green, and red, as he

you

soon you

But color greatly complicates photography.

Not only do you have

later in life,

By

the project, most movies and magazines

and even family photos were

would need

trick.

in processing.

truly ambitious shot.

would capture the

entire

and then

He wanted

a color

quad of the school,

all

George Gilder

4o

long sepia buildings, the gray three-story main structure, the

its

gymnasium, the cars parked

in the

back

lot

by the tennis courts,

the flowers along the lawns, the whole polychromatic shebang in

one image. For

this,

he needed special Kodak Ektachrome

and a quarter inches wide and

five

aerial color

a problem.

Nowhere around

such images be cheaply developed. There was no

would need all

to figure out

El Paso could

alternative.

by himself the entire E-3 development

fix,

bleach, rinse, wash, stabilizer, and

That meant he would have

to take over the utility

room

developer tank and then the kitchen table for the overflow.

mom

think his

ever forgave him," said

the results were worth

ever centerfold.

showed

120 degrees.

Dad

"I

don't

in a jocular way.

Opening up over

of 1970 contained

But

one

photo covering

the other side was a near 360-degree

of the quad. Yellow flowers

its first-

a full four-page spread,

a black-and-white professional class

On

for the

it.

The Austin High School Roundup

side

Lyon

the fifteen separate steps, including developer, rinse,

hardener, color developer, dry.

designed for

five feet long,

photography

Here there arose

process,

film,

panorama

bloomed along the green lawns.

Parked in front of the three-story main building was a bright

VW bug.

crimson

In the utility areas

was an

array of blue

and

green trucks. Lyon had wanted to have an entire 360-degree cylindrical image, with a green

that

would have taken another page. He

pager

an

bush appearing

—

a

NBC

at

both ends. But

settled for the four

unique high-school yearbook displaying peacock.

yearbook picture

Many

in the

years later Lyon

its

colors like

would bring out the

course of courting his future wife, Peggy.

She was impressed: ''Wow! What a nerd!"

The

Silicon

Eye

41

Underneath the yearbook panorama was

a story about Dick.

Describing the prolonged calibration process for the coordinated

motion of the motor, the

film,

across the scene, he said,

"I'll

when

I

finally got

and won

my

first

Of

some

'til

before making any off to Caltech.

noncamera

the

panned

wrote up the process

of the spelling, he later

said: "This is

my

my fourth one"

fourth camera, Dick Lyon at seventeen

There he embroiled himself

also

in a series of

Mead.

worked with the

scientist of signal processing,

after retiring

won

of Sciences, senior divi-

projects under his advisor, Carver

Echo and

world's pre-

John Pierce, spearhead of

Telstar satellite projects,

who came

to

Caltech

from Bell Labs. Pierce got Lyon a summer job

Bell Labs. There,

still

only a teenager, Lyon invented

intensive digital signal processing digital

He

camera, Dick

you see

As an undergraduate, Lyon eminent

it

did fourteen somersaults

Academy

his future plans for the

third camera. Just wait

went

I

as

third prize in the Trans Pecos Science Fair. Refining the

place in the Texas Junior

sion.

bet

good one."

presentation and correcting first

and the camera

camera that took

(DSP) algorithms

digitized signals

example, and prepared them to be

from a

mapped onto

an undergraduate, Lyon became such a

DSP

at

new math-

for a kind of satellite,

for

a screen. Still

prodigy that he

taught the subject to undergraduates and faculty members,

including Mead. After graduation from Caltech in 1974, Lyon

Xerox

PARC

(Palo Alto Research Center),

moved on

to

where most of the key

components of the personal computer were

first

put together

George Gilder

42

into practical systems, including the interface, the laser printer,

mouse, the iconic user

and the Ethernet. Working with Eth-

Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs, Lyons won two

ernet inventors

patents on an Ethernet timing recovery circuit. In 1980, Lyon

invented the optical mouse. Used in various workstations from

Xerox and Tektronics, emitting a detectors.

beam It

it

defined screen locations with a mouse

of light detectable on a grid of solid-state photo-

was

a kind of device that later

as a neural network.

Simulating the intuitive and associative

processing of the brain

—with

inhibited neighboring neurodes

putations

among

became known

signals that either spurred or

—

it

clusters of pixels.

performed collective com-

Thus

it

could approximate

constantly changing and uncertain signals from the user

who

was moving the mouse by hand.

From Xerox, Lyon went

first to

Schlumbergers Artificial

ligence Lab, and then in 1988 to Apple Computer,

Intel-

where he

spearheaded the development of the second version of the Newton

handwriting recognition system

(the

one that actually

worked rather than the one that became haplessly famous

in the

much hype from

Doonesbury cartoon

for not working, despite

Apple). Through

these research roles, Lyon was piling up

all

patents by the score, most of cessing, pattern recognition,

By immersing himself boy, however,

them

related to digital signal pro-

and image processing.

in the

Kodak

color film process as a

Lyon had learned the most successful imaging

technology ever created. Invented in 1935 as Kodachrome, this multilayered film, using silver halide phosphors, represented the

climax of a series of color systems that dominated photography

The

Silicon

Eye

43

hundred years following James Clerk Maxwell's invention

in the

of three-shot color and additive color projection.

tems

captured the three primary colors, one

all

then green then blue

—and then combined them

or print, while the photographer

moved

ing had

second technique pursued

—red

for a projection

that noth-

moving subjects improved.

A

decades of the twen-

photographic transparency

patented by Auguste and Louis Lumiere of France, sensitive

time

at a

hoped against hope

in the first

century was autochrome.

tieth

earlier sys-

meantime. As the combining process

in the

accelerated, the ability to handle

A

The

it

used color-

dyed molecules of potato starch, covered with an emul-

sion spread across a transparent plate like a frame of film, to filter

the three colors at once.

when

a color transparency

The random mosaic

light

was reversed

filter

yielded

into the emulsion

through the same random pattern of grains. While

this

ungainly

process of "back propagation" yielded inaccurate colors and

modest

resolution, the pastel images

Twentieth-century

digital

were pleasing

to the eye.

cameras would repeat these essen-

three-shot and mosaic concepts with three-shot and mosaic

tial

charge-coupled device

CCD

(CCD)

systems.

With the advance

of

technology, this essential process of collecting and

filter-

and then computing the colors

after-

ing light intensities

first

wards has become quick and robust.

But the underlying

insight

—separate

colors

and postexposure mixing and mapping them

in a pic-

James Clerk Maxwell's. And the

CCD pic-

ture

—

is

the

same

registration of the intensities of three primary

as

tures necessarily suffer

from the process of

first

throwing away

two-thirds of the light (the other two primary colors) at every

George Gilder

44

pixel at the

time of exposure. Digital cameras then recalculate

the colors from the hues of neighboring pixels.

As Lyon came

camera technology

to see, this digital

taking over in the

new millennium

of capturing colors, a major step

backward from Kodachrome.

James Clark Maxwell and mosaic

filters

transcended both

by capturing

colors at

once

the film.

By allowing one quick shot on one piece

tering

all

three

as they penetrated to different vertical levels of

colors

all

was

was, at the most basic level

CCD, Kodachrome

Unlike the one-color

that

and

all

the light at

Kodachrome eliminated the motion and vious systems. Banishing

random

all

of film, regis-

locations

at

once,

overlay problems of pre-

filters

and processing guess-

work, Kodachrome would rule color photography for nearly the next

fifty years.

Eventually, though,

new method

tions to a

CCD

Lyon himself would make

digital

vital

of imaging that could eclipse both the

camera and the Kodachrome system. Laboring

through the fifteen steps for developing one color

he

let his

contribu-

mind wander

slide,

perhaps

to the possibilities of the transistors that

intrigued him. Perhaps there began to develop on the subcon-

scious substrate of his

Like the Ektacrome,

it

mind the

idea of a solid-state camera.

would capture three

colors of light at

three different levels at every point on the image plane, with no special color

enough

to

filters.

combine

developing process

With still

all

colors

on one chip,

and motion

at all. All

capabilities

it

would be

fast

and require no

the photographic procedures could

occur on the single silicon chip that also captured the image.

Advancing

at the

speed of the computer industry rather than the

— The

speed of the camera industry,

Eye

Silicon

this

45

breakthrough chip would rep-

resent a total revolution in imagers that would achieve both

speed and resolution exceeding either Kodachrome Technicolor movies.

And

it

slides or

would be hundreds of times cheaper

than the equipment of the day.

That was merely a dream. Amid

all

his distractions,

got around even to trying to build his promised fourth or the fourth great technology in the history of digital until

he came

to

this

new machine

—

to

cameras

and Lyon would need

a lot of help

from a

his

old

in building

be named the Foveon imager,

high-resolution color-sensitive "fovea" in the eye

Vermont.

camera

Foveon Corporation and rejoined

Caltech mentor and collaborator, Carver Mead. But

he never

after the

—both

silicon wizard

Mead from

Dick Merrill with a Sigma 10 camera containing his

handiwork

—

the

designed and built. will

become

as

PCs. According

Foveon imager that he

He wonders when

common to

largely

"Foveon Inside"

a logo as "Intel Inside"

Carver Mead, Merrill

creative engineer I ever met.

"

Dick Merrill

is

"the

is

on

most

—

3

Back—

to the

ice

Merrill's

View

Future. "Doc-tor"

Emmett Brown

played by Christopher Lloyd

at

your serv-

—there you have

it

the antic image of Dick Merrill. Wire-rim glasses, long

white coat, electromagnetic blond

hair, a bright feral glint in his

skyblue eyes, Merrill will be a familiar figure to

time travelers. Just step into this vehicle, with a

monochronometer

wavelengths of

light,

and attach

a

your highly analog flux capacitor called

it).

Then read out

all

you

faithful

new all-aluminum enclosed inside to emit just the correct

few score wires (that's

to the pins of

what Steven Spielberg

the data. "Doc" here will have you wing-

ing back into the future in a nanononce.

The reason he can do

it,

you understand,

is

that he's ignorant.

"Never underestimate the power of ignorance," Merrill doesn't

mean

that he

is

stark ignorant like an actor

says.

who

thinks

he can predict global weather over the next hundred years. is

ignorant and

of knowledge

—

knows he is

is,

and conscious ignorance

power. In other words, he

47

is

is

He

a

He

form

an intuitive exper-

George Gilder

48

[mental scientist. That

is

different from being a highfalutin

expert or an academic Ph.D. Merrill

man who went

to

work

first

is

way

of a

electrician

and

ignorant in the

as a carpenter

and

He

only slowly built up to chip design and silicon manufacture.

learned his trade without "being

how things

bombarded by you

are for so long that they give

endurance and

professors about a doctorate for

servility/'

"You know." he sums up, "I'm not one of those Caltech guys. "I

.

.

might not

school. six

.

Nowhere

reasons

why

too ignorant.

in

fit

I

vour

near.

I

story.

can't just

my

class in

do the equations and

tell

not going to work, like Dick Lyon can.

it's

will

go build the chip anyway

build chips

—and maybe

some other

useful effect, and

In other words,

wasn't at the top of

I

he

is

it

—

I

I

am

know how

won't work exactly, but it

you

I

to

will find

solves the problem."

a genius with silicon.

His problem-solving orientation served him well back in

Woodstock, Vermont, where he grew up, of a prominent local physician, he things. After graduation

became

a carpenter.

in his first job.

w as oriented toward building

from high school

While on the

The son

in the late 1960s,

job, though,

serving chiefly as an electrician. At that time in

he

he found himself

Vermont you did

not need any degrees or certificates to wire up houses, and unlike his boss he wasn't afraid of electricity.

None

of the houses

wired by Merrill burned down, to his knowledge, and during the course of his work he figured out

could turn the lights on or off

back and forth three times. Merrill savs, he

is

none too

It

how

to

equip a room so you

at either side, folding the wires

was

swift

a real puzzler for a while

—but he worked

it

out.

—

as

The

Five years

and physics

later, after

Silicon

Eye

he had made

at the University of

49

the

it all

Vermont

way through math

in Burlington,

tured across the Connecticut River to Hanover, shire,

he ven-

New Hamp-

twenty miles northeast of Woodstock, to study electrical

engineering at Dartmouth's Thayer School. There the experi-

ence with three-way wiring saved him a night of homework. In

one of

stumped most

his first classes, the professor

classmates with exactly that problem

—how

of Merrill's

to wire a

room

so

the lights can be switched at either door.

After graduation with a double neering), Merrill at

went

off to

E

(a

degree in electrical engi-

IBM's famous Watson research labs

Yorktown Heights, where he learned the alarming lesson that

ignorance can be even more effective

when

Exploring early Metal Oxide Semiconductors

—he

worked

microchip technology

endary inventor of

As and

memory

for

laced with alcohol.

(MOS)

Robert Dennard,

stint of

went

off for a long

it

might be good

IBM

inventor

lunch in April 1964 and began a

real work.

if

sudden pang of conscience. They

they accomplished something before

manage

all

of

them were

So they decided

to

do some Really Important Work,

leaving for the day. But

worthy of their glorious

memories

ing producer of

too drunk to

state of inebriation.

Dennard asked, "What agreed,

leg-

competitive boozing. Later, stumbling back from the

restaurant, they suffered a

thought

basic

chips.

Merrill heard the story from Dennard, the

his staff

—the

is

really

are important;

memory

chips.

important to IBM?" Everyone

IBM was Memory

then the world's lead-

chips consist of a tiny

grid of wires attached to an array of "cells" that store a desired

information bit at each point in the grid where the wires cross.

George Gilder

50

The problem

is

how

to stop the electrical

the bit from draining

At the time, each memory

to electricity. sistors that

silicon, cell

which

is

a sieve

consisted of six tran-

kept the bits alive by passing them back and forth in a "flip flop." Together with the wires

what was termed them, the

away through the

charge representing

six transistors

took so

much

between

space on the chip that

these memories were limited to the low thousands of bits rather

than the hundreds of millions or even billions of bits possible today.

"Well,

let's

invent

By the end of

some

better memories,"

a roisterous lunch, the group

idea of a single transistor storing the bit in the capacitor,

two

Dennard

memory

form of an

which consists of

a

cell.

It

said.

had arrived

at the

would be based on

electrical charge

on

a single tiny

conductor sandwiched between

insulators.

"Wouldn't "Yes,

it

just leak off?" asked

guess the capacitor would flux," Dennard said, "but

I

could be measured itance

one of the group.

on the

cell

at the

sum

of the capac-

You would have

to refresh the

end of the

and on the

wire.

it

line as a

cell constantly."

"Well, a

good

it

might work," said one of the team. "That sounds

idea,

you might

call

it

a

dynamic flux

like

capacitor. Call the

lawyers." In

memory berg,

IBM

1968, cell,

patented this one-transistor flux capacitor

and the

rest

is

history.

Bob Noyce, Steven

Ted Hoff, Emmett Brown, and the

rest of

Spiel-

them adopted

it

in various

ways and dynamic random access time-travel became

a surefire

theme from

Feynman

to

Silicon Valley to Hollywood,

Michael Crichton.

from Richard

The

Silicon

Eye

51

Anyway, that was how Merrill remembered Dennard remembering the invention of the now-prevailing technology for the

DRAM,

dynamic random access memory

the

Research offers a more sober thin film magnetic

work"

in

memories and

"many months

unique research environment"

the "one-transistor dynamic the working

memory

based single-transistor in

entailing

conference on of

an arduously "disciplined innovation process" using the

scientific resources of "a

all

tale, starting at a

IBM

chip.

memory

At the heart of nearly

PCs

in the world, the capacitor-

cell is

one of the key inventions

in all the

DRAM

cell."

to create

semiconductor history and according

to

IBM

bravado, "the

most abundant man-made object on the planet Earth."

Out son.

of his experience with Dennard, Merrill took a vital les-

He came

tern detection

to

understand that the secret of invention

and extension. "There's

a lot

you can get

is

pat-

in this

world just by looking for symmetry, looking for patterns," he says.

The tors

pattern of advances in silicon

per

bit.

The

memory was fewer

zero transistor bit? Sure.

IBM

transis-

had already

invented the hard drive in 1956, based on magnetic domains.

"Look

one area and apply

for a technological trend in

another," Merrill said. Using this technique, Merrill ating patents for National eight a

month when

meeting on tor)

CMOS

Semiconductor

in early

at a

it

to

was gener-

pace of some

1997 he met Carver

Mead

at a

(complementary metal oxide semiconduc-

imagers at the National offices on Lawrence Avenue in Sun-

nyvale. Since the mid-1980s,

structure of nearly

and other electronic Merrill

all

CMOS

has defined the essential

the digital chips in personal computers

gear.

met with Carver Mead on

several Fridays at National

George Gilder

52

he did not even know

who Carver

and

at first,

this

guy doing imagers that were not going

to

to

was.

"He was

just

work. They'd seem

work, they gave great demos, but those Caltech guys, they

know

a lot of stuff, they

they don't

know

— they

know much, much more than

know

can't

making something work once repeatedly, in volume, in that stuff because

I

mass production

do, but

difference between

and making

in a laboratory in a

wafer

fab.

I

it

know

have had twenty years of agonizing experi-

ence making things by the millions

in

Merrill's frequent habitat, where raw ingots of

—the

I

silicon

wafer fabs."

a wafer fab,

is

a chip factory,

from beach sand are transformed into

microchips through the most complex and rigorous manufacturing process ever conceived by

minuscule devices

man. Although fabricating the most

in all industry,

commercial wafer fabs are now

mostly too large to compete for real estate in Silicon Valley. Sur-

rounded by moats and metal fences and chemical septic pools, bulbous with huge tanks of deionized water and chemical gasses

and buttressed and suspended

to

absorb the shock of 8.0 Richter

scale earthquakes, attended by workers hermetically sealed in

white

suits,

these structures

modern version society's

smack

of

some

sleek and angular

of a medieval fortress, designed to protect the

most precious treasures from the outside world.

Sequestered in remote parts of the globe, wafer fabs loom on islands such as

Kyushu

in

Japan or bleak desert reaches such as

Chandler, Arizona, or even on the wilder edge of Portland,

Maine, where National Semiconductor makes

its

chips.

— The

Silicon

Arrayed inside these factories

Eye

53

a concatenation of shiny

is

metal machines linked by robotic arms moving quartz boats of silicon wafers

—

thin gray circular disks usually either eight or

twelve inches wide

—on and

may run on automated equipment less

like a

automated

may be borne by a controlled

is

These containers

tracks that traverse spaces

model amusement park

sites

machines

ing the

off of carriers.

between the

roller coaster or at

fab workers. Surround-

environment with mazes of

pipes carrying the millions of gallons of deionized water or

minute quantities of exotic chemicals into Turbines and

strategic positions.

constantly clean and process the atmos-

filters

phere in "clean rooms" that are classified by the number of particles smaller than

foot of

air.

particle

Though

500 nanometers

in

diameter in a cubic

entirely invisible to the

looms across

a

microchip as

naked

a "boulder."

eye,

such

a

Leading-edge

clean rooms at companies like Intel or National Semiconductor are "class ten" or

even "class one," meaning that there are

between zero and ten such

particles,

making

a

microchip fac-

tory tens of thousands of times cleaner than a hospital's cleanest surgical facilities.

Using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the exquisitely calibrated equipment,

wafer

lasts six

the fabrication cycle for each silicon

weeks and

entails

between 700 and 1,000

specific

process steps. Transcribing the chip's circuit design onto the silicon surface

is

photolithography. visible

a specialized photographic technique called It

bathes the wafer in near-ultraviolet light

wavelengths being between four and eight times larger

than the 90-nanometer features that must be inscribed on the

George Gilder

54

The

chips.

ultraviolet rays shine

through reduction lenses

in a

process that resembles a slide projector with the optics reversed to miniaturize rather

than expand the image.

Interspersed with the photolithography steps are hundreds of repetitions of chemical and physical etching, cleaning, ion

implanting, diffusing, and "doping" the silicon layers with needed

elements to create millions of nanometer-scale devices on every chip.

Each wafer holds hundreds of separate chips

cooked

batches

in

at the appropriate

that are

temperature for each chem-

reaction or physical deposition and then diced apart after

ical

they are probed and tested.

equipment tweaks, and specialized

Full of black arts, this wafer-fab

process lends

lore,

few masters the mystique of

its

a

kind of priesthood. Whatever grandiose plans for microchips

may emerge from

the systems engineers or computer-aided engi-

neering teams at

company design

microchip firms such as Foveon, rill

who

ultimately determine

Merrill, however,

chips and invent

was

new

centers or from "fabless"

the fab masters like Mer-

it is

what can be

a rare fab master

built

who

and how.

also could design

devices himself. Merrill thus could inno-

vate not only in chip design but also in chip fabrication, enabling

new

devices that could not be created by the usual processes.

This capability would prove crucial

where the usual industry-standard be adapted

to create

new forms

Patents had been issued on

CMOS

large to enable

Foveon Corporation, processes needed to

of analog photodetectors.

CMOS

But until the early 1990s, the feature

were too

at

imagers as early as 1964.

sizes of

CMOS transistors

an imager with a reasonable number of

The

pixels.

Silicon

charge-coupled devices (CCDs), a custom compo-

nent partly invented by Carver less

the

55

For imagers, the industry turned to specialized technol-

ogy, chiefly

up

Eye

Mead and

his students that took

space on a chip than transistors did. Like

field,

many

others in

though, Merrill calculated in the mid-1990s that by

then microchip progress had advanced enough to enable an

imager that uses a cleverly tweaked and controlled version of

cheap high-volume

CMOS

transistors instead of

CCDs.

At the time, the entire industry of analog semiconductors was pursuing what was termed "complementary technology." By

—two

using both positive and negative electricity every measurement

immunity

mon

to

to noise

— the

complementary approach offered

and other environmental conditions. Com-

both of the complementary

cancel out

when

sources for

signals, these influences

the difference between the two inputs

is

calculated.

In 1994, three years before meeting create a pixel with

Mead,

Merrill decided to

complementary output. Exempt from

ronmental interference,

it

would allow more

stable

envi-

and accurate

imaging. Building this complementary pixel, he discovered that

the two channels responded differently to different wavelengths of light. Different wavelengths penetrated different depths into

the silicon, making tary pixel. this effect

it

impossible to

But Merrill

—

make

a reliable

complemen-

listening to the technology

—thought

might be used in a silicon imager.

With three

colors penetrating different depths, a single silicon

device might render a full-color image, employing the physical properties of the material.

His

first

tries

yielded impossibly

George Gilder

56

murky

results,

but he thought something might be

might not be sharp but the

manufacturing

at least

details,

National's patent lawyers tion.

One

it

made

of

it.

"It

would be cheap." Elaborating

he registered

and proceeded on

his

concept with

to his next inven-

patent idea down, seven to go for June 1994.

The Charged Competition

proposing a

InMead,

Dick

new

silicon

Merrill,

challenging one

of

image plane

for cameras,

Carver

and Dick Lyon of Foveon would be the

proudest and most profitable

redoubts of Japanese industry. True,

like

almost every other early

invention in electronics and communications, from the transistor to the laser, the at Bell

charge-coupled device

(CCD) was

Labs, then the giant research arm of AT&T,

invented

now

serving

Lucent and Telcordia. But the Americans went on

its

offspring,

to

more adaptable memories. The Japanese adopted the

and converted light

it

from a memory

cell into

CCD

an imager, a kind of

meter that could convert photons into electronic pulses.

In inventing the device in 1969, Bell Labs

was seeking what

might be described as a tape player on a chip: a with a capacity in megabytes that offered tinuous stream. At a time

huge, and

Intel's first

held just 500

bits, a

when

DRAM

its

transistors

serial

memory

contents in a con-

were

still

relatively

(dynamic random access memory)

successful megabyte

57

memory

chip meant

George Gilder

58

memory domain

shrinking each

space as possible.

to as tiny a

This goal prompted Dennard's pursuit of the one-transistor

DRAM

cell at

IBM. The

netic spot, like the

was not a

ideal

domain on

a disk drive.

seemed

answer the need

to

Because the rectangular

that could efficiently pass

cameras shutter

dense memory device.

capacitors proved to be

contents to a

as

an imager

memory when

the

closes.

Leading the quest for the lab chieftain Jack to costly

its

Holding a movable

showed promise

also

on

for a

CCD

grid of

CCD

sensitive to light, the

mag-

Dennard's "flux capacitor," the

flux of charge in a capacitor, like

CCD

transistor but a

CCD was

first

Bell Labs' solid-state

Morton, who was seeking a

silicon alternative

magnetic memory for picture phones or answering

machines. Responding to Morton's quest were two engineers, then in their

thirties,

The analog

named George Smith and

in silicon of a

Willard Boyle.

magnetic domain

is

an electrical

charge on a capacitor. Smith and Boyle conceived of a long array of capacitors that passed their charges one to the other, as in a bucket brigade,

when dragged

along by a voltage stepping along the top.

Patented by Bell Labs, this prototype charge-coupled device

was

a first step toward the technology that ultimately

ply imagers for

would sup-

most of the world's cameras. However, when

Smith and Boyle presented the device

to

an International Solid

State Circuits Conference in 1971, they were surprised to find

young Mead student written with

Mead on

Mohsen and Mead, voltage to

Amr Mohsen

move

improved

a sharply

the

presenting a paper he had

CCD.

new charge-coupled

the charge

down

the line

Conceived by

device used a push

more

swiftly

and

reli-

ably than a pull voltage could. Although a Bell Labs researcher

The

Silicon

Eye

59

stood up during the session and declared that

work,

current

all

CCDs

columns

would never

use the Caltech design. Pushed by a

shifting positive voltage, electron charges registers or

it

to a horizontal buffer.

move down

vertical

Read out by an on-

chip amplifier, the charges are converted into a digital image. In the great imager confrontation

Foveon and the Japanese,

Mead

now under way between

thus can claim at least partial

authorship for both of the contenders. But back in 1971, Intel perfected Dennard's

DRAM for "working memory" and the eras-

programmable read only memory (EPROM), now

able

for software storage.

memory

The

CCD

went the way of

But when Bell gave up on the took over the project.

ist at

moved on

CCD,

Now

key developer, Gil

its

famous

to other inventions.

Ame-

as a turnaround special-

Rockwell, National Semiconductor, and Apple Computer,

Amelio was then

a

young researcher working

Boyle at Bell Labs in Murray turn around the

When

CCD

Hill,

CCD

sufficient

Smith and

He

resolved to

Jersey.

Labs

to Fairchild

for imaging.

Amelio moved from

and made

for

New

Bell

ductor, he set out to adapt the device for this

the

specialized

devices unfavored by the onrushing advances of silicon

chip technology. Bell Labs soon

lio,

all

"flash,"

improvements

to

new

Semicon-

application

be credited as a father of

imager. In the 1970s, Fairchild created a small busi-

ness in the product for

NASA

remote sensors on

satellites

and

space probes.

making many humble

visits

both

to

Murray

Hill

and

to Sil-

icon Valley from the 1950s through the 1970s, however, were

George Gilder

60

Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Kazuo Iwama, together with

Makoto Kikuchi,

a scientist

and the builder of Japan's

from Tokyo's Electrochemical Lab

first transistor,

who became

Sony's

research chief. As American companies Bell, then Fairchild,

then Texas Instruments, and then Rockwell

Sony wrestled with the technology

field,

dropped from the

all

for

some

thirty years,

gradually eking out a device that could be manufactured by the

thousands, with a yield of one or two per wafer. Sony's cofounder, third president, and transistor

devoted

much

of his career to pushing the

unforgiving gauntlet. of his gravestone in

Iwama never But

Embedded

Kamakura

is

lived to see the

Japanese-made

in the

a

CCD

through

this

upper right-hand corner

CCD

chip.

widespread success of

CCDs.

pioneered most successfully in Sony

like the transistors

handheld radios and in

champion Kazuo Iwama

like

the lasers that were used most widely

CD players, CCDs from Japan finally outper-

formed those of the American inventors. The Japanese are now manufacturing ing a

them

CCDs

by the scores of millions and incorporat-

into ingenious

camcorders and

digital

cameras that are

key source of profits for Japanese industry. In Japan, the

CCD saved the solid-state division of Sony Cor-

poration in the 1980s after sors

and

some

calculators.

It

it

failed to

six million a year, to

become one It

microproces-

early twenty-first century. Far

down

at a rate of

of Sony's most profitable

became

highest-performance-image plane for

become one

in

enabled the camcorder, made

products through the 1990s.

has

keep up

the lowest-noise and

digital

photography

the learning curve, the

in the

CCD

of those established products that has gener-

The

Silicon

Eye

61

ated an entire industry, supply chain, financial keiretsu, and of manufacturing skills

and machines.

terintuitive but remorseless

It

web

benefits from the coun-

law of business philosopher and

pundit Peter Drucker ordaining that no innovation can displace

an established system unless

it

is

ten times better. Almost no

inventor wants to hear this law, which disgruntles patent holders

around the world. But

it

remains mostly

true.

5 Annealing Neurons

A

the heart of the science of late 1960s neural net-

t

—computers inspired by model —was analogy with the

works

.brain

steel. Steel is

annealing cooling

a

a bizarre

tempered and strengthened by

—heating

it,

of the

human

processing of

a technique called

up

again,

in a repeated cycle of diminishing amplitudes,

some-

it

up, cooling

it

down, heating

it

times climaxed by plunging the metal into icy water.

Try

it

some time on your own neural network,

yen for nerves of

Sauna,

steel.

if

you have a

oscillate, sweat, jiggle,

shudder,

shake and bake, and dive into the wintry bay by the Golden Gate as

some people do every year

refresh you. For a to

new

in

San Francisco.

to find a

will surely

—planning going cameras —you

utterly

Silicon Valley start-up

transform both computers and

have

It

superman

or two,

men

are

to

of steel. Perhaps annealing

offers a recipe.

What

is

going on in an annealing process, like the process of

developing a film, or even bringing closure to a meeting or pur-

63

George Gilder

64

pose to a company,

is

a quest for a desired condition of the mol-

ecules of the material. With a film camera you want an arrangeof silver halide molecules that convey a targeted image.

ment

The developing process

tips

and sloshes the film through

when

cession of chemicals toward a "program" created

image

is

result of the computation,

With

a

conforms

to the correct

such as the recognition of

a face (hi,

meeting you want an enduring consensus. With

a piece of steel,

you want an arrangement of

that will not break

A

the

exposed. With an analog computer you want a configu-

ration of electrical energy patterns that

Carver).

a suc-

crystalline

under pressure or sag

form

—think

of ice

softly

molecules

ferric

on

—arranges

a hot day.

the molecular

grains of a metal in an aligned structure, riven by shear lines

prone to fracture. Ice resembles a

digital

system

—

and

perfect at

every step, and perfectly fragile in the face of a mere bug.

Whoops! Emerging from the brine with you too may

feel

crunchy and

frost

crystalline,

on your eyebrows,

ready to shatter into

shards.

On

A

heated metal gravitates to a homogeneous

fully

leable will

the other hand, you don't want to be cooked either.

clump

that does not hold

its

form.

Out

array, a

mal-

of such a glop you

not even be able to extract an image.

What you

desire, as a

of molecules that

is

man

of steel,

is

a

random

distribution

free both of the fault lines of a crystal

and

the ductility of heated metal. To arrive at this point, you need to

heat up the molecules, jiggle

them around, and shake out

the crystalline clumps and shears, without melting

shapelessness. Your

man

of steel cannot be a blob.

them If

into

you are

annealing a sword, you need a bendable blade with a sharp cutting edge.

When

you get what you want, you plunge

it

into icy

The

water to preserve the

Silicon

result.

Save

Eye

as:

65

Deadly-weapon.doc. Or

Supermancomic.gif.

Consider strike

you

metal,

it

a computational result. If

computing does not

as a plausible analogy for the processing of a

don't

computing

That

worry.

as a

is

because schools tend

lump

to

of

teach

branch of mathematics, an abstract discipline

separate from the physical world. But the physical world, as it

changes,

the state of

is

its

constantly

doing computations,

transforming

molecules in accord with the algorithms of phys-

ical law.

Thus computer

scientists see the universe as the ultimate

analog computer, processing cosmic cycles of astrophysical, chemical, and geological change toward a graphic result ren-

dered as the landscape, weather, and climate you see through your windows. In that way, computer scientists differ from

plumbers, for example,

who

rarely claim that the universe

is

merely a Kohler machine, a particularly clever arrangement of

cosmic pipes and valves, though such a notion ble.

Carver

Mead

is

equally plausi-

teaches computer science to biologists and

other beginners as a form of plumbing hydraulics. In annealing, the successive steps of heating

down

a material represent efforts to jiggle

up and cooling

and seduce a system

toward a desired outcome, shaking out suboptimal fixations or energy disequilibria height.

—

errors

—on the

way. Analogous to heat

is

Both hold potential energy. Imagine a pinball machine the tray up and

with two knobs that enable the player to

tilt

down and back and

maneuver

forth using gravity to

several balls) forward toward the goal.

the bottom (or pops into a hole),

it

Once

will not

a ball (or

the ball pops out at

come

back.

It

has

George Gilder

66

arrived

at

its

energy equilibrium.

physics

In

math, such

processes are governed by formidable procedures called "Hamil-

Rowan

tonians," after the great Irish mathematician William

Hamilton. In 1834

method

general of

all

at the

age of eighteen, he introduced a "a

dynamics, by which the study of the motions

in

free systems of attracting or repelling points

is

reduced

to

the search and differentiation of one central relation, or characteristic function,"

which might be

gravity, or voltage, or

thermal

entropy.

Neural networks treat computations as downhill movements toward equilibrium. During the hot phases, the atoms material are high

up

in the

in the topography, full of potential energy,

hopping around unpredictably. The solution comes when the system cools off and gravitates to the valleys, the basins, of a low energy equilibrium, the solution set by the computer program or

camera image. But on the way they may come trap,

caught in a tree or a high

shaken

free.

When

some suboptimal

a

to rest in

from which they must be

valley,

company becomes

goal

—

it

often

ship. Early in the history of the

an upland energy

so ensnared

—pursuing

must be saved by new

Foveon

leader-

project, long before there

was a Foveon company, long before Dick Merrill and Dick Lyon actively entered the scene, the crucial leadership

legendary figure of Silicon Valley Faggin

who

called

on Carver

named

Mead

new

science of the

—the

processor

human

Federico Faggin.

to help

Faggin was shaping called Synaptics.

Its

came from

him with

goal

brain to create a

central processing unit in a

was

new

a

It

a

was

company

to exploit the

kind of micro-

computer or camera.

Part

Two

THE FORGOTTEN

FOUNDER

Federico Faggin at the beginning of his career at Olivetti in 1961 in

Borgolombardo,

Italy,

flanked by technicians helping him

culator system he built boards.

At

Intel he

test

a cal-

using some one hundred printed circuit

would put the same computer power on a

chip. Courtesy of Federico Faggin

single

6 FF

Many is,

Americans have no idea of who Federico Faggin

why

his

his

name

to the cognoscenti,

a

expectation in the Valley.

who knew enough

Fah-jean, Federico Faggin

circuit design,

company would cause

a

at

comment and

susurrus of

However,

arrival

was

to

pronounce

a paragon of integrated

and the man who contrived the basic microchip

technologies that enabled the creation of silicon computers and

cameras.

If

fabulations

you could see through

—

McKenna PR journalists

suits,

the Intel publicity fogs and

sweet smiles and smoke from

Regis

with their jargon and gentle guidance for

and historians

was comparable gods,

the

all

all

—you

might understand that Faggin

in his contributions

even

to the legendary Intel

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore.

Working inside

Intel,

an

Italian

immigrant, age twenty-three,

with skewed English and few friends in the Valley, Faggin had

been the true creator of the microprocessor, the central processing unit in nearly every personal computer. This

69

was the product

George Gilder

jo

that

had made

Intel the

main company of the California econ-

omy, the core holding of every technology investment portfolio,

and the crucial physical foundation the

The microprocessor

north.

Japanese

— seemed

memory

and the

to

be slipping away

Key

chips.

in the

fast

to

that

mid-1980s

—and

amid

Intel's

a tide of

computer revolu-

to the personal

rise of the Internet, the

empire

was the product

the United States' lead in semiconductors

profits as well

tion

also

from Japan

retrieved the technological edge

when

for the Microsoft

microprocessor could even

be deemed the basis of American commercial power and thus ultimately

its

military might. Lying at the heart of nearly

all

major products of U.S. industry, microprocessors inform the cruise control

and power brakes

television sets,

manage the

in cars, regulate the tuners of

interior

environments of tanks, and

guide missiles to their targets.

One-tenth of the weight of

rival solutions,

the original micro-

processors thrived in applications requiring absolute minimization of

power and

size.

The

first

one, Intel's

developed, fabricated, and tested by Faggin

Apollo spacecraft that took

men

to the

silicon space.

—was

—designed, used in the

moon.

In those days of large transistors, there

on

4004

was

a

huge premium

You could not waste area on the chip. In the

design of the 4004, Faggin adhered faithfully to the rule of

minimization. But on the face of the chip, integrated with the

thing extra. area were sistors.

where

it

could not be removed, he added some-

Consuming

a precious square millimeter or so of

silicon circuitry

what appeared

Through

a

to

be two malformed additional tran-

microscope, the concerned historian could

The

Eye

Silicon

71

see that on the border of the chip Faggin had

miniature Fs

—

FF. Faggin's English

was

embossed two neat

still faulty,

but he was

not shy. Yes,

we

knew,

all

all

of us in the know, that

erico, to the extent that

signed the all

first

man

one

it

was

really

could be credited,

Fed-

who had

microprocessor and was the proximate source of

the bounties of

creation.

its

Even more important, though,

in

enabling the whole industry to prosper, was Faggin's previous

development of a new fabrication method called the

silicon gate

process.

Electronics cations links

is

a

technology of wires and switches: communi-

combined with

controllable transistor cross-points

that can perform logical or sensory functions. In a world of ever

more

trillions

Whether

of transistors, the switches

become

in brains or microprocessors, all

relatively easy.

computing

is

ulti-

mately limited by the wires, by the reach and bandwidth of communications. results,

If

you cannot integrate the various intermediate

you cannot

square of the

finish a computation.

number

of nodes or transistors, wires congest the

silicon surfaces of chips

of the brain

Multiplying by the

and the dendritic wetware of the cortex

and the backplanes of computers and the ganglia of

eyes and the wiring closets of businesses and the ionic passages of the central nervous system

and the under-street

circuitry of

big cities.

As they increase exponentially with the increase

in transistors

and processors, wires eventually constrain computation and force localized solutions

and

distributed architectures.

As Mead

remarks, "In the end everything gets choked off by the wires."

George Gilder

72

That

is

why, after a few billion years of evolution

several decades

of

—and despite

enhancements and upgrades from IBM,

Cray, and Intel, despite even the rise of fiber-optic worldwide

webs

of glass

ticular brains

and

light

—

intelligence

is

still

distributed in par-

and machines, rather than centralized

in

some

transcendent supercomputer in the sky or some pedestal in an air-conditioned computer shrine.

As

historic as

his

Faggin's role in

more fundamental

processors,

was

was

making the

first

in the industry's long-run

micro-

advance

contribution to relieving the problem of the wires.

Before Faggin, every transistor on a chip had to have a metal wire attached directly to

minum necting

formed

it.

This was called a metal gate, an alu-

link to the switching transistor giving it

it

power and con-

to all the other transistor switches that collectively

a processor or a

memory. Since the

of silicon and the wire of

transistor

was made

aluminum, the main problem of semi-

conductor manufacture was joining the two incompatible substances together in a robust, reliable way. If

need

your brain used metal gates, your head would weigh a ton, a direct link to the

Grandma's face

in a

power

grid,

photograph.

and

still

The need

sharply curbed the industry's ability to put

couldn't recognize for a

more than

dred transistors on a chip. Metal wires melt, absorb at temperatures far below

silicon's

metal gate

drift,

thermal

few hun-

a

leak,

and

limits, often

reached during the process of manufacture, which entails multiple

cooking steps. Restricted to temperatures below the melt-

ing point of metal,

impossible.

many microchip

fabrication steps

become

The

While

still

at

Fairchild

Silicon

Eye

73

Semiconductor Corporation with

Noyce, Moore, and Andrew Grove, Faggin developed a way to replace these metal wires with wires

the

amorphous version of the

Although

scientists at Bell

made

of polysilicon,

crystalline silicon of the chip.

Labs and

at

Hughes had

patented some form of silicon gate, they had never

previously

made

the

technology work.

Outside the semiconductor industry, the romance of patents

and inventions captivates observers. But within the industry patented inventions are mainly a nuisance that allow others to obstruct your work but do not enable

That

is

why

and shared.

them

to

consummate

it.

across the entire industry patents are cross-licensed Intel's

patent portfolio, for example,

is

Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, and

shared with all

the other

microchip firms. In general, companies achieve competitive advantage not by patenting ideas, exposing them to the world, but by hiding crucial process steps that are latent in densely

wrought and many-layered

silicon devices.

In electronics, ideas tend to be relatively easy.

They mostly

consist of taking functions, such as computers and cameras,

already performed on a large scale, and translating small-scale

microcosm of microchips. What

is

them

into the

hard are not the

patents (patent derives from the Latin word meaning to

open") but the latents (from the Latin word meaning to den"):

linking

"lie

"lie

hid-

thousands and then millions of transistors

together in an inscrutably complex chemical and physical weave of layers that reliably executes (and conceals) the idea.

matters

is

process:

making the devices

actually function.

What

George Gilder

74

Thus the world may

for "inventing" the integrated circuit. For his

won

a

Instruments

exalt Jack Kilby of Texas

achievement, he

Nobel Prize and appears on a postage stamp. But the

industry saw that Kilby's design, entirely metal gate, with

its

gold wires arching through air across the top of a chip of germa-

nium, was not manufacturable. The industry knows that before co-founding

Intel,

Bob Noyce invented

the real silicon inte-

grated circuit while at Fairchild Semiconductor and with Gor-

don Moore, Jean Hoerni, Faggin, and others made In

developing the silicon gate,

exquisitely accurate

method

work.

Faggin also contrived an

down

for laying

wires on the chip substrate and connecting tor so they aligned

it

these polysilicon

them

to the transis-

themselves in exactly the right place.

It

was

a self-aligned silicon gate.

Allowing the creation of transistors

forms of silicon

made

entirely of various

—sand—the Faggin breakthrough

of silicon gates

gave the technology at least a temporary reprieve from the tyranny of wires.

Most of the chip could be completed before you had

worry about the metal and

its

melting point. After Faggin, wires

and switches could be made of the same Although no one recognized the

first critical

it

essential material.

at the time, the silicon gate

step toward a totally

new

which

was

paradigm: a global net-

work of wires and switches dominantly wrought of silica,

to

are various permutations of sand.

The

silicon

and

substrate of

chips would be opaque silicon, and the network would be trans-

parent silicon (fiber-optic glass). Ultimately, nearly tion technology,

from networks and

cell

phones

all

to

informa-

computers

and cameras, would consist of various forms and aggregations of silicon gates.

The

Enabling

Silicon

Eye

75

this all-silicon infrastructure will

be

all-optical long-

distance systems, where the wires evanesce into mere wavelengths on fiber threads and the switches evolve into passive optical

waveguides

silicon gate

tion in

—

like prisms.

his first step for

This consummation of Faggin's

mankind

2005 and skeptics believe

company

it

—

will

is still

under construc-

never be

built,

though a

called Corvis has already run such a network for

its

subsidiary Broadwing. Jerome Wiesner and the other science advisers of President

John Kennedy, remember,

all

believed that

the Apollo project was impossible as well.

By sending the wings of

light,

signal

from origin

to destination entirely

on

the all-optical network obviates the electronic

conversions and regenerations, synchronizations and retransmissions that raise cost

Vastly simplifying

and complication

and accelerating

all

in existing networks.

communications, optics

can enhance the audio and video resolution of every

film, tele-

conference, medical image, game, or cultural event that plays across the Internet. Digital

mostly

computers and cameras and

silicon.

An

cell

phones are already

would be

electronic camera, in particular,

almost impossible with metal gates, since metal cannot detect colors of light. Eventually, silica fiber optics will replace

all

the

copper cages and metal harnesses of existing telephone systems,

and the network readily as

it

now

will

be silicon too and

will transmit pictures as

handles voices. Faggin's concept

will

be every-

where. With the wires and switches, computers and cameras,

made work

of the at the

same

all

essential substances, they might ultimately

same speeds, allowing the

distribution of

computing

and vision across an entire worldwide web of sand and

light.

Beyond the

Back

in 1969,

Gate

Silicon

while Neil Armstrong capered on the lunar

surface, silicon

cameras and

networks

all-optical

lay in

the long and still-embattled future. At that time, as

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore to

form

Intel,

Hobbled by behind

left

Fairchild

Semiconductor

Federico Faggin faced more immediate problems. restrictions

at Fairchild,

management back

on

his visa, the

young

Italian stayed

while Sherman Fairchild and the company

in

Long

Island tried to figure out what to do

with their depleted Silicon Valley subsidiary. Faggin was not

at

the forefront of their plans. Meanwhile, the U.S. government did not

want the young

Italian

with his physics doctorate from

the University of Padua to take any jobs from Americans without

due process of bureaucracy. His experience with a stint with Olivetti at age nineteen, the former typewriter

company with

seen as a "small" computer (well, circuit boards,

deemed

heroically

11

it

in Italy

when he had

a design for

had only

few

had begun

a

provided

what was then

hundred printed

at the time).

Think how

George Gilder

78

many

jobs for low-income Americans that kind of mischief

could cost.

So Faggin had Valley

rumor

to stay

mill,

put at Fairchild. Through the Silicon

he heard that

Intel

was experimenting with

silicon gates. "If they are," said his boss at Fairchild, "we'll sue

them." At the time, Faggin did not

and was

startled

by

know about American

He

this idea.

technology, and Fairchild was letting

seemed, another key to depart

had

man would

wanted

just

it

drift.

to

lawyers

work on

Each

his

day, so

it

leave the company. Nearly last

was the young Hungarian chemist Andy Grove, who

at first resisted

this frothy talk of

someone from

moving

to Intel out of suspicions

compensation

in shares. Faggin

Intel didn't call him.

toward

all

wondered why

They could help him with

the visa, and he could help with silicon-gate processes.

He

still

And he would be more

than happy to

take shares. But he had to stay back. Bearing their

first child, his

knew many

wife, Alvia,

useful secrets.

became

restive.

They had few

Perhaps Federico should return to It

took some

six

months

friends in the Valley.

Italy.

work out the

to

visa details. Finally

Faggin called up Les Vadasz, his former Fairchild superior, then at Intel,

and asked

Vadasz thought for a a mysterious

project for a

was

a

to

come

to Intel to

moment and

new project.

It

work on

He had an idea for this new silicon-gate

said "Yes."

turned out that

complex device that

silicon gates.

Intel

Japanese calculator company,

had contracted

to create

named Busicom, and

that

could not be readily built without Faggin's intimate knowledge of polysilicon processes. Crucial

were the so-called buried

or "doped" silicon contacts that

made

layers

the connections from

Faggin's silicon wires to the transistors below.

The

The

Eye

Silicon

79

some 2,400

silicon-gate process enabled Intel to put

transistors

on a chip, enough

ing unit on a single sliver of silicon.

was the microprocessor,

an entire central process-

to build

A "computer-on-a-chip," this

a feat long targeted

by various visionar-

the industry but only vaguely outlined at the time and not

ies in

economically manufacturable without Faggin s technology.

The day

Vadasz hired Faggin to build the

after

Masatoshi Shima showed up

check out

Shima had lessly

at Intel

from Busicom

their microprocessor project.

persuaded

finally

item

which

at Intel,

Shima had signed slipped five

still

off

I

itself a

on the project

angrily

it

already see those.

circuits?

fancied

in

remained a low

priority

memory company. December,

Since

had already

it

months behind schedule.

As Shima put

There

came

is

all

when

Where

Faggin showed him the specs,

the logic design?

is

nothing here. This

way over here

is

the project since he had

and help him make

hand crippled

in a

left. it

Where

not a device.

to check.

check." Shima was furious that Intel had

ities

December 1969,

unorthodox one-chip concept. But by April 1970,

Intel's

arrived, the microprocessor

stay

Japan to

company, which had been clue-

his

when Shima

idea.

In

in

device,

seeking a calculator chip set with ten separate designs, to

accept

"I

new

There

is

made no

are the

It is

only

nothing to progress on

Faggin had to persuade Shima to

into a real microprocessor.

With

a

boyhood rocket experiment, Shima s capabil-

were doubted

in corporate circles in Japan,

intrigued by the opportunity to

come

to the

and he was

United States.

He

stayed for twenty years, until rehired by Intel to start a research

center at Tsukuba in Japan.

From

the silicon-gate concept later evolved a "floating gate."

George Gilder

80

memory

Crucial in the

power goes

when

chips that do not lose their contents

out, a floating gate

an insulated island within

is

the silicon device treated to accept electronic charge and hold

it.

Faggin inadvertently discovered floating gates for himself in the rendition of the microprocessor

first

when

the end of December 1970" and he could

Chips are made

number

in

came

"the big day test the

wafer

in

at last.

batches on wafers, each containing a large

of actual chips.

It

was

on that December

after 6 p.m.

evening after Christmas, and most of the other engineers had the day. Alone in the lab in Mountain View, Faggin was

left for

measuring the

electrical behavior of the device

loscope, the ubiquitous box with a

window

that provides a

oscil-

blue or green screen

for the engineer into the invisible elec-

He

on the chip.

tronic world

little

through an

attached the delicate probes of

the tester to a die (an unseparated chip on a wafer containing

many

dies).

As he wrote ing.

mean

I

scope.

I

I

pushed the

it's

bad

a

button and

.

.

.

noth-

die, let

me

another one:

7

try

Same

changed the wafer and repeated the process. Same

By now

I

was profusely sweating, thinking:

have screwed up so bad? wafers.

start test

nothing, not even a wiggle anywhere on the oscillo-

told myself,

story ... result.

later, "I

No

life.

I

continued

to test

After 20 minutes of agony

take a look under the microscope.

more I

How

dies

finally

could

I

and more

decided to

Something must be wrong!

It

didn't take long to find out that [Faggin's unorthodox] buried-

layer

masking step was

fab team]

.

.

.

Most

left

out of the process [by

Intel's

wafer

of the gates were floating!"

Insulated from any electrical connection, a floating gate

is

The

Silicon

Eye

81

useless as the control element in a transistor, but

useful as a

memory

cell that

would prove

could hold an electrical charge for

mere milliseconds of

a capacitor

but in years or even decades. Also in Mountain View

at the time,

a period

an

measured not

named Dov Frohman was independently

Israeli

floating

in the

gates

as

memory element

a

mable read only memories (EPROMs). 1971, Intel launched "a

announced four

new

perfecting

program-

erasable

for

When

on November

15,

era in integrated electronics,"

it

chips: for calculations, Faggin's microprocessor;

for software storage,

Frohman's

EPROM;

dynamic random-access memory; and

for

working storage, a

to interface

between the

processor and memory, a small register chip. In sum, Intel intro-

duced

all

the key components for a personal computer and

them used

as

it

EPROM, ories

of floating gates especially intrigued Faggin,

off.

who

an extension of his own silicon-gate concept. After the the floating gate enabled a series of nonvolatile

—memory chips

went

of

silicon gates.

The concept saw

all

that kept their contents

Based on the floating-gate concept

memory, holding programs and data on your

when is

cell

the

mempower

todays "flash"

phone, start-up

data in your computer, and images in your digital camera.

Faggin was a in 1986, still

some

vital catalyst for all

these developments.

fifteen years later,

he was

still

And yet,

in Silicon Valley,

building chips, and almost entirely unacknowledged by jour-

nalists

and historians

in the industry.

Only the experts knew

personal computers had Faggin's work inside.

that

The key reason

for

Faggin s eclipse was his departure from Intel in 1978 with his collaborator the "nobushi" (cantankerous) genius

Shima

to start

George Gilder

82

a

new company. At

when

a time

prowling the globe to protect erty it

and

to deter similarly

would not do

to let the

the silicon gate. So the

the company's lawyers were

Intel's

precious intellectual prop-

pregnant defections from Intel

itself,

world know the story of Faggin and

man who had

transferred the key intel-

and

lectual property of Fairchild to Intel in his spruce

Paduan pate was written out of

volatile

some kind

Intel histories as

of

embarrassment. Faggin had

many reasons

to leave. Intel

was too

large, too pre-

occupied with the memory market, too concentrated

owner-

in

ship in the founding group, too oriented toward a hagiography of

Noyce and Moore

to celebrate

of Faggin. In addition, that has

and reward the accomplishments

Andy Grove had

become infamous

at Intel. "If

instituted a sign-in sheet

you arrived

morning, you had to sign

after eight in the

in." Clearly,

time to go. Faggin was willing to sign in his (FF), provided

was a bridge too

As

was

it

far.

at the office

initials

on

it

was

silicon

a device of epochal importance, but this

He

felt

"subjugated."

a practical matter, though, even in Silicon Valley,

not just spin out and start a

new company without

banks and venture

capitalists.

opportunity. Intel

had yet

For Faggin, the

to focus fully

you can-

support from

vital factor

was the

on the microprocessor.

Faggin and Shima formed Zilog Corporation to do the microprocessor right! At Zilog, Faggin led the design of the Z-80, a

new

microprocessor, which was decisively superior to the Intel

processor and would enjoy a longer

life

span embedded in

low-rent electronics products. However, the central role of the

microprocessor in a computer architecture

is

to

define

its

The

Silicon

Eye

83

"instruction set," the portfolio of things that

it

can directly do,

such as add, subtract, or fetch from memory. Directly addressed by every

system (OS)

—such

as

computers software operating

Windows

or Linux

— these

instructions

vary subtly between different microprocessors, even very similar

ones

like the Intel

among

8088 and the Z-80. The subtle

instruction sets pass on as a kind of

DNA

variations

into the soft-

ware operating systems that run the basic operations of a computer,

and then from the

Word and PhotoShop

OS

into

that use that

all

the applications such as

OS.

Faggin set the Z-80 to execute Design Research tions, thus obviating the

need

to

pay Microsoft

DOS instruc-

fees.

the Z-80 was Tandy Radio Shack for the 'Trash 80" puter.

Adopting the 8088 from

Intel

was

IBM

Adopting

home com-

for its personal

computer. As a microcontroller embedded in everything from

automobiles to copiers, the Z-80 eventually sold in the billions for single-digit dollars. In the long run, however, going

the back of Bill Gates and his In the exalted realm of

DOS

behind

did not turn out to be wise.

computer central-processing

units

where

margins lurked near 50 percent and chips sold for hundreds of times more, Intel would crush the Z-80 entirely. Crush Faggin. In all

those benighted days before the

trial

lawyers banned

pithy or revealing corporate communications, before casual

e-mails

came burdened with seventeen

lines of disclaimers at

the bottom, and before the Justice Department focused

guns on various forms of managerial faux pas, term "crush" a tors.

Its

lot to

convey

its

Intel

goals in relation to

its

its

big

used that competi-

much-acclaimed campaign against Motorola's 68000

George Gilder

84

microprocessor was called Operation Crush. 1

crush

le liked to

rivals, too. In this

it

He would

was faggin who History

is

launched the

but to rewrite

privileges of greatness it.

processor would

ture of the chip.

based as puter, the

it

in Intel's version of

is

make

was on

man from

had conceived the general architec-

was not an exceptional architecture

at all,

Equipment Corporation 's minicom-

Digital

PDP-8, and not

history

inventor of the micro-

be Ted Hoff, the nice owlish

It

Ham-

a great company,

is

not only to

The company-certified

New York, who

Rochester,

really a

new

idea. Expressive of

what

PDP-8 devoted most

the industry called "spaghetti design," the its

not even get

but he and Shima

play,

written by the winners. Intel

and among the

of

ele-

alone famous.

became Rosencrantz and Guildenstern let.

Gates noticed.

slam dance of industrial

phants, Faggin was lucky to get out alive. rich, let

Bill

space to metal wires between the components on the

printed circuit board.

Put those wires on a modern micro-

and the thing would

processor, without Faggin's silicon gates,

sprawl over several blocks of Santa Clara.

Hoff was a smart and creative

man who

integrated solution for a calculator chip. didn't

proposed the obvious

He

stayed around and

make waves, and mused modestly about

recognition. But Intel

microprocessor

was not

company,

interested.

period,

and

It

He would win

well and he

went

had become the

more

supererogatory. Hoff had had his certified idea

man.

chips for speech

ideas

were

and he was

Intel's

the kudos, until Intel got bored with Hoff as

off to

become

a fellow at a research institute.

— The

However, the

feisty

In a Silicon Valley really a it

man

until

Silicon

Federico

you

85

— FF —was not the

macho moment, he

moved

had ended up with

"pushy" wife, so they said

"fellow" type.

observed: "You aren't

start a company.'' If

wisely in Padua and had

Clara, he

Eye

to jive

he had come it

money, and

who thought

should get credit for what he had done. Imagine Faggin

Faggin outside

—was the

wive

wealthily in Santa

relatively little

at Intel,

to

a

her husband that. Forget

Intel consensus.

Largely crush-proof, however, Faggin was difficult to forget.

And Alvia,

a technical writer,

was

grasp her husbands role in the

still

first

pushing

to

make

the world

microprocessor. She would

ultimately prevail, but the world of technology

was slow

in per-

sonal matters, and Intel-oriented. In 1986, Faggin thought he

might make history yet again, find yet another chance

for

fame

and fortune and enduring achievement, by founding yet another

company a

resolved to replace his

company poised

to take

first

invention with a

advantage of the

new

one,

latest innovations in

another computer model, the neural network.

8 Tobermory

many smart engineers the Federico FagLike deemed the prevailing microprocessor designs — even own — cumbersome, and too dependent in

industry,

gin his

on software

as

inflexible,

for interfaces to the outside world.

Based on the

architecture credited to the great Hungarian genius John von

Neumann,

all

these microprocessors followed a serial regime,

step-by-step, getting instructions

and data from memory, pro-

cessing the operands one at a time, and sending the results back

memory. "Step

to

n'

Fetchit"

was the

drill.

Von Neumann

machines were so dominant that any other design was termed

a

non-von.

Although von

Neumann computers were

efficient at per-

forming routine mathematical functions and simple step-wise algorithms for spreadsheets and word processors, they bogged

down on fail

to

a variety of

more complex problems. Not only did they

meet the famous supercomputer grand challenges of

chaos and nonlinearity, fluid flow and phase changes, weather

87

George Gilder

88

modeling and molecular chemistry, they also recognition, vision,

summed up

and haptics

as simulating

—

human

all

failed at pattern

functions that might be

sense and sensory input.

Daniel Hillis was the designer of several formidable "non-von"

"Thinking Machines'' employing a massively parallel design called cellular automata.

Neumann's

Although based on yet another of von

computers optimized

ideas,

automata

for cellular

were deemed "non-von" by an industry that could not quite terms with the polymathic genius of von Neumann.

come

to

Hillis

described the problem of von Neumann's original step-by-

common sense,'' or why computer science. Among humans,

step architecture as "the paradox of

sense

is

common

common

not

in

sense springs from

lots of

of the environment. In general, the ter they function.

and

see.

the

dumber

But

Neumann

in a it

knowledge about the

more humans

The more they know,

computer,

gets.

it is

the

learn, the bet-

more they can sense

the opposite.

The more knowledge

The more

that

is

it

functions. That

is

it

learns,

put into a von

computer, the bigger and more crowded

and the slower

details

its

memory

why your Google

search

engine runs not on one huge computer and one centralized data base but on one hundred and twelve thousand networked small

computers, using Pentiums, the great-grand-kin of Faggin's microprocessor design. Hillis

explained the problem in his book, The Connection

Machine: "As we build bigger machines with more equivalently, as area, the

we squeeze more

machines have

power and

silicon, or

transistors into

each unit of

memory

to processing

a larger ratio of

are consequently even less efficient. This inefficiency

The

remains no matter

how

fast

Silicon

we make

move

This time

89

the processor, because the

becomes dominated by the time

length of the computation

required to

Eye

data between processor and memory."

sump

was the

is

von

called the

overcome

it

Emerging

in the universities

Neumann

much computer

grail of

was

David McClelland, William

bottleneck. To

science of the day.

new movement

a

Chuck

Dally,

Seitz,

led by Hillis,

Steve Colley,

and many others who advocated removing the von Neumann bottleneck by multiplying the processors and coupling to

each one, distributed through the machine.

names, the concept was massively part on models of

human

memory

Known by many Based

parallel processing.

brain functions, the

would eschew the step-by-step regime and adopt

new

in

designs

parallel

meth-

ods that could simultaneously process scores or even thousands of bit-streams.

One

persistent line of research focused

on what were called

neural networks, which were computers based on a primitive idea of

human

how

billions of

neurons might work together

in the

brain. In the early 1980s, for all their popularity as

an

academic pursuit, neural networks remained an obscure backwater in the computer industry. In the enthusiast,

MIT

computer

scientist

league Seymour Papert, had

shown

late 1960s, a

one-time

Marvin Minsky, with

col-

that neural networks could

not perform logical operations critical for serious computing. At the time, the most resourceful advocate of neural nets was Frank

Rosenblatt of Cornell, inventor of the "perceptron," an early

form of neural network optimized Today, Rosenblatt's device,

for imaging.

named Tobermory

after a fictional

George Gilder

90

cat that could understand

Smithsonian Institution first

blatt

computer model,

in

as

human

Washington, next

if

losing a debate to

believed

it

was

to

He

von Neumann's

died in a somewhat myste-

on Chesapeake Bay

Minsky

in the

sits

comparable inventions. But Rosen-

never saw this vindication.

rious boating accident

conversations,

"I

apparently

most fervent

Rosenblatt's

a heinous crime.

after

disciples

accuse: Dr. Minsky on the hay

with an algorithm"

Minsky showed

that while any digital

computer can mimic

the series of additions and multiplications of a neural network, Rosenblatt's simple one-layer perceptrons could not perform key digital

computer functions, called Boolean

logic,

necessary for

the execution of digital computer programs. Since the digital

computer could do any calculation the Tobermory could do, but Tobermory could not perform key

digital functions,

others dismissed the utility of Rosenblatt's machine.

Minsky and As

a result,

the perceptron idea lay in limbo for two decades.

By the 1980s, however, the flaws led to a

new

Neumann

British genius

Machines (named

who conceived them

German Enigma

after

Alan Turing, the

during World

code).

A

digital

War

II

world.

But

digital

They were

num-

computers could not interact with the deaf,

dumb,

blind,

knows

that

real

and insensate. "Dumber

than an airport urinal," as Nicholas Negroponte puts urinal at least

while

computer might

simulate anything in the cosmos that can be reduced to bers.

design

look for alternatives. Digital computers might be

Universal Turing

breaking the

of the von

it,

since the

you are there. Computers may aim

to

be "general problem solvers" but they could never solve the prob-

The

lems of driving a

car,

Silicon

Eye

91

emulating a retina, or taking a photograph.

After decades laboring in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT,

Minsky, himself, concluded that the most challenging form of intelligence

was not the manipulation of numbers, whether

in

high-school arithmetic or advanced calculus, but the perception of the real world

been

is

solved.

all

the seeing, hearing, touching, and motor

learned in the

skills that are

the input

—

first

year of

life.

Once

the image or

converted to numbers, the problem has basically It

becomes

SMOP

(simply a matter of program-

ming). Neural networks were designed to address these prob-

lems of pattern recognition that the

do

at

all.

That neural nets

machines seemed But

to

like

digital

computer could not

Tobermory might be slow Turing

irrelevant.

push neural nets

to the point that they could create

an

image or register a touch or recognize a face or take a picture

would require

a series of innovative jolts imparted by rivalrous

professors at Caltech.

The Hopfield Net

1980s revival

its

In

ral

at California Institute of

Technology, neu-

network research reached a moment of revelation

at

an

evening meeting of the American Science Association.

There

a

Caltech physics professor

duced the Hopfield

net, a

model

named John Hopfield

for a neural

network based on

an abstracted cartoon of the functions of neurons

in the brain.

These neurons had none of the features of wetware, no complex biochemistry. But the mathematical their behavior in electronic

and

terms

DNA or

rules that governed

their massive connectivity

— seemed

intro-

—

fan-in, fan-out

crudely congruent with the way

the brain functions in seeing, hearing, feeling, and recognizing patterns.

Comparing

his

computational model to the

digital

model, he

offered the analogy of two different approaches for a committee to

make

members

decisions. "In a digital computer-style

vote yes or no in sequence; each

committee the

member knows

about

only a few preceding votes and cannot change a vote once

93

it

is

George Gilder

94

cast. In contrast, in a collective-decision

committee the mem-

bers vote together and can express a range of opinions; the

know about

bers

opinions.

mem-

the other votes and can change their

all

The committee generates

a collective decision,

or

what might be called the sense of the meeting."

A

meeting that gravitates toward a consensus

meeting where even one buys

duce

a

more

stable

in to the decision

and robust outcome than

Japanese companies do not spin out a

that

lot of

a binary

up-down

to create devices

in the face of errors, bugs, or fuzzy inputs

Such

the real world.

likely to pro-

competitive compa-

Advocates of neural computing hoped

were robust

is

analog

Supposedly run by consensus,

vote from a digital meeting.

nies.

—

— an

a

from

computer could conceivably become

a

camera, or an eye.

What made tists,

Hopfield's vision irresistible to

and entrepreneurs

physicists,

was

alike

foundation in the natural physics of spin arrays

of magnetized glass

heated into an excited

could

on

it

tip a polarization

mathematical

its

These were

glass.

(silica)

brain scien-

that could

states

from neighboring

by the magnetic

grains.

Small effects

one way or another, triggering

of change to neighboring grains.

a

cascade

Governed by the laws of

action and lowest energy, the synthetic neural network gravitate as

much

ing a consensus

—

as possible to all

its

it

would

—which represented

solution to the targeted problem. Because a spin glass ural object, researchers thought

least

lowest energy state, signify-

argument subdued

teries of brains, eves, ears,

be

with each molecular grain "frus-

between two binary

trated," or poised

forces impinging

flux,

molecules

many

might offer clues

was

a nat-

to the

and other natural objects.

a

mys-

The

One way

Silicon

Eye

95

simulate such a network

to

to

is

interconnect

densely an array of simple processor elements, usually termed

neurons but better named "neurodes" to save the biological

name

for real neurons. Like cellular

the inputs of

all

automata, neurodes

contiguous processors. This

is

sum up

a "high fan-in and

fan-out" arrangement with lots of connections both in and out.

Responding

to the collection of inputs

that in turn

becomes an input

system over time arrives

at

—pattern

at

for neighboring processors, the

an optimal point: the solution. By

making the topology

grammable

with an output action

of energy peaks and basins

—

pro-

each processor through a pattern of weights on the

neurodes, the neural network designer can create a general-

purpose computer without a memory bottleneck.

Each configuration

of the entire

machine could represent

a

particular pattern of sounds in a speech recognizer, or of finan-

data in a securities analyzer, or of cranial shapes in a face

cial

recognizer.

In theory, then,

and

in practice

soon

after,

such

devices could identify fingerprints, buying opportunities, bacteria,

credit-card fraud, power-plant perils, or terrorist maneuvers.

The network may be inputs,

which

it

a desired pattern of

result in a particular weight for

pattern of weights

mon

trained by showing

is

each neurode. The

the program for the device.

Thus the "com-

sense" of the machine was not concentrated in

tralized

memory but

some cen-

diffused through the entire network, like

the information in a hologram.

Faggin had been tracking

oped first

his

these developments as he devel-

new company, which he would

insight

become

all

was

that a

a preferred

call

Synaptics. His

programmable neural network could

form of processor

for all

pattern-matching

George Gilder

96

computer

functions, such as hearing, imaging, touch, and other inputs. Since every

spend

much

of

its

computer or

cell

phone

or

camera would

time recognizing patterns of various kinds, a

general-purpose pattern recognizer could find a market that

might be comparable microprocessors

in size to the

like the

market

von

for

one Faggin had created

Neuman

at Intel

some

fifteen years before.

Faggin's further insight

function as the

was that

memory element

his "floating gates"

for the

could

neurode weights.

He

envisaged a programmable neural network based on floating gates that could be trained to perform any pattern-recognizing role.

"Guess, measure the

back"

error, adjust

the answer, and feed

the basic routine of neural networks:

is

an

it

iterative

process that step-by-step approaches the answer to problems,

such

as: "Is that

object in the

Bin Laden's face or a bagel?" or "What

Tumi bag?"

that cannot be

is

that

computed by ordinary

machines.

Once

again, as in the case of the original microprocessor,

intellectuals thought they

knew what

a neural

network was, but

no one could build an effective and marketable device. Like

most researchers who explored the

field,

Faggin found himself

gravitating toward the

work of Mead, then building

scale neural networks

on microchips. Even though

his largehis neural

networks were only roughly related to the models of Hopfield

and McClelland and the other pioneers who had attracted

Faggin,

Mead was

originally

pursuing a quest for practical

devices rather than for exalted but elusive theory.

He was

begin-

ning to transform his Caltech lab from a center of leading-edge

The

digital devices

and design

Silicon

tools into

Eye

97

an arena of what he called

Analog VLSI.

Mead and VLSI chip sors,

his

students began converting ordinary digital

substrates such as are used in Faggin's microproces-

made by

the billions in semiconductor factories around the

globe, into analog circuits that could crudely reproduce brain

functions. Because he

was using the most common semicon-

ductor processes, his devices could be cheap, containing thousands of transistors. Because he used these transistors in analog

form

—not switching on and

ing continuously like an

analog sensor with as

off like a digital device

AM

many

radio tuner

—he

but operat-

could

make an

transistors as a digital microproces-

sor has, eventually millions.

company, Faggin would have

To tap these resources to

come

to

for his

new

terms with Carverland.

Part

J

hree

THE CAT AND THE

CAMERA

—

10 Carverland

Beginning

in 1983, the center of

his students called

above the

janitorial

it

Carver

Carverland

Meads

—was

world

his laboratory

warehouse and machine shop

at Cal-

tech. Originally classed as "second-class space," this secondstory facility filled

became

up with equipment and avid students and

a hive of creative activity

glimpse of some of the players,

network

at

LAX and

weight

its

let

on the campus. To get

us set up a pretend neural

synapses for

school males headed for Pasadena for the the synapses for acne, ponytails,

ham

brilliant

fall

nerdy high-

semester. Jack up

radios, plastic pocket pro-

tectors, model-airplane kits, copies of Godel, Escher, Bach,

advanced graphic calculators. (Let that big glasses

and denim

overalls

a

girl

and

with granny

and the comic books under her arm

pass right through, shunted by the neural network into the

art-

school queue.)

One way or another, the rest

—

the synaptic machine might catch

many of

including, for the purposes of this tale, David Gillespie,

IOI

George Gilder

I0 2

[obi

I

Tim

)elbriick,

Allen,

Adam

Greenblatt,

Gribble, David Feinstein, John Piatt, ipants fit

Tom

and even

a

Tucker, Glenn

few older

partic-

— instructors — such as Dick Lyon, who wore a ponytail and

the mold. In 1984, Lyon had joined the Schlumberger Artificial

Intelligence

Lab

in

Mountain View

From these perches regularly eration,

down

to

after his stint at

in Silicon Valley,

Xerox PARC.

he continued

to

commute

Carverland in Pasadena to guide each

work with Carver on

new

gen-

problems, and

difficult technical

tutor exceptional students.

Now that our neural

net has caught them,

imens. Near the entrance to 1

980s was

a fuzzy-faced

he was introduced ("This shift

screen.

on

He

is

his feet, look

really

had

meet our spec-

lab throughout

most of the

blond boy also with a ponytail, leaning

toward the large screen of an

and

Mead s

let's

to get

HP Chipmunk workstation. When Dave

Gillespie"),

down and back

he would shuffle

away, and back at the

to his project.

A

Caltech soph-

omore, he was ginning up a design tool for timing parameters on digital circuits that

Carver considered "pretty neat." And "Carver

had the coolest computers," so the young undergrad began

hang around the "I

managed

to

He ended up

Soon he was there day and

lab.

horn in on

all

night.

the coolest professors," he says.

as a teaching assistant in

course, "The Physics of Computation."

He

tech to victory in national Association of

(ACM) programming

to

contests and then

Richard Feynman's also twice led Cal-

Computing Machines

became coach. Taking

the Hopfield course in neural nets, he would not only do the

homework but homework

also

code computer programs

automatically.

to

perform the

Even before graduating, he

started

The

actually

Eye

freshman course

the

giving

Silicon

103

computer science.

in

"Except for Carver, most of the top professors steered clear of freshmen.

I

found them

great.

I

liked turning

them

on.

I

liked

explaining the stuff."

Within an important group of other scholars such as Glenn Gribble, Telle Whitney, and John Lazzaro,

who

supplied the lab

with design tools and software, Gillespie became a fixture in Carverland. In an extraordinary feat, he contrived to spend a

decade

at Caltech,

including six years in graduate school.

It

full

was

not until 1991 that he turned off onto Interstate Route 5 and drove up the coast to Zanker Road in Santa Clara, where he

much

joined another lab that looked pretty

same

faces

the same, with the

and much of the same equipment. The company was

Synaptics, almost five years old at the time, the vessel of the imager project that

would end

Often working with David Gillespie 1980s was Tobi Delbriick. Max's son, a

unassuming and engineer in the

boards

(test

practical, Tobi lab,

as the

corporate

Foveon X3.

at Carver's lab in the

large,

shambling man,

was perhaps the most adept

ingenious at contriving workable bread-

boards with an array of working electronic devices

on them), incorporating the various by

first

Mead and

the other students.

and devices created

circuits

He

frequently collaborated on

imagers with colleagues. Later contriving a stream of retina

—

chips himself ers,

for

camera imagers, door openers, check read-

and autofocus detectors

at Synaptics.

—he

built

many

of the imagers used

Nonetheless, industrial engineering was never his

true calling. Like his laureate father, he

research on the frontiers of science.

was called

to basic

George Gilder

104

Sharing an office next to the Caltech lab were John Piatt and

David Feinstein. Even

Caltech, where "beautiful minds"

at

abound, these paragons of mathematics were a rare and coveted resource. Although Piatt his services

was Mead s graduate advisee, he shared

with John Hopfield; Feinstein worked both with

Hopfield and with Richard sis

Feynman while

writing a Ph.D. the-

with Mead.

With

curly black hair

twenty years teen.

He

later,

a boyish look that

Piatt

had not

left

studies.

When

was

in

log project

incident

and came

in three years,

he arrived

at

cramped quarters was

light.

to

in

in

ful collaboration

with

low power

to the

new

machine shop

Mead on

—

for graduate

to

be run on

Carverland

Piatt

began

— the

a fruit-

the use of timing dynamics in

neural models, delays and buffers that give

counterpart of short-term

Long

Booth Hall, where the only ana-

1983

larger space over the janitor s

Pasadena

at

age eighteen in 1982, Carver's lab

a circuit of sufficiently

Moving

him

exhausted high school by age four-

passed through the computer science program

Beach State

still

John

and

memory

them the analog

in digital systems.

Mead was

sure that crucial to the brains computational process

was the

use of time. Rather than marching to the beat of an abstract clock, the brain uses the time of arrival of an input as a source

of information

mode

and

its

relationship to other timing events as a

of computation. For example, the brain apparently distin-

guishes a word from a chaotic flow of sounds by the appearance of several

phonemes enjambed back-to-back.

Presenting a prototype system to Carver, Piatt in his

first

year

declared that his scheme was asynchronous (without a regular

The

Silicon

clock cycle) and thus would be

Mead

speed of components. matter

if

you take out

Eye

105

immune

to variations in the

challenged him. "Then

he

this capacitor?"

shouldn't

it

said, pointing to a small

circular device that stored or delayed electrical charge

on the

prototype board. Piatt

hedged. "Well, maybe." Piatt had a mathematical theory

but had not tested

it.

He

took a deep breath and yanked the

capacitor off the board while the circuit was running.

ued

to

It

contin-

work, meaning that the circuit was truly asynchronous

and thus did not depend on

a particular

cadence of timing and

delays.

Carver burst into a smile and slapped him on the back. "That's terrific!"

he

said, delighted as usual

achievement by his students. a

mode

of

computing eventually led

and Dick Lyon

human

Piatt's

in the creation of

work on the use to collaboration

to the

of time as

with

Mead

an ingenious model of the

cochlea, which imitated the

sound frequencies according

with every show of

human

ear by separating

time they take to pass

the auditory channel. After getting his Ph.D. under

down

Mead

in

1985, Piatt joined Lyon as an intern at Schlumberger. In pure intellectual fireworks, though, Piatt his

match

stein

in his office

more than met

mate David Feinstein. Unlike

was not awesomely precocious. Until age

eight,

beat his electrical engineer father in chess for the

was deemed dyslexic and otherwise

slow.

Piatt, Fein-

first

when he time, he

But he got over

it.

Described by the department head as Caltech's best student in applied mathematics in thirty years, Feinstein talks so fast that

Mead

coined the "Feinstein" as a unit of speech pro-

George Gilder

106

duction and described

other students as speaking in "milli-

all

down

Feinsteins." Unfortunately, "Feinsteins" slow

when

crawl

translated into writing,

thesis for several years.

minated the

When

and he

failed to finish his

came, however,

it

to a viscous

it

brilliantly illu-

between Claude Shannon's information theory

links

and thermodynamics. Although above

all

deeply philosophical.

else a mathematician, Feinstein

He

communications

assistant

He became

theory.

and go-between

wave dynamics

more recherche enigmas

the nature of the soul, and the or

for the course

putation" jointly taught by Hopfield,

to

make

useful

it

to find their

who had come ing

"The Physics of Com-

who

failed read-

hung around

trying to be

it

One

in.

of these

was Tim Allen,

Caltech chiefly under the influence of watch-

to

Feynman on

way

of quan-

Mead, and Feynman.

into the inner circle, but

enough

to

the lead teaching

Also influential in Carverland were students ily

also

can commute readily among such sub-

jects as Jungian psychiatry, the relationship of

tum

is

a tape of a

Nova program.

scores of times," he says.

"He

didn't

"I

must have played

have particularly more

screen time than any of the others, but there was something

about the others,

man

I

—he was more

just liked

and hearing him

talk

exciting than any of the

about things made

me

excited

about them, too." Allen's

most profound early encounter with technology was

a

Hewlett-Packard HP-35 scientific calculator, which his physician dad brought

was old enough captivated

me

home from

the office

when Tim was

to appreciate that arithmetic

to

hold something in

was

nine.

difficult

my hand which was

and

"I it

'smarter

The

than

I

Adept

was."'

at

the calculator "the

Eye

Silicon

107

mechanical technology as a boy, he found

first

thing

I

had ever encountered whose

inner workings were totally impenetrable, invisible, inscrutable. Just a at

lump

of plastic,

it

didn't

Caltech nearly a decade

relevance to this machine.

35 worked, In his

"all

the

way

whir or

later,

He

click."

When

he arrived

he chose his courses for their

set out to figure out

how

the

HP-

to its physical underpinnings."

sophomore year he encountered Carver Mead teaching

CS10. Mead opened

the introductory computer science class, his first lecture

with an analogy between the

a car: "Imagine trying to describe

how a

computer and

car works to a technically

savvy alien who'd never seen one before. believe that an engine that

digital

It

would be

worked by explosions

difficult to

rattling

cams up

and down could ever produce the outward appearance of smooth quiet motion. Digital computers were the itive internal action,

fluid function." Allen

same

its

frenetic, prim-

well-hidden, causing an illusion of smooth

concluded, "Carver was articulate, charis-

matic, and informal, and struck exactly the that videotaped

—

image of Feynman.

.

.

.

same chord

in

me

as

Caltech had delivered on

promise."

Like his friend Dave Gillespie, Allen was attracted to Carver's

Chipmunk

lab of

dained the

little

HP9836

pre-PCs. Real computer "geeks" dis-

Chipmunks, preferring

centralized near-"mainframe" Digital

computer that the

one

all

center.

HP was

time-share a large

Equipment "VAX"

in the

But Allen and Gillespie quickly discovered

half as powerful as a

to himself,

to

VAX and

each student had

while the VAXes had to be shared with

other students. Setting up the

Chipmunk

lab,

fifty

Mead showed

his

George Gilder

108

grasp of the promise of the personal computer back in a period

when

it

fast that

seemed

a radical idea.

This technology has moved so

today Allen with his team at Altera Corporation, a major

Silicon Valley innovator, has built a microprocessor unit, given

away in a

as a promotion, that has the

power of 150 VAXes and

fits

corner of one of Altera s chips.

Like Gillespie after him, .Allen

CS-10. But he

still felt

more

looking

elite lab,

that he

became

a teaching assistant in

was on the outside of Carver's

In his senior year, he signed

in.

Meads "Analog VLSI and Neural Systems" largely taught recalls,

"It

from

his

forthcoming book by that

for

which was

title.

As Allen

was new, important, leading-edge glamorous fun,

—

interesting

class,

up

everything.

I

experienced the feeling of being in

exactly the right place at the right time to catch the perfect wave."' cle.

But he

To do

still

that,

had not made

he had

for a silicon retina that

to build a

his

into Carver's inner cir-

custom piece of

was of urgent

step on the road to Foveon.

way

lab

equipment

interest to Carver

and

a key

Misha Mahowald gazing

into Tobi Delbriick's camera, taking a break

from a research conference they attended

in 1993. Tobi Delbriick

11 Michelle

Into

Mead's band of

digital brothers

1983 strode a woman. Hey, no big

woman

to play

one day

her,

December

She was not the

deal.

an important role in the

such as Telle Whitney before

in

lab.

first

But the others,

and Mary Anne Maher, had

been adaptive, supportive, working within the frame, conceiving

new

valuable

woman, Michelle Mahowald,

contrast, this transistor

design tools for advanced transistors. By

digital

was

"a

arrived thinking a

kind of radio." She really did.

And

radios

were

not her thing.

Michelle was a different kind of

some

said a "bionic

She was shy what

to

do

.

woman," interested

at first, .

.

—an analog woman,

woman

get this, gardening.

in,

but she rather soon began telling Carver

and, for nearly ten years

finish her thesis nor leave the laboratory.

.

.

.

she would neither

She would decorate

its

walls with artsy-dipsy posters, concoct chip designs with an antic hexagonal flare, post lab reports with bright overlapped

patches of color, mauves and yellows galore, and release random

George Gilder

in

analog beasts of prey from their safe digital cages. After her passage, the lab

would never be the same.

Her landing

in the lab

was unplanned and unexpected. After

the usual prodigies in academics and college boards obligatory at

Caltech admissions, she had arrived on the campus three years before from an Full of cautions

all-girl

Catholic High School in Minneapolis.

from her intellectual mother on the

"Californian lifestyle," Michelle

was

perils of the

set to study astrophysics

and become an astronaut. She wanted

to

walk

in space, tran-

scend her past. She even wanted to change her name, transform her mind.

"I

wanted

to burst out of

my

shell'

"

—her Michelle

Catholic constraints, the concept of original "sin," her structured family, their corseted beliefs, their rules

the parents

who had adopted

She sought

rosaries.

She loved

and named her

her, raised her,

become "Misha,"

Michelle, but she wanted to idyllic, free as a cat in a

and

bionic, lyrical,

commune. wonder

to recapture the

of a trip to Disneyland at

the age of seven, on a ride recalling the Alice of Lewis Carroll or the "incredible shrinking Slick's

Disney

man"

of film, or perhaps even Grace

"White Rabbit" pill-borne descent of the 1960s. In the ride,

she remembered dwindling

enter a water molecule, as

dance. With

little

good, flushed

down

into

a

size of a basketball.

Brownian

froze into a dazzling crystal

Disneyland netherworld,

maybe

face-to-face with a nucleus

it

in a

and she thought she was gone

a stream,

microcellular catacombs,

small enough to

bounced around

it

Michelle inside,

and then melted into

down

—

forever.

lost

for in

Then she came up

a bright red blinking sphere the

Glancing above her she became aware of

a

The

gigantic eye, a

huge pulsing

a microscope,

seeming

to

was half giving up hope,

Eye

Silicon

retina, looking

down

half hoping for the ride to last forever,

into the nucleus?" "Certainly

I

she began to grow back again

and aggregating the atoms

into

"Do

And

dare not." .

.

could

.

all

dare to go further,

I

it

then astonishingly,

be

.

.

.

recomposing

the higher levels of structure,

and blood and bodies, and restoring her

cells

her through

at

peer into her mind. Just as Michelle

the spectral voice of her guide asked,

in a

113

to her original size

conventional family group. There was Papa Al smiling, and

embracing

her,

and Mother Joan,

cerned as usual, and

intelligently, judiciously

sister Sheila, all as before.

the trip into the molecular

her world. As she recalled,

Her

family.

microcosm had permanently

"I

thought

it all

was

real.

I

Because you

that

I

had been led

were normally

found that

it

to believe.

invisible to

was supremely

me

much more

a

There were

that

exciting."

imagined that an astronautical

more

Mahowalds embrace it

space would bring a

link with distant lands over

ham

a

mere

abstraction.

and rebuild

model planes and radios.

five,

televi-

rockets, or

She painted

vivid pic-

tures, with rich colors, consciously suggestive of Picasso.

age of

still

Unlike her classmates or her

associates in the lab, she did not disassemble sion sets as a child, or construct

I

and beauty.

was never

as a reunion with nature.

these things

As the years passed, she

trip into

of science

all

interesting

were actually there and

ecstatic high of natural revelation

She saw

down

never thought to doubt."

She concluded: "The world was place than

But

altered

could see the other people on the ride moving in miniature a tiny plastic pipe,

con-

At the

she saw patterns in nature. Pointing happily, she told

George Gilder

n4

The wind blows through

her father: "Look.

them over

the grass and knocks

dominoes." She helped plant a maple tree

like

in the

backyard and dreamed of having a garden of her own. She hid in her room and gorged on books of fantasy Rings, then

Hermann

Her teachers and avid artist

loped

it

Tolkien's Lord of the

Hesse's Steppenwolf.

friends from

Minnesota remember her

and an able gymnast, part of

third in the state.

moment

—

One

in kickball.

and

it

a girls'

team

as an

that

was

of her eighth-grade teachers recalls a high

"She just stepped up

was gone.

When

I

to the plate

and wal-

think of Michelle," she said,

"I

see her standing there, hands together, great big eyes and a shy

smile and the kickball zooming out of the park."

remembers her dancers

as the

at a local

Her mother

most intense and perfectionist of the tap

dance studio. Afraid

at first to

go on stage,

nervous and evasive, she emerged once there as a dervish of a dancer. In the audience, they

Joan,

beamed

Everyone

all

noticed her, and her mother,

in pride.

recalls a

happy and successful

more than expected. But Misha remembers

ment

in

always giving

a sense of confine-

her pleasant suburban household and her structured

Catholic schools. As a child, door, but

girl,

I

"I

could not leave through the front

could read books and take that way out." She remem-

bers that at school the teachers tended to devote most of their attention to the slower students, so she again retreated to books

and then

was neglected, and

to college extension courses

on

a

campus near Minneapolis. Misha never became a type

can be defined

a typical Caltech science

at all

on probably the

wonk,

nation's

if

such

most

truly

The

diverse

study physics, she already

By then the

Eye

On

and meritocratic campus.

from Minneapolis, headed

ence.

Silicon

115

the plane west to

September 1980

for college in

felt

LAX

qualms about the usual

life

to

of sci-

brunette with the theatrical smile and

little

the already fierce intelligence had grown into a big, willowy,

owlish

girl

—what the French

conveying a para-

call "jolie laide"

dox of coarse features and luminous femininity.

With granny too,

and

glasses,

broad shoulders, a secret forbidden

a taste for sixties rock

and

roll,

plane on her way to Caltech with a pile of

comics and some colored pencils, given

she comes onto the

Conan

to her

She finds herself

sitting next to

bound

campus, flaunting

a

and a

copy of

the Barbarian

by a rakish

friend Diana. for the

tat-

artist

another youth

Scientific

American

pile of scientific texts. Sixteen years old, too "nerdy" to

believe, "he

made me

feel old

and

I

wasn't even eighteen." Hor-

monal, aggressive, splaying peacock plumes of mathematics and

away

physics, he chattered proto-professor.

Why

can't

in the adjoining seat like a

he keep

runaway

his voltage fields, his calcs,

megahertz, his knees, his vectorials, his Hamiltonians to

his

himself?

Why all

way

at

this

mental molestation?

Is this

going to be the

Caltech? As on several other occasions on her

pil-

grimage into Southern California's most outre circles of high

sci-

it

is

ence, she considered turning back. In those

moments, she would cherish her memory of Min-

nesota, the quietness of

it,

the peace. "The seasons were pro-

nounced and you have an acute sense of time early-summer

day, the

passing. In an

sun would shine through the elm leaves

bowering the paths along the water, and the

light

would shim-

George Gilder

n(.

mer and

crystallize the scene,

and grass growing

trees

short time to just three

"Then out a

lot

live. It

and

it

was

as

if

you could see the

in real time, as if life there

has to get

it all

way

out of the

has a very

in a rush of

months. in the

and

of diamonds.

winter

ice

it is

cold but beautiful because the sun

grows on the branches and the world

The sense

is

made

is

and yet

of seasons, of things changing

staying the same, isn't there so strongly in California.''

came new

at caltech

of Disneyland or the

shocks and changes beyond the ken

all-girl

Catholic High School. Perhaps only

her mother really had the picture. Assigned to the Ricketts coed dormitory, she encountered "the sexual dance."

Palmy Pasadena

resembled something out of Dr. Seuss "with tufted palms trees everywhere and strange gawky animal adise that looked as

if

they might eat you

In a college that grants

up

in "his or

sion, in

her

own

freedom galore

way,"

meaning

an institution that did not

and Flowers of

life if

you strayed too

for

each person

virtually

officially

Par-

near."

to

grow

no adult supervi-

recognize the differ-

ences between the sexes, the heat built up.

Misha found herself under

who resembled and

visible

a two-year siege by

male creatures

her airplane companion, with prognathous math

cutaneous

oils.

Retreating to literature as was her

wont, she was taken with the theories of The

Territorial

Impera-

Robert Ardrey and The Naked Aye of

Desmond

Morris,

tive of

two

texts that

expound evidence

for the theory that

most human

behavior echoes the ethology of monkeys and baboons.

"I

was

The

Eye

Silicon

struck by the hypocrisy of the boys,

ested in science, in ing rites for

to

be

inter-

were animals perform-

like goats

seemed her best guide

butting heads." For

to life at Caltech.

and maneuvering grew intense. They "glommed"

jiggling

onto her and wouldn't

sum

spend more time with

me

All that platonic annealing

four hours in a day and

wouldn't give up.

The

"Glomming," so they

let go.

Caltech tradition." The to

who pretended

ideas, but in fact

my benefit. They were

a while, zoology

The

my

117

1

of

was

it

than

began

that "the guys

wanted

I

said,

to

all

was

"a

wanted

spend with them."

to get physical.

50 male nerds on the

Only twenty-

floor.

These guys

neural program was snagged on a high

energy plateau.

The

sex ratio

suffices to

For

all

war

"my

shell."

bit

much

She was

for

one

Misha. She began to retreat

a big girl with

but "there wasn't near enough of

me

my room with

Often she would

the lights

off,

flee Ricketts to

an expansive heart,

for all of

learn to slam the door in their faces, to

hide in

theory, seven to

her brains and heft, physical and intellec-

seven to one was a

again into

to one. In

overcome almost any armed and entrenched defen-

sive position. tual,

was seven

them.

scream

so no one

I

had

to

them, or to

at

knew was I

there."

Dabney, a nearby dorm dom-

inated by the hippy counterculture flourishing at Caltech in a

delayed throwback to the

when

sixties.

There she met Tim Allen, who

not in Carverland served as a leader in student "govern-

— ment"

"I

was

like

Ralph

in

Lord of the

Flies," as

him, Misha protested against the behavior of her don't think she really trusted today. "I

was focused on

me

or liked

me

he puts

dorm mates.

at first," says

electrical engineering,

it.

To "I

Allen

making things

George Gilder

us

work, and she wasn't. She was focused on learning about the brain."

But the

Allen says,

was

"It

for everyone.

real

The guys were not

sad.

wrong. There were just too the

same thing and the

easy

way

were caught

best friend,

and

As

doing anything

they were

in the

all

doing

middle with no

out."

became entranced with

Visiting Dabney, though, she

late

really

many of them and

girls

vision.

an awkward situation

really a case of no-fault,

was

It

problem was Caltech's unisex

Tom

artistic,

Tucker.

A

Allen's

glowing, charismatic figure, articu-

one of the most obviously gifted of

his class at

Caltech, Tucker was deep into everything that Misha's mother feared in "California lifestyles."

With Tucker, Misha discovered

some

and the downside of zoological

of the upside of zoology

males. Tucker turned out to fascinate

many

of that years girls at

Caltech. But Misha got more than her share. Together they took

her Disneyland hallucinations from physics onto chemistry and

pharmacology. sor

From Tucker, she

also heard reports of a profes-

named Carver Mead, whose course Tucker was

Allen,

taking. Like

Tucker was an enthusiast of Mead's adventures

in analog

VLSI and neuroscience. Misha

still

was pursuing physics. But the astrophysics was

not going so well.

Misha had been

a

math prodigy back

nesota, taking college courses as early as eighth grade.

read with exhilaration about

nearby Palomar, with kind of Capitol islate for

its

Dome

the universe.

Caltech's

giant

in

Min-

She had

observatory at

hyperbolic 200-inch Hale telescope, a

for the university's physicists as they leg-

When

her bus into Pasadena drove past

the service entrance to the Caltech Synchrotron Accelerator,

The

I

learn

what

This

is it.

is

where

119

it

really

speed of

light,

happens. This

she

where

is

really true."

is

She had always found math

easy,

prevail in the physical sciences.

But

math prodigy and she discovered est

Eye

particle collisions at the

where they contrive thought, "This

Silicon

and she saw at Caltech,

that her

math

as a

it

way

to

everyone was a gifts

were mod-

by comparison to many of her classmates, more than half of

whom

were physics majors. She became uneasy with the

assumptions they so readily upheld, the idea that

was a pyramid,

The

on

resting

all

of science

a substrate of physics at the bottom.

physicists implied that everything above

was somehow

epiphenomenal, that they were merely awaiting some more powerful digital

machines

come and subdue

to

the derivative disci-

plines to the underlying rule of physics.

Plunging into astrophysics, she discovered that the course that she

was taking offered

were scant

—but

authority, they

the total mass in the universe

and

forth, like

tune or

like

infinite

physics were

men

was

tractionary, issuing

an

and equations. Hard

made her

seemed

in

to

nervous. Estimates of

to swell

some remote

losing her faith.

astrophysical ride

into

reports from Betelgeuse

and

molecule responding

a Disneyland

was

—

shrink,

back

an accordion playing an inscrutable modernist

agenda contrived by adult, she

data

bristled with theories

on

follow, resting

little

to a

hidden

control center.

She could not

tell

As an

whether the

real or not. Inflationary, oscillatory, con-

from an ineffable singularity or multiplying

number

of parallel paths,

it

seemed

as

if

astro-

away

into space

from the supposedly solid foundations of the physics

at the bot-

all

math,

all

the time, flying far

George Gilder

120

torn.

She had wanted

like a

be an astronaut. Her head was spinning

to

nerdy propeller cap, but she was farther than ever from

orbit.

In her doubts, she

Caltech's physics.

Church. the

life

seemed

on earth

him

to

much

as the Catholic

emanate from males." Even

of the space program, a symbol designed to repreto all other galaxies,

forthrightly forward,

ing at

to notice the patriarchal tradition of

resembled nothing so

It

"All authority

emblem

sent

began

showed

man

a

engaged with the scene, and a

Was

reverently from the side.

looking

woman

gaz-

the universe itself a

male playground? In Caltech physics, tory biology course bristling

seemed

it

more

to be.

to her taste.

She found an introduc-

Rather than scarce data,

masses of equations, and mazes of theory, biology

offered reams of data, find patterns in

it.

measurements

She was an

galore,

artist,

found herself gravitating toward the

and

adept

need

a sore

to

She

at patterns.

living sciences. Science,

she

concluded, should not be a hierarchy or a pyramid but "an organ-

roscience,

and changing." Taking a course

in

neu-

she became deeply intrigued by the retina,

the

ism, continually growing

photons

sensitive thin outer layer of cells in the eye that receives

and transduces them into electrons of the brain. In

many ways

the crypts of the mind.

It

it

for passage to

seemed

was

to offer a

deeper layers

path of

light into

a regular structure, well

with accessible chemistry and self-evident functions.

It

could be

understood. She plunged deep into an effort to master

through

it

to

fathom the

known,

it,

and

brain.

In this pursuit, at the beginning of her junior year, she signed

The

up

for a course in

begun by Caltech

new

to achieve a biology, field

a

sciences.

121

A famous course,

Feynman, and Mead,

hoped

it

multidisciplinary synthesis of physics, neurojust

what Misha was looking

who had turned

for.

Hop-

to biology.

engineer and physicist with an interest in the brain

Feynman was

But early

tation.

titans Hopfield,

mathematical physicist

Mead was an

Eye

computational neurophysics.

and engineering,

was

Silicon

a legend exploring the limits of

compu-

he was stricken with cancer and

in Misha's year,

forced to withdraw from the course. That

left

the neurobiology and neural networks, and

Hopfield pursuing

Mead expounding on

the potential of very large scale integrated circuits for simulating brain functions and performing neural-network-like collective

computations. In the lectures, ing the

first

Misha found Hopfield's ideas

plausible path into a

inspiring, offer-

model of brain functions

—how

a simple collection of unintelligent neurons could achieve a

form of collective intelligence from the bottom up, with no central control.

But she was mostly baffled by Mead's dense expla-

nations of transistor physics.

"I

couldn't understand

she recalls. Although she demurred at tions of Hopfield's neural

project

some

him

at all,"

of the simplifica-

network model, she decided

to

do her

on the retina with Hopfield.

She went

to

meet with the teaching

David Feinstein. Shared and coveted by for his extraordinary gifts in

assistant in the course, all

the three professors

mathematical physics, Feinstein had

become an emissary among them.

Earlier

he had reproached

them

for asking their students to integrate the three disciplines

when

the three professors themselves

seemed

to

have

little

idea

George Gilder

122

how

Then Misha came

the fields could be joined.

paper she had written on the drawings that conveyed

its

the Millikan library, hiding

human

him with

to

a

retina, replete with large

operations.

She had spent weeks

in

away from the Ricketts scene, work-

ing out the detail and limning out the supporting

art,

showing

all

the biological links and signal pathways, horizontal and vertical.

Her model encompassed the

entire neural flow of light

and

energy, from the retinal cones that capture the colors in the eye

and the foveal receptors that focus on you are reading, through the

ters

communication

into the brain

fine detail

such

as the let-

triad synapses that begin the

and bipolar and amacrine

cells in

the "plexiform" layers that do vital balancing of energy and

dynamics down tex,

which

to the retinal ganglion paths leading to the cor-

integrates the

"fan-in" to 'Tan-out, "

it

image into a recognizable whole. From

was

misha was shy about

a coherent imaging system.

her work, but to Feinstein

extraordinary vindication of the course. field

and Mead,

Nothing

in

it

biological science

seemed

could be reproduced.

seemed an

To the physicists Hop-

offered any kind of agenda by

logical function

it

largely guesswork.

which the physio-

Mahowald was

a biologist

by training, but she had offered a model of the retina that was least suggestive of a

schematic diagram of a chip ... a chip that

could become a working model of a kind of camera.

at

mammalian eye

or a

new

Misha Mahowald shows Carver Mead a feature of the that she built in

teacher

and ended

Tobi Delbriick

Carver Mead's

laboratory.

as her collaborator

"silicon eye"

Mead began

as Misha's

on the frontiers of brain

science.

12 Misha

When

David Feinstein took Misha

seemed

Hopfield, the prospects

meet with John

to

favorable for an

enduring student-teacher link between the gray-haired professor and the ambitious

Hopfield tive

who had most

excited

young

Misha with

computation by individually

dumb

was Hopfield whose magnetized "spin

his

biologist. It

model of

neurons

glass"

tall,

was

collec-

in the brain.

It

concept seemed

to

offer the possibility of a physical foundation for neuroscience.

But Hopfield's neural networks were radically simpler than

Mahowald's concept. Crucially, the Hopfield

model was "feed forward."

the feedback loops that were essential to of a

human

lionfold

retina that

would have

to

It

lacked

Misha s understanding

respond

dynamic range, from moonlight

to

to light over a mil-

midday, that would

have to null out vast changes in ambient brightness to focus on the features of a scene. In talking to Misha, Hopfield too

125

was

all

feed forward and,

George Gilder

126

He seemed

said Feinstein, "in her face."

retina project only to the extent that

work algorithm. To Misha, retina,

if

couraged and decided

approach

with his neural net-

fit

the algorithm did not work for a

could not work for the brain

it

it

interested in Misha's

She was deeply

either.

dis-

drop the course as irrelevant to her

to

to the field.

But Feinstein would not give up. Increasingly intrigued with this

woman and

her retina, her vulnerable shyness and her pow-

and her quakes of laugh-

erful intelligence, her capacious smile ter,

Feinstein protested: "This course

synthesis

to offer a

between biology and engineering. You are the only

ogist taking

"Why

supposed

is

it.

If

you leave

it

will

be a joke.

show your paper

don't you

to

.

.

biol-

.

Carver Mead?" he

suggested.

"Oh, no," said Misha,

"I

can't

work with him.

I

can't under-

stand anything he says. All that electrical engineering.

I

want

to

understand the brain." "He's different in person," Feinstein said.

The

next

week Mead,

Feinstein,

"I'll

arrange a dinner."

and Mahowald met

ner at the Athenaeum, the old Gothic faculty center full

of leather chairs, science texts,

hundreds of

brilliant

at

for din-

Caltech

and men's club smoke. Like

students before her, she

fell

quickly under

the spell of Mead's quiet authority and polymathic knowledge.

Contrary to what she had expected, amid the smoke, he listened attentively to her views their significance.

himself. his lab.

He

on the

retina

He had been

and grasped immediately

contriving

"little

toy retinas"

suggested that she do a project with him, working in

The

So Misha found herself

part of the scene.

in the lab

127

surrounded with a mostly

though Allen, Tucker, and Feinstein were

different set of males, all

Eye

Silicon

Mead

gave her the kind of guidance and

support that she sought. "He was amazing," she said later with a wistful smile.

"He had an unworldly

or possible physically. his expertise

He

intuition of

could take a

and somehow

tell

phenomenon

whether

it

field like biology, full of conflicting data ability to tell

what was physically

was a dead end was

crucial.

I

likely

what was

was

far

likely

beyond

plausible. In a

and speculation,

his

and promising and what

couldn't have

done without

it."

Mead's central proposition was that you could not understand anything unless you could build

it.

The

offered models of the brain resembling a medieval

fully

biologists

map

of the

world, with arrows across the oceans pointing to bodies of

land

—

Broca's region here, area seventeen over there, dragons

lurking in a reptilian neural netherworld, and wildly speculative theories connecting one to the other sels of interaction

the biologists had no

The

way

to use

They could not define the

circuitry.

at all

They

electroencephalograms and nuclear resonance spec-

troscopy to yield crude patterns of energy flow and then

educated guesses that were impossible

As Feinstein different planet

up

ves-

of finding out

what was going on. They could not implant probes

the billions of neurons.

had

to the retina.

might as well have been clipper ships. To an

electrical engineer,

exactly

and

said, "Carver's

from the

to test.

view of a wiring diagram was on a

biologists'

a primitive brain, piece

make

maps."

Mead hoped

to build

by piece, beginning with the "trans-

ducer physiology," as the elder Delbruck had put

it,

all

the con-

George Gilder

i28

versions of energy and electrons in retinas and cochleas and the ionic channels that

who had

he had studied with the Xobel laureate

saw Misha's scheme,

He

said.

When

strode into his office fifteen years before. "it

looked

like a

lion

iUead

wiring diagram to me," he

could see the possibility of greatly enhancing the

sophistication of his electronic models of the retina

and actually

testing the latest findings of the biologists.

Mead

explained:

"When we

build the circuits and

them work, make them render images and to flashes of

light,

we can understand

brain's,

with

ambient

all

find edges

we make and adapt

with flows of energy that parallel the the retina in a

way

that the biologists

masses of murky measurements never can."

their

Nonetheless, for several months, they failed in their effort to create retinal devices that could simulate real functions. Carver's steady guidance,

Under

Misha was learning step-by-step

all

the soldering, and wiring, and "pin" connections onto an electronic breadboard. far

Becoming

a tyro electrical engineer, she left

behind her original notion of a transistor as mere

they had hit a wall in their understanding of

how

radio.

But

to translate

Misha's general schematic into a wiring diagram that would work.

Meanwhile, over dinners taking

Mead

Mead

recalls,

through the

at the

Sawmill Restaurant, she was

latest reports

from the

biologists.

As

"She was better than the biologists, because she

reinterpreted and embellished their findings as they related to

our project." They began by building on Mead's toy retinas.

"It is

always easier to start with a previous design than to begin with a

blank

slate,"

he

said.

The problem was

that the previous retina

The

structures had tell

Silicon

been designed

to

Eye

129

perform motion detection

—

to

the viewer what was moving in an image rather than merely

to present a fixed this function of

'

picture."

At the time,

motion detection was done

frontal layers of the retina itself.

deeper

Misha saw

level of the brain, in the cortex.

motion detection on the electronic

them

for

Mead

The

it

still

in

believed that

analog in the

as being

effort to

done

at a

accomplish

retinal surface distracted

two months.

They made key advances, though. Mead showed Misha how to

approximate the dynamic range of a real retina

—

its

ability to

deal with near darkness and bright sunlight, a difference of a factor of millions

—by keeping the

light

represented by currents

On

a chip, voltages are far

rather than translating to voltages.

more convenient, because they can be divided without strength, providing "fan-out" crucial for neural models.

picoamps

rents can vary from

losing

But cur-

to milliamps, a factor of millions;

voltages vary only from milliwatts to five watts, a factor of thou-

sands or

less.

Mead

figured out

how

to register the intensities

currents and then convert to the logarithm of the voltage.

and

Mead

model

by

Misha

incorporated this feature in their emerging retinal

that could operate like an eye or a usable

camera under

conditions of drastically changing light intensities.

At the same time, through Misha's junior the

dorm continued

to build up.

year, the pressure in

New troops

of baboons arrived.

They saw the curvy female semaphore but did not Misha's feedback. She finally got tired of fending

was an emotional woman and fied

by tears and

cries,

learn to read

them

off.

She

after a tussle at her door, ampli-

she had had enough. She rode the

George Gilder

130

LAX,

express bus to

got

on

a plane,

and returned

She was through. She was persuaded

lis.

only

when Mead managed

with

money

for

Minneapo-

to

Caltech

to return to

augmented

to get her scholarship

an off-campus apartment.

Carver did well by the arrangement. Misha became the

driv-

ing force behind his projects for a retina chip, neuron chip, and

see-hear chip (combining the retina with a cochlea). She astonished the others in the lab with her ability to envisage chip dia-

grams. As one of the leading chip designers, Allen often had to

work with Misha's better.

She was

layouts. "I thought

I

was good. But she was

As Feinstein puts

truly gifted with layouts."

it:

"She had an amazing faculty for spatial visualization: a kind of intuitive silicon compilation taken to a higher level of the sys-

tem, with

what design

The

tem.

the feedback loops. She realized what unit

all

primitive,

would elegantly generate the

wiring problem often

Misha was an

idiot savant

'beginner's luck' but she

lously

and

it

would map out

was her

... in a good way

we became

.

would draw the unit

She

.

.

cell

called

it

and miracu-

into a working system with reflections

inspiration.

fringe of the lab. Just Carver

the end

entire sys-

seemed insurmountable but

transitions, into a real chip layout."

of the retina

cell,

and

The hexagonal

As she I

and

said: "I

structure

began on the

a retinal model.

But by

the mainstream. Everyone was doing retinas

and cochleas." Mead's crowded laboratory became chiefly devoted

Delbrucks complex of "transducer physiology" sions

between input from the world and the

brain. In this pursuit,

Misha was

—

all

to

Max

the conver-

reflective parts of the

in the lead.

Sometimes vague,

The

Silicon

Eye

131

sometimes vulnerable, Misha, with the capacious Havahart trap of a mind,

glommed onto

ideas from

were converging around the lab

—

all

the scientific fields that

neurobiology, electrical engi-

neering, solid-state physics, neural networks, biosensors.

Soon the guys

were eager

in the lab

to share in Misha's proj-

Tobi Delbrtick collaborated on other retinas and on stereo

ects.

matching chips that could convey depth of scene. Tim Allen

went

work on

to

a device to display the output of Misha's latest

on

retinas in real time pixels serially

a monitor, rather than

and then looking

Mead wanted him

gram.

at

them

to build a

later

downloading the

using a plotting pro-

system that would scan

images from the retina and display them

in

NTSC

television

video form, so they could be seen as they happened and adjusted as needed, as in a digital camera. Allen

ous analog video techniques, "I

was

riding

Rose Bowl,

my bicycle

when

was contemplating

disaster struck.

on Linda Vista Avenue, alongside the

uphill, drafting

behind a friend when he swerved

My

head went through the back

around a parked

car.

I

window, leaving

me

badly injured and unconscious.

woke up asking

my

ambulance,

make

it?'

.

.

friend I

was with me.

I

When

all

I

remember

get into Stanford?' (Yes.)

Nervous looks

.

Am

I

around."

turned out most of the damage was facial and required

reconstructive surgery. cost

didn't.

him two questions: 'Did

going to It

in the

vari-

him three weeks

leisurely project for

gency.

The at

incident

the lab.

left

him some

By the time he

scars

and

got back, the

Misha and Carver had become an emer-

He lamented

his

plight

responded off-the-cuff: "Just use a

with another student,

who

ROM (digital read only mem-

i

George Gilder

^i

oi\

I

TV

ROM

he

could store a

conversion algorithm.

without numbers, with electrical patterns

As Allen put

It

all

numerical scheme of the

digital

didn't

all

have to be done

the changes performed in continuous

hard to store and control.

it:

"Instantly,

I

could see the entire solution. All

the complexity of the video scanning process,

waveform

itself,

could be encoded in a

cuit could read the

and

a

and even the

ROM. A trivial digital cir-

contents out and drive the retina chip for the image.''

He

built the

day and spent the next week creating a program to

generate the

As

ROM

few key inputs on the mixer

circuit in a

in analog,

ROM contents in NTSC video format. became something

a result, Allen

of a hero in the lab.

Video sources made on a breadboard are notoriously sloppy:

jumpy synch,

blurry pixels, lots of noise. But the

ROM

digital

approach made everything predictable with rock-solid timing, crisp pixel boundaries,

were both

thrilled

and

a clear picture.

with the results.

I

"Carver and Misha

had crossed the boundary

between 'peripheral character' and one of the Chosen lab."

As Carver put

it

later,

giving

in the

him the ultimate Caltech com-

pliment: "Tim, you really grokked cially significant that

7

it."

No

he had grokked

it

one thought by going

it

espe-

digital

—

by-

separating the computation from the changing real values of the

image and converting them

all

into

numbers synchronized

to a

clock pulse.

during this period

in her senior year, Misha's relationship

with Feinstein grew ever more intense. Lovers and intellectual

The

explorers, they

would

talk

Eye

133

deep into the

night, about philosophy,

Silicon

engineering, biology, the nature of the brain, the

power of

reli-

gion and spirituality. Driving in Feinstein's big Corvette, with

sumptuous black leather

seats, they

would return

to

its

park out-

apartment around midnight and sometimes not

side Misha's

leave the car until five, engrossed in each other, yes, but even

more entranced with the incandescence of pursuits. Leaving "Michelle"

new academic intellectual

behind

at last,

their intellectual

Misha had found

father in Carver, supporting her work,

and romantic companion

her service, she was feeling at

the

first

home

and an

in Feinstein, nurturing

and stretching her mind. With two of the best minds at

a

in the

at

Caltech

world for perhaps

time.

There was, however, a persistent canker of

dissatisfaction.

the world, the Caltech program of putting brain functions in

To sil-

icon was advancing with amazing speed. Mead's laboratory had

become in

globally

famous

in the field.

But

Misha, their progress

to

understanding the brain seemed agonizingly slow and she

continued to pursue

saw

—

against Feinstein's warnings

—what

she

as the parallel path of drugs.

Cocaine, she found, gave her an inspiring feeling of completeness, as

if all

come. Heroin she

and

it

her work were done, tried

all

once and gave up.

did indeed reproduce in an eerie

der and discovery that she

her challenges over-

LSD

was her

way the

favorite,

feeling of

won-

remembered from Disneyland. But

perhaps her most powerful insights came from the ingestion of

THC

(tetra-hydro-cannabinol)

brownies.

—the

essence of marijuana

—

in

George Gilder

1^4

Feinstein

remembers

sitting in the car

with her late

at night,

while she exclaimed that she could count the photons reaching

her eye. She had a vivid and overwhelming sense of the paucity of the information from

which her brain was creating

From

estry of nocturnal sights. less

few scant photons, mass-

messengers, her mind could build a scene

detail,

is

an achievement of an entire mind

beyond the

The

retina could not

do

it

alone.

completed over seven Mahowald's doctoral thesis

that

in

She would have itself.

years

it

reached

.

.

to explore

.

under Carvers wing,

1992 won the Clauser award

the best Caltech thesis of the year.

The

first

that prize at Caltech, she even relieved

life

—

models she was building.

retinal

the farthest shores of consciousness

fears

of mass,

full

and beauty. The experience strengthened her conviction

that vision far

just a

a rich tap-

woman

some

ever to win

of her mother's

about California by giving her "the most exciting day of

when

for

my

the award was announced, the last and most presti-

They dined

gious prize of the year.

with Carver

Mead and

that night at the

Athenaeum

Francis Clauser, the physicist

who had

donated the award. Misha reassured her mother that she had joined the John

Catholic

Henry

women who

Newman

also

Society, a gathering of Caltech

pursued yoga and spiritualism.

As Misha went on her triumphant way, writing chapters, books, she

1993 submitted

umentary on her in

May 1995

to

was called by

WGBH

some twelve hours

life.

of Boston

hour on PBS,

and

in

of interviews for a doc-

Entitled "Silicon Visions,"

for a full

articles,

it

was shown

as part of the science

The

Discovering

series

Eye

135

Women, and was

narrated by Michelle

Silicon

Pfeiffer.

Coming from

biology into the dense mathematical briar patches

of Caltech physics and engineering, she was sympathetic with

newcomers

other

Misha when ence.

I

I

needed a

clear explanation of

some

I

would consult

issue of the sci-

found her a dazzling mix of contradictions. Earnest,

— an experimenter with drugs — she pushed her

ambitious, and modest, engineer,

many

Writing Microcosm,

in the field.

directions that

But through

it all,

at

all

some

once

wistful,

an

a biologist, a physicist,

brain in so

seem

of the time she did not

there.

all

she was following the complex paths of Mead's

science farther perhaps than any of his other students did. I

remember walking behind her

brown braid bounce on her back,

for hours,

as

watching the big

we climbed

the sepia

hills

above Pasadena. Here she often retreated to ponder the conver-

gence between her biological studies and her physics, and here she went from time to time with

man

club.

It

comforted

logical creatures all

time."

her,

women

she told me, "to reflect that

my

perform amazing mathematical feats

She waved away

a curious

fly.

New-

friends from the

"Yes, this fly,"

all

bio-

the

she said, "can

see and react faster than the largest supercomputer while using a billionth of the power.

I

spent

six years at

Caltech learning the

Schrbdinger equation, but the merest electron can solve the Schrodinger equation

all

day long. That

every

movement embodies

know

its hard."

is

that calculation.

what It

it

in the

end

—

its

does not even

Through many permutations, Misha's

on the retina chip would lead

does

to Foveon.

early

But

it

work

would

be hard.

Misha was

a scientist

first.

While many of her colleagues

in

George Gilder

136

Carverland went north to companies Clara,

Misha would not become

her eye on the

fly.

When

Now

it

Palo Alto and Santa

a Silicon Valley

girl.

She kept

she was offered a leadership post in an

eminent neurobiological laboratory land, she accepted

in

eagerly.

at

Oxford University

in

Eng-

Misha had changed Carverland.

she was off to change the world of biology.

Federico Faggin at a desk at Synaptics with a

ment

that he

would eventually make

Cawer Mead?

obsolete.

lot

of electronic equip-

Did

Alvia? Courtesy of Federico Faggin

the rose

come from

13 Synaptics

was not only Misha who was impressed by the thinking

Itprowess tory all

the

and neurophysical charms of

Mead's labora-

flies.

was one of the few places on the face of the earth where

humans bowed humbly

Dipterolatry ruled, and

to the brain of the lordly Diptera.

was driving some of them

it

to drink

and

other distractions. In the lab,

Tim

Allen, for example, imagined that he could

deploy thousands of times more processors than a times more connectivity and hugely more power.

speaking of any

own mental

artificial

neural network.

faculties. Yet

and nervous system of

a

fly. It

swats aside

With ily

its

to

And he was

He was

not

referring to his

all

the notions of neu-

time were claimed in this

which was widely known

in the electronic

millions of

he remains baffled by the eye, brain,

romorphic insight that from time elite laboratory,

fly,

to

be leading the world

emulation of neural functions.

tiny brain

and infinitesimal metabolism, the

eludes Allen's hand, and only by mustering

*39

all

fly eas-

his concentra-

George Gilder

14:

tion

be

and

like

much

effort

can he sometimes

someone

ure, the

fly's

Application

is

less

Specific

with a swatter.

It

would

Building. Yet

Diptera gets away. By any obvious meas-

little

brain

it

him with the Transamerica

hitting

of the time

hit

complex than one of Aliens advanced

Integrated

autonomous power, the

fly

Circuits

(ASICs). Yet with

performs maneuvers that would be

the envy of any aerobatic team with the most advanced airplanes

commanding ASICs. The on

glass or

the computing power of scores of thousands of fly

can do flawless

flip

landings on the edge of a

a glass ceiling while scarcely slowing

find food out of thin air

down.

It

can

from elusive chemical cues. All the Cal-

tech computer firepower in Carvers lab

— Misha's

retina

and

Lyon's see-hear chip, David Gillespie's computer-aided engineering, David Feinstein's mathematical virtuosity, John Piatt's

neural networks, Tobi Delbriick's prowess and creathity with

analog electronic circuitry

—could not even scratch the surface

of the evident superiority, and continuing inscrutability, of the eye, brain,

and nervous system of the

As Allen finished up his career

hoped tive

to learn

how

the

measure explained

fly's it.

brain

The

fly.

at

Caltech

in

1987, he

still

w orked. No obvious quantita-

fly's

neurons were more densely

interconnected than any silicon chip. But they operate millions of times

more slowly And

a million neurons,

however heavily

interlinked, could not in themselves perform the

using any principles of algorithm

The

human

known

to

artificial intelligence or

fly's

repertory

neural network

computer science.

real target of the researchers in Carver's lab

brain.

Although a lummox by comparison, the

was the

human

The

Silicon

Eye

141

more formidable challenges.

brain offered far

Its capabilities,

Allen believed, must similarly stem from as-yet

independent of

tural principles,

since

it

struc-

substrate (or substance),

operates with continuity over a period of decades while

cells constantly alter in

its

its

unknown

so

an environment with ever-changing

temperatures and other conditions. For example, brain retain memories for

stance of the cells

is

Mead, Hopfield, had

that there

to

years or more, while the sub-

fifty

and transformations? Analog?

abstruse synthesis of or

the

replaced and the body endures thousands

of environmental shocks

Quantum? Or an

how does

three?

all

Digital?

Who

knew?

Feynman? Don't ask them. Allen thought

be some architectural concept, some principle

of neural organization, that

was eluding the group.

only they

If

could find

it,

what

Hoping

to

continue the quest, he applied to graduate school

at if

laurels they could win.

.

.

.

Caltech. Like most Caltech graduates, he was accepted only

he spent a year somewhere

seemed

that he

with Misha

would have

who

else, either

needed

ing from

its

a job,

was

still

in Pasadena. Allen

and Silicon Valley was

mid-1980s crash. Living

forty rejection letters

in his

just slowly

VW van,

on the bulletin board

his

lab,

inquiries.

Mead

emerg-

in the lab.

It

was

a

Mead.

followed a rule of never recruiting directly from

he would respond

Mead

now

he posted

cry for help. Finally, he turned in desperation to Carver

Although

It

to leave the brain science challenge

then, in 1987,

seriously

working or studying.

to

students

who made

told Allen about Synaptics

specific

and dazzled Allen

with the exploits of the legendary Faggin, creator of the

microprocessors at

Intel,

and, at Zilog, the Z-80.

first

George Gilder

i_|2

"The Z-80, wow," said Allen.

80

—

that Radio

Shack box

at least

learned to program on a Trash

that used the Z-80.

microprocessor." That was a

but

"I

start. It

was not

he could understand how

by the idea that the designer of the Z-80 parable advances could be

made

now

favorite

amazing

as

as a

He was

worked.

it

my

It's

fly,

excited

believed that com-

in neural networks.

synaptics was a fancy new neural name

for a small pile

Meno

of venture capital lamely launched the year before as

Corporation by aspiring venturer Lauren Yazolino. For help in finding a fashionable product, Yazolino called Faggin, then a

high-powered consultant,

who

suggested his old dream of a

microprocessor based on neural networks. Since the company

had no

CEO,

new world

Faggin was asked to take over and he did. In the

of neural processing, the monicker

Meno

did not

convey the cachet or the concept. Faggin suggested Synaptics,

and

it

stuck.

colleague

To find a neural network

Mead

in

expert,

he called

his old

October 1986, and together they began

assemble a team. In Synaptics

literature,

described as the founders, Faggin as the

Mead

Faggin and

initial

CEO

to

are

and Mead

as chairman.

Arriving at Synaptics in suite 106 in an office complex on

Zanker Road

in

Santa Clara, Allen became the

the reorganized company.

Glenn Gribble,

first

a software expert in

the Caltech lab as an undergraduate, followed later.

employee of

him

a

month

Joining Faggin in the small laboratory, Allen planned to

continue the neuromorphic pursuit. As time passed,

many

of his

The

Silicon

Eye

143

Tom

previous colleagues from Caltech joined him:

David Gillespie,

Adam

Tucker,

Greenblatt, Janeen Anderson, John Piatt,

Ting Kao, Lloyd Watts. Piatt had served as an intern

Schlumberger

dropped

also

petitor,

Artificial Intelligence

in

at the

Lab with Dick Lyon, who

once or twice, though he

first

became

com-

a

designing handwriting recognition devices at Apple. Tobi

Delbruck was a regular

Meeting from time

visitor.

time at dinners in the Valley with

to

and Faggin, Misha came by

nounced them to a Grateful

in the

summer

of 1987 and pro-

a "dynamite team." Allen took her in his

Dead concert

was happy and

at

home,

at

Laguna Seca

in

VW bus

Monterey. She

as at ease in the hippy scene

funny smoke as she was intense under the

Mead

rigors of

and

its

Caltech

graduate school and her emerging thesis on the retina. Carver

himself spent one day a

week

in the office. Synaptics

seemed

to

be becoming Carverland North. Allen never did get around to reentering Caltech. 'The

few years

at Synaptics,

Tobi, except

I

was well

I

was doing the same work

paid, better equipped,

as

first

Misha and

and got more

indi-

vidual attention from Carver." Yet Faggin

Mead had

yet to point to a marketable idea from his laboratory.

Carver was

were ing.

toys.

was growing increasingly uneasy. By March 1987,

still

The

coming

in only

one day a week. The imagers

neural networks could not perform real comput-

Although Business Week would identify the Synaptics tech-

nology as one of the five leading innovations of 1987 the kind of hype Carver could generate

had emerged. Faggin had

—no

—

that

was

serious applications

to return to the venture capitalists with

George Gilder

144

news

the

mode." stuff.

was reorganizing the company

that he

He

Not

explained:

going to take a long time, this neural

"It is

a lot of money, but a lot of time."

the annealing

in

in "research

model, every technology company needs

two kinds of leadership, coming from two kinds of men.

Let's

them, for short, the Meads and the Faggins.

call

One

is

mercurial, imaginative, philoprogenitive, conceiving of

something new and bringing

it

and precarious, but loving

as a

it

malformed

to life, often initially

mother does. He sees

potential in the balky bundle, in a fuzzy-faced

infinite

sophomore with

quirky design tools, in the noisy breadboard, in the oversized and

slow imager chip, in the large young bio major with granny glasses, in the snarl of wires

the

revenues

top

line

— running

—and often wins the

succeeds.

risk tak-

than punctilious, sometimes sentimental, he pur-

ing, often less

sues

and switches. Optimistic,

If it doesn't,

from wistful hope

credit of the

don't bother him;

crowds

he

off

is

if

to

fitful

the venture

on something

else.

This

man

could not consummate his ideas without collabora-

tors, also creative

tion.

Where

Where gin

is

the

the

Mead

looking for

and resourceful, but

Mead is

is

visionary,

lower level of abstrac-

at a

the Faggin

Where

nine-dollar sales.

peripheral vision, seeing the interconnections

bottom

line,

skeptical.

seeing zero-billion-dollar" markets, the Fag-

initial

in his universe, the

is

'

the

Mead

among

is all

everything

Faggin dons blinders and bends toward the

the goal line, profits

now

.

.

.

And

that

baby

in the

The

Silicon

Eye

145

bathwater, that recognizer chip with the blurry images,

it

was a

hopeless kludge.

Though needing each pretend to hold

when

all

other, the

the virtues in their singular selves.

—both Mead and our — they may not be

the claims are true

Renaissance

men

of

two types may sometimes

Faggin, after

era

able to

Even

all,

are

combine

the roles in practice during the course of eighteen-hour days.

When

these two types conflict, their

company

suffers.

But when

the two forms of leadership align themselves synergistically, they

can unleash an unstoppable force.

Carver Mead with

his protege

Tim Allen

at Allen's

ber 1990. Allen was Mead's student at Caltech

wedding

and

touch-pad project at Synaptics. Courtesy of Tim Allen

in

Novem-

the savior of the

1

The Analog Perplex

Tim

Allen saw the

first

two years of Synaptics

in

1987 and

1988 as an exploratory phase. Allen and Glen Gribble

had

set

up the

lab,

developed design tools for neural net-

works, and experimented with several neuromorphic analog cuits.

Tom Tucker

joined for a while and

made

contributions,

but seemed incapable of focusing on this long-term project. left

and did not

It

turned out, as Allen

resembled too

recalls, that "all

down our money. Understanding deep 1989,

for ten guys

we knew

it

much

for a

a

a Carverland lab.

we had done was run

the brain was just a subject too

and ten Sun workstations

was time

He

came and went. Faggin had

return. People

point. Perhaps Synaptics

cir-

to figure out.

By

commercial application of some

sort."

At that point, the company began a sharp expansion. Allen's

good friend Dave Gillespie saw

fit

to leave

Carverland south and

follow the others up Route 5 to Synaptics. Gillespie brought

tremendous sophistication

in

computer science and chip design

147

— George Gilder

14S

to the project.

He

of the

company

April,

John

replaced Glenn Gribble,

Piatt finished his

employee number

He and

Ph.D. thesis for Carver (on graph-

neural networks),

into an Oldsmobile,

out

an obscure but intense row with Faggin. In

after

ics applications of

who had stormed

and drove

to Silicon Valley.

on the way

six,

crammed

to

his belongings

He

enlisted as

becoming chief

scientist.

Faggin soon began collaborating on original research on

"Blind Source Separation," an abstruse field, which used complex time delay algorithms to improve identification of the sources of sensor signals such as sounds for

mixed up

in passage

example, the output of an array of microphones. Presented

NIPS4,

at

a neuroscience conference, these innovations led to the

creation of a mathematically esoteric research field

still

flour-

ishing today.

Although the company had yet

beyond closely

its

research, Synaptics

watched and celebrated

enues and

then

own unique

in

profits

1

to achieve a saleable

seemed

product

was one of the most

start-ups in the Valley. Large rev-

just a matter of time.

99 1, everything changed

for the Synaptics

band of

brothers. Verifone called, proposing a major application for the

technology.

No more

more

from Misha then finishing up

visits

flies,

no more abstruse neuroscience, no at

Caltech, no more

Carverland North.

With

a billion dollars of revenue, Verifone

company

in point-of-sale credit-card readers.

to introduce a device to read the

MICR

was the leading

Now

it

was aiming

(magnetic image char-

The

Silicon

Eye

149

on the bottoms of checks. Just as you

acter recognition) codes

currently swipe your credit card through a reader, so in the

future you could swipe a check. Joining the two key areas of

company

expertise of the

works

— the

new

—image

processing and neural net-

Verifone device would combine a fast image

MICR codes on

scanner with two neural devices, one to find the the check and the other to read the numbers.

be based on the retina work

identify edges,

and look

Caltech, including Misha's ingen-

at

ious edge recognizer circuit.

The imager would

It

enabled devices

The

for patterns.

neural nets would use

from John

"a fiendishly ingenious algorithm"

to detect light,

based on a

Piatt,

He

recent invention called a Support Vector Machine.

also

designed a training algorithm for the device that could process the equivalent of 128 thousand examples in 7.5 minutes on a

Sun Sparc would be

2 server. Storing the synaptic weights on the chip

floating-gate technology pioneered by Faggin.

Allen was in charge of developing the analog floating-gate technology. But

when

Faggin broached the idea to the company's

— UMC Taiwan, chips — the engineers foundry

in

which would have

to

make

the

just said, "No." Floating gates for flash

memory as a

cells that

one or

difficult

to

each could hold a single

zero, with

perfect.

endurance over

ability statistics

not going to

identifiable only

nothing in between, had been devilishly

UMC

had

fifteen years,

almost ten years to

bit,

make

it

to

and

reliable.

it

guarantee

it.

memory's

had taken the company

Now

and the working design

mess with

the

that they

at last, the

had the

reli-

foundry was

Faggin's idea of a floating gate that

could hold not a number (based on binary ones and zeroes) but

George Gilder

150

a

continuous fractional analog weight over time without leakage

or degradation

—

this

was beyond the

capabilities of the

UMC

process.

At Caltech, they had always been able tic

connectors

in a

among

to

program the synap-

the neural net's neurodes with memories

computer plugged

into the wall (that

was

real nonvolatility)

or with electronic potentiometers (like continuous light dim-

mers). But Verifone wanted a cheap single-chip system that

could be bolted to the side of the cash register and would keep its

weights

if

solving the

mental that,

you turned

it

off.

Allen explored the possibilities of

problem with some other device, but he had

barrier.

There were

amorphous

a lot of ideas

silicon circuits

—but

—

hit a

ferroelectric this

and

nothing was near ready

except a return to old-fashioned magnetic cores and no one

made

those anymore. Faggins basic concept for a programmable

single-chip neural net processor

seemed

Allen remembers driving up Route

Cruz

in a rental car

with

Mead

1

to

be

far out of reach.

home

7 from his

in

Santa

discussing the problem. "Carver

always had a rental car because he flew up from Caltech every

week and

stayed at a motel in Sunnyvale." Contemplating vari-

Mead

ous solutions. course"

—Allen

said:

liked that "of

"The simplest way

—"would be course"

weights as different transistor

That was the solution. but the of

MICR

numbers

marks

that

It

sizes.

in the bar

code

blips. It

a

do

it,

of

program the

can do that."

reprogrammable chip,

codes on the checks consisted

would not change

to nine, plus four

to

We know we

would not be

to

—

just have to read

from zero

would be an application-specific

device that could find the codes and recognize them.

The

During

this period, the

such projects.

It

Eye

151

company contracted

to

do a

series of

signed up with a bank to do a cash counter that

could both gauge the

amount

Silicon

number

of each one, and

it

of

bills in

committed

a pile

and

also read the

to contrive address label

readers for the Post Office and for United Parcel Service. Faggin

made

a deal with a scanner

tor for

company

called

Caere

to

do a detec-

an Optical Character Recognition wand. These projects

had baffled many companies

in the past,

but neural networks

and neuromorphic imagers made them accessible

at last.

Meanwhile, some of the limitations of the chip they had

made

for Verifone

were coming

codes were not the same after visited the

It

was

a

all

MICR

cue from Verifone, Allen

warehouse

bad checks. Allen got permission

clear right away.

idealized rendition of the to

On

a large one-story

checks through the machine

became

all.

Perhaps

bad-check repository of the 7-Eleven convenience

store chain. lions of

to the fore.

to

in Dallas. Mil-

swipe bounced

to his heart's content.

One

They had been working from

MICR

codes.

They were

all

thing

a highly

supposed

be the same, but in the real world there was a host of subtle

variations

had

to

and

machine did not work. They

go back to the drawing board and change the design to

accept more sistors

a lot of the time the

and

Where were

variety,

which meant changing the

also possibly increasing the

the floating gates

when

sizes of the tran-

number

of mistakes.

they needed them? Well,

standard floating gates were good enough to store a rough value,

and that would be good enough of neural networks, after

all,

for a neural network.

The

was dealing with imprecise

That was why you used them, what they were

for.

forte

inputs.

George Gilder

152

Employing the standard process used

for digital

memory

cells

programmable read only memories (EPROMs),

in erasable

a

an analog charge with the equivalent of

floating gate could store

of resolution (which in a binary system

means

perhaps

six bits

number

of two to the sixth, or sixty-four gradations of accuracy).

That was

was good enough

exciting; that

for the synaptic weights

of a neural network that could recognize codes.

one waiting trade, "if

I

for? "Well," Allen

mused one

charge with the same accuracy.

and

Digital converters

would not go standard

digital for

EPROM

cells

D

to As.

6 I

Of

course,

That

just the

one

A

tal stuff after all."

tions,

when

memory

to D.

I

I'd

just a

could store the

need Analog

measly 12

to

you

bits of

could store two to the twelfth or 4,096

bits of resolution. That's three orders of still

any-

a hassle. Perhaps

is

But with

bits.

What was

day, in the lingo of his

memory,

just took 6 bits of digital

a

Maybe

there

Analog seemed

to

is

magnitude more and

something

work only

in fixed applica-

the algorithm or inputs do not change.

or programming,

you

Nonetheless, as Mead,

still

needed

Piatt, Allen,

in this digi-

If

you need

to turn to digital.

and Gillespie

all

agree,

with altered transistor sizes the check-reading device began

working the

.

.

.

robustly.

As

Piatt recalls:

"We

really

sweated blood to get

chip working in time for Verifones shipping schedule.

only had a few people ... so everyone helped out and did that

was

lines for

far outside their

We

work

normal job description. To meet dead-

our silicon foundry,

all

of the engineers in the

company

pulled a simultaneous all-nighter, going through pot after pot of strong coffee, to

make

sure that the

first

version of the chip went

out on time and correct." Piatt, the neural network guru and com-

puter science Ph.D.,

became

"chip verification guy."

The

was

"I

Silicon

frantically entering

Eye

153

VLSI schematics

System while Tim Allen was laying the chip start-up," Piatt

Called the

into our

CAD

out. That's life at a

remembers.

I-

1000, the chip fulfilled

Verifone, reading the hardest

MICR

all

the specifications of

codes with an accuracy of

99.995 percent. Integrating a variety of leading-edge analog and neural network technologies on a single chip,

it

seemed

to

be a

dazzling triumph of the Synaptics vision. But what's this? Veri-

fone

s

specs were changing. That was not part of the plan. Veri-

fone wanted a cheaper chip. Verifone's customers wanted a

motor

to pull the

cisely

what the

checks through the machine, which was pre-

optical reading chip

was engineered

to avoid

(with a motor you don't need a smart optical imager; a motor can precisely pull the

check past an ordinary magnetic

Verifone executives

who had approved

ever reason, the deal

fell

the project

reader).

left.

The

For what-

through.

Faggin says today that

it

was a good thing

in retrospect,

because the analog settings on the chip would have deteriorated in use

and

it

would have been

"a bitch to

keep

one else on the project has any idea what he Faggin's growing

ently jaded his

in the field.'' is

No

talking about.

disenchantment with analog devices has appar-

memory

of his successes in launching them. In

any case, the chip used delta-based or differential technology that maintained accuracy

under any conditions that would not

also destroy a digital device.

author, the virtues of the

I-

But even by Faggin,

1000 are

the collapse of the market for

it.

less

its

ultimate

remembered today than

Retrospect

is

like that.

After the Verifone fiasco, similar frustrations afflicted the

other projects. Unable to create a general-purpose neural net-

George Gilder

i54

work processor with programmable synaptic weights, the Synaptic

devices

some two

became special-purpose custom

years to develop

chips, each taking

and each only good

one applica-

for

Even with changeable synaptic weights, the

tion.

difficulty

remained. For recognizing numbers, a ten-item matrix was optimal, but for letters you needed twenty-six, regardless of

how

variable the synaptic weights were. Similar problems afflicted

almost every neural architecture and application. that neural nets

been teaching

were

and

parallel processors,

It

turned out

as Carver

for fifteen years, "parallel processing

had

is

inherently

these obstacles to the analog ambitions of

Mead and

application specific."

But

all

Faggin were

trivial

compared

to the real

showstopper on Zanker

Avenue. During those two years while Allen, Gillespie,

Piatt,

and

the others perfected their special-purpose analog devices, the world's ten thousand digital chip designers

bled the capability of digital technology.

two hundred thousand new "Just think

against.

now, Intel has increased the clock rate of

Caere, the Post Office, or the bank

that

to

be

Faggin pointed out,

Between 1986 and

digital

from 50 mega-

By the time Synaptics would present

amazingly ingenious and low-power

pened

They generated some

digital designs.

what we were competing

hertz to 3 gigahertz."

had more than dou-

—had come up with

little

its

analog chip, Verifone,

—whoever the customer hapa high-power digital solution

was good enough and that could be simply plugged

in to

an

IBM PC. It

tells

was not only Synaptics the story of CTI, a

that

company

fell

that

before this cycle. Faggin

makes telephone terminal

_i

The

Eye

Silicon

equipment. During the same period aged to bring to market an analog

155

in the early 1990s,

memory

serial

it

man-

that could dis-

place the tape recorder in a phone answering machine.

It

was

cheap, robust, nonvolatile, and good enough to record fifteen

seconds or more of talk in

memory producers began tive chips.

memory

Then

the

tell

row,

markets for their defec-

to search for

was

a

killer.

the difference.

system might be,

it

But

for a voice recording,

If

no

However ingenious CTI's analog

could not compete with an analog-to-digital

converter and billions of nearly free reject chips from fabs.

DRAM

For most digital computing applications a defective

cell, or

one could

rendition.

its first

you needed

nonvolatility,

add

observed sardonically: "The world has

a

many

battery.

DRAM

As Faggin

cylinders."

Gillespie concludes, "This experience led to a lot of soul-

searching around here. For linking to the real world, analog indispensable. But trying to build analog circuits to do a

putation that could be done digitally are going to lose. If

you need

to

is

com-

to fight City Hall.

compute, go

to Fry's

is

You

and buy a

computer."

With

all

Silicon Valley trooping to Fry's, the

reached an impasse. By 1992, the road to failure. vice, the

The

cash counter

all

all its

company had

contracted projects were on

Post Office, Caere, United Parcel Ser-

were kaput. Faggin and Mead, though,

each had one further project under way.

Mead was

doing

CMOS

imagers, with the goal of developing his retina technology into a

new

analog camera that would collect

accurately and usurp film.

Mead

work was "extremely promising."

all

the color information

said Tobi Delbriick's imager

156

(

reorge Gilder

Having watched Carvers analog systems come over

previous

the

lous. Regardless of

$20

billion

six

years,

however,

camera industry seemed

had served

tion, the

nothing

was incredu-

any Delbriick miracles, competing with the

ambitious. Let's just say "impossible." gin

Faggin

to

for ten years

to

be more than merely

Or maybe

crazy.

But Fag-

on the board of Logitech Corpora-

computer interface device company. There, two years

before, he

had come up with

a better idea.

Dave ible

Gillespie at his office, with one of his Synaptics touch pads

behind

his right shoulder.

From

vis-

the iPod to the "teleputer," Gilles-

pie sees ever-rising markets for "haptic" devices. Dave Gillespie

15 Seizing the

As

Sword

Peter Drucker has written, in any industry the largest

profits

tend to go to the company which supplies the

missing element that completes a system.

Located Valley,

in

Freemont, California, across the bay from Silicon

Logitech Corporation was doing well as a maker of com-

puter mice and trackballs (essentially upside-down mice) that

completed desktop computer systems. however, Federico Faggin had

come

On

to

the Logitech board,

understand that these

technologies would not suffice for notebook computers. Pretty

soon notebook computers would be most of the business, and they

still

had no adequate input device.

Trackballs took too

moisture, and, likely to fall

cabin.

If

little

you

out and

space and depth,

tried to clean roll

— not

one

in

under the seats

a stewardess stepped

might go flying a

if

much

gummed up

with

an airplane, would be

to the other

on one, the

a useful cursor effect.

end of the

coffee, tea, or milk

IBM

had concocted

track-stick that avoided the moisture problem, but

i59

it

George Gilder

160

IBM

stuck up through the keyboard and gave you the

you thought that way

many people

—whenever you

made

finger

a mistake,

—

which

did as the cursor gyrated wildly across the screen.

With Logitech engineers, Faggin came up with the idea

of a

computer touch pad and had persuaded the Logitech board adopt fect

it.

if

to

After an exhaustive worldwide search, he found the per-

company

to build the chip to

run the device.

It

was

a

little

firm across the bay called Synaptics. Indeed, Synaptics probably

had the best

skills for

designing a system that could recognize a

and

finger position robustly

have

to

be analog, and

it

accurately.

would have

to

Such

a device

would

have significant powers

of pattern recognition such as were uniquely afforded by neural

networks.

To pursue

this opportunity,

Faggin proposed a partnership

between Logitech and Synaptics. Logitech already had the and firmware

ers

force to market

invention was

to

it

connect the device

to the

PC

dampened when he

and found 170 examples of to

industry.

to the

PC

and the

Although Faggin's

driv-

sales

thrill

of

investigated the patent record

"prior art,"

no one had yet managed

put the touch-pad idea into practice. After

all,

there had been

plenty of "prior art" ideas for the microprocessor also. Early in 1992, Faggin signed a contract with his friends at Logitech, Per Luigi Zapacosta and ian

connection"

Borel. tion,

—and

The group

settled

their

Giacomo Marini

"the Ital-

Daniel "Bobo"

Swiss colleague,

on price parameters

—

for a

two-chip solu-

including a Motorola microcontroller, with plans to

a single device

veteran

when volumes

who had begun

move

to

rose. Steve Bisset, a Silicon Valley

at Intel

and defected

in

1976

to

form

The

Silicon

VP

in 1989.

161

had joined Synaptics

chip-tester pioneer Megatest,

ing

Eye

as a market-

Faggin put him in charge of coordination with

the Logitech engineers.

was the idea of dispensing with

Bisset's greatest contribution

the need to attach the touch pad to the computer as another

He

layer of gadgetry.

suggested that they

move

the touch-pad

capacitors into the back of the computer's printed circuit board itself.

become

Circuit-board layers had

accommodate the

so thin that they could

entire sensor array, enabling an entirely inte-

grated touch pad. Taking virtually none of the precious space inside the computer, one side of the

pad would bear the chips

and connectors, surface mounted on inches square. face space

The other

side of the card

where you place your

a printed circuit card

would provide the

sur-

finger.

Faggin led the planning and assigned the design job to Bissets

new Intel

hire

Bob

Miller, a burly six-foot-four

who was uncontaminated by

ing with

Caltech graduate from

the earlier failures. Consult-

Mead, Miller learned the magic

of analog.

He

a system with analog potentiometers, floating gates,

novel circuitry. says, "It

The chip

was close

fit

designed

and other

Synaptics technology well. As Faggin

to the teaching of Carver, with analog sensors

and recognizers and compensation using floating-gate devices." Faggin, Bisset, and Miller got patents on the device.

Soon plunged

into a bitter divorce, however, Bisset

Faggin and asked to leave the project.

and nurse

his

wounds.

He

could not accommodate him Carver,

seemed enough

He needed

came

to

time to reflect

asked for a part-time job. Faggin at

—but

Synaptics

when

—one key

part-timer,

Bisset suggested that he

George Gilder

162

move

to

Logitech and manage the project part-time from the

other side, Faggin saw a "win-win" for both companies.

vened

make

Logitech to

at

the arrangement. Bisset

He

inter-

moved

to

Logitech and was put in charge of the touch pad. By early 1992

came back from

the prototypes

enough

to signal a

the foundry and worked well

go for the project. Faggin went to Logitech to

finalize the deal.

was then

It

They

that his friends at Logitech

Bob Miller they wanted

told

would take nearly puts

had to

it,

"It

was the

this device

make

all

began

to get shifty.

a drastically lower price that

the profit out of the product. As Gillespie

classic situation for a joint venture to

which had

a lot of

We

added value and we wanted

had

a profit, while Logitech

fail.

all

market connections and wanted the chip

the key interfaces and at cost."

Faggin thought he could straighten out his longtime colleagues. After

all,

it

had been Faggin who had conceived the

touch-pad opportunity for Logitech in the Italian

place.

But

his

connection had frayed, as Per Luigi and Giacomo had

resigned from over.

first

On

management and Daniel "Bobo" Borel had taken

the Logitech board, Faggin had long supported

and gotten along well with him. As a to pull out all the stops

last resort,

Bobo

Faggin decided

and resolve the issue man-to-man. Meet-

ing Borel for breakfast at the Stanford Court Hotel in Park, Faggin thought they

Menlo

were near agreement. Faggin would

just patiently explain the cost situation,

and

as

soon as Bobo

understood the deal would be done. Every time Faggin tried to pin

would

shift

down

the terms, however,

Bobo

ground. Like Oliver Twist, he always wanted "more."

The

Silicon

Eye

163

Borel believed that Synaptics had no recourse.

"We were

nered," said Faggin. But as creator of the

first

microprocessor

and an industry paladin, he was not going

run a profitless con-

tract design crazy.

But

house

to

He knew he was

for Logitech Corporation.

He

his pride got the best of him.

cor-

stood up at the table

and announced that the two companies would have

to go their

separate ways. Yes, he was resigning from the Logitech board.

He would Back

figure out

at

some course

for Synaptics. Bye, bye,

Zanker Road, Faggin summoned

his

all

company meeting. After much wrangling and many he called

team

for a

questions,

an entire touch pad, com-

for a crash effort to create

plete with drivers, firmware, ergonomics, that could be designed, built,

Bobo.

and even economics,

and sold by Synaptics.

If

they

could not win by joining Logitech, they would win by beating

them. This meant a complete

life

change

for the

company. For-

get understanding the brain, forget exotic imagers, forget the

comforts of Carverland. Faggin was leading the company into the fierce, unforgiving crucible of competition in the global personal computer business.

He had

leave.

If

you

didn't like

the board on his side.

it,

well,

And one by

you could

one,

many

of

the previous stalwarts did indeed leave. Faggin's decision might not have

seemed

as

foolhardy as

Mead's idea of competing with Kodak, Nikon, Canon, and Sony, but

was

it

close. Logitech

had Steve Bisset and

his intimate

knowledge of the Synaptics design. From long experience

mouse

in the

business, Logitech had the crucial and time-consuming

firmware and software drivers to connect to any personal computer.

And

Logitech had close

ties to

every major manufacturer

George Gilder

164

of personal computers, including the inscrutable

webs

wanese fabs and contract manufacturers and obscure but niche

PC

of Taicrucial

players elsewhere in Asia.

Alps in Japan was already well on the way to producing a

touch pad for PCs. Moreover, one of those 170 patent holders that Faggin in Salt

had found turned out

Lake

City,

to

be a company called Cirque

and they had already

tied

Apples new Powerbook. Synaptics seemed

up

to

a contract for

have almost no

chance. But in the face of the definitive failure of

its

other

designs and the quixotic prospects of the imager project, Faggin

could present "almost no chance" as a tempting

new

horizon of

opportunity. Battered by long failure, the board did not balk.

Nearly everyone was willing to "bet the company" on something,

and

if

Faggin thought touch pads were the ticket, they would

buy another

ride.

At the

least,

touch

pads meant competing

with Logitech and various companies they had scarcely heard of rather than with

Nikon

or Kodak.

Allen and Gillespie also supported Faggin's decision. But until this

meeting the touch-pad project had been a fringe operation

at Synaptics.

"An ugly duckling,' "

as Gillespie said, "without ele-

gant neural nets or imagers." Allen and Gillespie were focused

on speech recognizers, pattern matchers, tions. Enthralled let

by

all

Faggin, Bisset, and

retinas, neural func-

this

high science, everyone was willing to

Bob

Miller,

all

old Intel hands, have their

But when Allen

way with

this low-rent project.

nized

the gory details" of Miller's design, his stomach began

to

"all

churn ominously. As he thought about

ready to scream, "Not again!"

it

more

He concluded

would bring the company down.

finally scruti-

deeply,

he was

that Miller's design

The

Eye

Silicon

165

Through the Verifone episode, the Post Office Caere scanners

ments

—Allen

— through

a

set

boundaries between analog and all

had

to

of rules for marking the

The

digital.

direct interfaces

be analog. So the finger would have to

be sensed and located through analog circuitry capacitor matrix. insulator.

A

UPS,

the gay launches and gory denoue-

all

had annealed

with the world

fiasco,

capacitor

is

— through

a

two conductors separated by an

A finger is essentially "a bag of water," a conductor, The

the sensor array would be conductive.

finger

and

would move,

and the capacitors would discharge and issue a rough pattern of data that could ultimately define the point on an x/y capacitive

would be analog.

matrix. All these sensory functions Allen's rule

stants

circuits

away before you had

was

fine for signals with time con-

to

use

it.

and

fast.

placement

A

But

if

and comparison

the time spreads toward a second, you have

touch pad would have to remember the fingers

for as long as a

on the pad.

It

minute or more

—people

rest their fin-

could not forget where the finger was.

could not forget the residual pattern

Bob

Filtering

could often be done in analog, since they operate pas-

to go digital.

gers

that analog

on a scale of milliseconds. The charge would not degrade

or leak

sively

was

when

It

the finger was absent.

Miller intended to store these values on analog floating

saw

gates designed into electronic potentiometers. Allen gates as nothing but trouble.

They would

drift

and

floating

distort the

output, assuring failure.

Tim Allen was the

felt his

job was on the

line.

But forming

in his

mind

entire circuit diagram of a device that could succeed, a

device that might even prevail in the market. Gillespie

and invited him

to

come up

He

called

Dave

the next day to his place

George Gilder

166

near Santa Cruz above Route 17 to help him define the details. Allen himself had conceived and helped design the house.

mostly glass structure on a ridge 3,000 feet high

Soda Springs Road, not change see from

it."

it

was

"all

analog," as Allen put

Through the windows on

Monterey

to

good

a

A

at the top of it.

"You could

day,

San Francisco, from Bay Bridge

you could to

Pebble

Beach. But this was not a good day. There was a wild storm outside, rain beating in torrents against the glass.

Even an ordinary

storm in the valley would bring 80-mile-per-hour winds top of the ridge. Allen's

anemometer ran

other occasions he had seen Gillespie

showed up

at

it

to

120 mph, and on

top out.

9 a.m., running up the rocky dirt path

through the rain to get into the house as Allen's wife work. Huddling up in the living room, they

was under

siege.

at the

"We were standing on

left for

felt that their

world

this little island, this

beautiful analog structure that Carver had designed at the top of

the mountain" from which you could theoretically see the city in the distance, the froth of the ocean, the glow of San Francisco, the

jeweled for at

lights of

Monterey

— symbolizing huge

potential markets

neuromorphic transducers and elegant neural networks. But

the time

all

you could actually

of creative destruction winging against the

see, feel, or hear

were the gales

up from Silicon Valley and Japan

windows of the house.

Nonetheless, hunched over that kitchen counter of gray granite

in

glass,

the eight-faceted

180-degree curve of the living-room

they found an eye in the storm. Totally absorbed in the

project, blocking out the world, they created a design for a work-

able touch pad based on Allen's concepts and on Gillespie's

.

The

Silicon

shrewd ways of squeezing the cheap

Eye

167

computation out of

last bit of

They could do much

eight-bit digital microcontrollers.

of

the calculation on special-purpose digital circuits on chips. But if

you were going

microcontroller,

"Dave did a

it

to

move

all

the rest of the computing to the

had better be able

to

do the job

in real time.

brilliant job," said Allen, "of partitioning the algebra

so the right answers dropped out naturally."

So

it

went. Again and again they chose to replace clever ana-

log solutions beloved of Carver

devices.

and even Federico with

As they worked through the lessons of previous

digital

projects,

they found themselves shunting aside, one device at a time,

most of the some

thirty

patented analog circuits that the com-

pany had concocted over the

years.

For Allen and Gillespie, stalwart graduates of Carverland, this

was

painful.

to leave

"Going

stand

it.

It

dragged

it,

"was

So we began

me down

it

worked pretty

well.

It's

It felt

In this touch pad, there

is

couldn't

just a sim-

empower-

analog. All digital processes ape

would be no analog

electronic potentiometers,

zona,

I

was analog concepts that they were simulating. But

analog functions conducted by the mostly analog

A

deciding

into the details too

to simulate stuff in digital.

everything in the real world

ers.

like

slowed the rate of experimentation. In the end

ulation, right? Yeah, but ing." It

put

home. To run away from your parents. But analog was

too hard, too slow. quickly,

to digital," as Allen

digital

human

brain.

floating gates,

no

no clever analog adders and multipli-

microcontroller from Microchip of Chandler, Ari-

would perform many of those computations.

Allen and Gillespie finished their work just as the storm

George Gilder

i68

relented and the sun began to peer through the clouds and the

image outside their window began

As they stood up and looked exultant.

They had

to take

shape from the murk.

each other, they

at

a design for survival as a company. But in

electronics, as they knew, there

were many designs, not many

They were

products, and most companies ultimately go broke. just

two engineers

and they lacked

in a very flat organization,

any clear channel

were

at first

to

impose these last-minute ideas on

their

company. Neither Allen nor Gillespie was used to company neither

knew

the next step. But whatever

a severe attack

on the work of

was,

it

a colleague.

it

politics,

and

would mean

As the senior

figure

Allen would have to do the job, and he had no such experience. Miller and Faggin were close, he knew, and Millers design well

down

the pipeline.

would not be easy over, Allen

The

to stop.

train

had already

left

With the heavy use

was

the station.

It

of digital, more-

doubted he could gain Mead's support. "Mead's not

going to like

this,"

he

said.

But Gillespie insisted, "You have got to have lunch with Carver." Filled with trepidation, Allen arrived the next for the Train restaurant

have lunch with Mead.

was cruising

"We have

on Middlefield Road "I

fully

thought

I

day

in

at the

Menlo Park

was already too

to

late.

I

for trouble."

a

problem

the problems with

at Synaptics,"

Bob

Miller's

Allen said.

He

explained

touch pad and the

dependent solution he and Gillespie had

crafted.

digital-

Then he

waited for Mead's reaction. After an excruciating pause, finally spoke:

Late

Mead

The

"It's

like

it

a

lot.

think you've grokked

I

169

telling

it.

He had been

him what But

cial place.

it,

I

Tim."

immediately grasped the validity of the new design

and endorsed

He

Eye

an adaptive analog circuit doing collective computation.

Mead had was

Silicon

if

it

had

you want

told Allen to

listening to the technology,

told his students

to

— analog has

and

it

a cru-

do a computation, buy a computer.

work out the

details in a

memo

and

fax

it

to

Faggin in Japan, where he was attending a conference. In the

course of writing the

memo, Mead

says, Allen

significantly

improved the design. Faggin was also ready for a

and

new

Gillespie, Faggin himself

design.

Unbeknownst

to Allen

had become deeply suspicious of

analog computation. By the time he arrived at Zanker Road,

he was ready Miller to a

to

new

put Allen in charge of the project and move role,

managing

relations with

the contract

manufacturers.

Then

in

May 1994 emerged

Cirque touch pad on four

its

the

new Apple Powerbook,

digital

ASICs.

It

with

brought wide-

spread acclaim as a major advance over trackballs.

The PC

industry immediately began to look for suppliers for a touch pad for its

PC-compatible notebooks. Alps was soon

own two-chip

ately resolved to

in the

market with

solution. In a critical decision, Faggin

adopt the Alps form

nectors and power levels.

He

factor, all the

immedi-

same con-

purchased drivers from the same

contractor used by Alps. Alps's device, however, suffered

from

sensitivity to

ambient

electromagnetism and moisture. Synaptics's pad did not. After the experiences with previous Synaptics products, Allen and Gillespie

had incorporated on-chip error correction and redun-

George Gilder

170

dancy and used redundant memory technology pioneered

mainframe computers. These decisions increased also

enhanced the immunity of the pad

programmable read only memories)

the Synaptics touch pad

PC

that the entire

company wanted ware could be 'Timing times

is

was

ready,

three

was precisely the device

fit

for the

a

data into a pot,

it

helped to be prepared. Full Synaptics had

moment

for five years.

company's expertise, but a perfect

mass of ambiguous capacitive is

'Where

stir it

answer. By taking a

is

the finger?' You put

bunch

—

it is

of

crummy

as

it

all this

murky

estimates and have

it

It is

not

them liter-

has no Hopfield algorithm, for exam-

domain of messy real-world

computer domain of all

and the

a similar kind of collective computation, trying to

bridge the analog

With

touch

around, and hope to get a solid dependable

neural network

—but

A

fit.

signals,

vote you can get a very high quality response.

pad

If a

a slightly different device, however, the firm-

for this

answer you want

ple

later,

everything in this business,'' Faggin says. "Some-

pad converges

ally a

months

Gillespie reflects, "Touch pads turned out to be not merely

good

all

All these

altered.

been preparing

a

firmware over

ROMs.

of analog-sensor and neural-network experts,

As

(eras-

notebook computer industry was seeking.

helps just to be lucky." And

it

When, it

EPROMs

for the

the significantly cheaper but unchangeable

decisions turned out to be crucial.

costs, but they

to outside interference.

Allen and Gillespie chose one-time changeable able

in

signals with the

digital precision."

the backing and

filling

and to-and-froing across the

settled for the correct path, the processor

had

to per-

The

Silicon

Eye

171

form a kind of cognitive annealing. Settling on a correct path the company,

it

was

time to plunge the Synaptics sword

finally

computer market. Over

into the icy turbulence of the personal

the next six months, with deceptive ease, the

some 60 percent

to capture

Holding most of the

rest

Then Logitech came Bisset's guidance,

least

would be twice

the price of

own

its

it

sold.

In the price

pad. Designed under

The

war

was

it

a one-chip

using two chips, which in theory at

30 percent below Synap-

at $6.50, nearly

would

of $9.00. At $6.50, Synaptics

tics s price

every pad

forth with

in Japan.

as expensive to manufacture. Logitech set

system

its

was Alps

still

company managed

of the global touch-pad market.

cultivated at Synaptics,

was

device. Synaptics

for

battle

seemed

to

be

lose

money on

over.

that followed, Logitech did

make some

small

inroads into the market. But Allen and Gillespie were already intensely at

work on

a

new

single-chip solution incorporating

all

the advances of the two-chip system. Faggin put Gillespie in

charge of the task of designing a microprocessor exactly cus-

tomized for

all

the special

demands

of touch pads. Gillespie

demurred. Designing a microprocessor titans

of

the

industry

—people

like

is

something that the

Federico

— accomplish

through legendary feats of genius and tenacity. But Faggin per-

suaded Gillespie that

it

did not take a "god or a Faggin to

make

a microprocessor."

With

Gillespie leading the processor design

and Allen contriving the

emerged

in 1997.

and the firmware

overall design, the one-chip solution

At that time one of Logitech's main customers,

the contract manufacturer of

Compaq's notebook, came

to Fag-

George Gilder

172

gin to report problems with the Logitech device, sitive to interference.

ready to plunge

adaptable

in the

alternative? Faggin

sword again. With

EPROMs, and

uct proved far year,

Did they have an

which was sen-

its

neural algorithms, the Synaptics prod-

more robust than any other touch pad. Within

Logitech was virtually out of the market, and

withdrew Faggin.

was

error correction,

entirely.

'They threw

in the sponge.

We

in

had

1999 it,"

a it

said

Facing defectors from Synaptics, former partners

at

Logitech, a continual stream of analog frustrations, Faggin had finally

uct.

triumphed

in a

new company

with a radically

new

prod-

His vindication was sweet.

Meanwhile, amid

all

the excitement over the touch-pad

breakthrough, few noticed that Carver and his team had taken a

remarkable picture of a

cat.

IN

A

scarcely risible cat lurks behind the blue pixels in the cover photo-

graph article

for

Carver

Mead and Misha Mahowalds

on the future of analog imaging. Could

threaten

Kodak

7

Scientific

American

this technology

ever

16 The Cat

While on

Faggin early in the 1990s was taking Synaptics

his

happy

ride into haptics

imager projects remained

—touch pads — Mead's

far short of the

But perhaps because they tapped a deeper stream of

market.

scientific

research, they continued, ever so slowly, ever so relentlessly, to

gather

momentum

both with Mead's

with Misha and her colleagues Fruits of

at

team

little

at

Synaptics and

Caltech.

Mead's collaboration with Mahowald spanned the

entire history of Synaptics, beginning a

launch in 1986,

few months before

when Misha was embarking on

its

her career as a

graduate student, through her departure to Europe in 1992, and

through the power of her design ideas afterwards. In 1987, in a Caltech classroom, his conviction that

first

publicly declared

what he termed "neuromorphic analog VLSI"

offered the possibility of a radically sor.

Mead more

effective

image proces-

For Mead, this assertion was not new. But later in the class,

he presented the

first

actual example of such a machine, a

175

sili-

George Gilder

176

con retina chip, based on Misha's design. Modeled on the

human

eye,

could follow a rotating fan without aliasing

it

do

(reversing direction as spinning wheels also adapt to drastic it

changes

in movies).

The images

in the intensity of light.

offered at the time were crude. But unlike

all

could

It

the other crude

imagers of the time, including the popular digital imagers used in the robotics industry to inspect

work

in progress in factories,

these images reflected a deep study of brain functions and processes.

Mead

explained:

"When you examine how

visual information, several facts are clear. as

system by as

meant

many

that the

as nine orders of

tem

is

a fly

[billions]."

He

—comparing the power

—

of the

fly's

neural reflex sys-

incomparably superior to anything computer science can

build or even model.

does

magnitude

"power delay product"

usage with the processing speed

it.

And

if

know how

"We have almost no

we cannot the far

The operation

separate memory.

work

in

real

figure out

how

idea of

the

fly

how

does

the

it,

more complex human brain does

fly

we do

it."

of the brain shares virtually nothing with a con-

ventional digital computer.

to

Even the brain of

eludes a swatter outperforms any real-time computer image

it

not

biology processes

It

It is

not serial and

it

does not have a

does not have a glossary of symbols. Forced

time

—creatures

with von

Neuman

imagers

would have been eaten by creatures with real-time brains

—the

The

brain

key neural constraints are energy and connections.

had

to

work

in a

remorseless environment of scarcity, in time,

power, and communications.

Examining the

brain,

we

find

that

unlike

a

computer

The

schematic, which wire

—adding up Less than

local.

percent of

its

to 1

Eye

177

dominated by several

some seven miles

percent of

energy,

80 watts used transmitting

is

Silicon

which

its

layers of long-distance

— the brain

in turn

between

supremely

wires are remote. Less than is

less

than

1

in a leading-edge microprocessor,

signals

is

different

parts

1

percent of the is

of

devoted to the

brain.

Although some experts have spoken of the "huge communications resources" of the brain, involving "millions" of axons (the

long-distance links), these millions compare to local billions of

The

millions of connections.

millions of axons represent roughly

one-billionth of the total synaptic lines,

order of quadrillions (10 of

15

The

brain lavishes

the neurons.

Though McCullough and other neural-network

champions have termed figure implies an active

this a passive process, this

70 percent

and transformative kind of communica-

resembling a data flow or systolic array more than a von

Neumann

computer.

Calculated in the 1980s by Margaret versity of ics of

Wong

Reilly of the Uni-

Michigan, these percentages reflect the energy dynam-

the only image processor that demonstrably works.

overthrow nology.

way,"

some 70 percent

energy on dendritic processing, the input trees that link to

its

tion,

).

which number on the

"I

all

the prevailing assumptions of passive imager tech-

do not imagine that

Mead

understand. efficiently

They

says.

The

than

I

understand the brain in any

"But our retina chip result

digital

is

that

is

full

based on what we do 4

it

operates at least 10 times more

imagers do and

it

can simulate some of

the functions of vision on silicon in real time." It

was

a significant first step

toward creating a real-time

George Gilder

178

imager on monolithic

silicon. In the future,

devices could

silicon

Mead

believed, such

empower improved forms

vision or superior solid-state

machine

of

cameras that could process images

as well as merely take pictures.

To the argument

cumbersome

bulk

CMOS

Mead

to build,

silicon

used in

To the argument that

CMOS

would require

and thousands of discrete devices that would be

exotic designs

too

that such an analog system

it

all

offered his device in the plain

the digital chips in your PC.

would use too much power, he ran

transistors at exquisitely

and P

tive) electricity of electrons

low power. Both the

N

(nega-

(positive) electricity of "holes"

(where electrons were missing from the material) he ran subthreshold voltages like the micropower systems in

at

digital

watches. Even the light-receiving photoreceptors needed no

complicated addition to the Every every

CMOS designer faces a fundamental problem.

cell's

positive

two

devices

transistors

—

—the

a potential

is

latch-up or parasitic device. a

CMOS process. complementary negative and bipolar transistor,

space charge region between the two

Where

positive

area termed a

and negative forces meet

P/N

CMOS

is

called

transistors.

in a device is

junction: a scrimmage line

the

called

can crop up across what

It

Between

an active

where contend

the negative electrons and the holes (electrons missing from the structure of an atom). Every

some way

CMOS

process has to figure out

to neutralize the potential parasite "latch-up"

the transistor that

the transistor that

is is

switched by a positive voltage on

its

switched by a negative voltage on

But rather than neutralizing

it,

Mead

between gate its

and

gate.

listened to the technology,

The

Silicon

Eye

179

and actually enlarged and enhanced the bipolar latch-up tor that the silicon

wanted

to provide.

He made

it

transis-

into a

com-

bined photodetector and signal amplifier. Collecting light on the

P/N junction

transistor amplified the signal in the

and

emitter.

With gain

at its base, the latch-up

channel between

its

source

of over 1,000, the latch-up outperformed

ordinary photodiodes that would have to be placed on a separate

chip from the image processor. Integrating the photodetectors

onto the

CMOS device,

systems that scaled

Mead showed

the

way

to create analog

systems in accord with Moore's

like digital

Law.

The latch-up photodetectors

play the

same

essential roles as

the 6 million cones and 120 million rods in the single

photon with an energy

will create

human

larger than the silicon

eye.

A

band gap

an electron-"hole" pair that causes swarms of elec-

trons in the base of the transistor to cross the channel. Govern-

ing the amplifying gain of the transistor

electron hole pairs

is

the

life

span of the

—how many holes can pass through the base

channel before they recombine with electrons and lose their charge. In this case, the transistor multiplies one photon into

hundreds of electron charges.

Similarly, in a

human

retina, a rod

converts a single photon into a million electrons worth of charge in the

span.

form of sodium

Though

ions,

with a gain dependent on their

life

radically different in detail, both are analog cas-

cades of amplification that use the lapse of time as a crucial guide in generating an image.

The human eyes and mind embodied

in

the

see and sense by the analogies

neurochemistry and electrical patterns

in

George Gilder

i8o

the brain.

They

don't even

know

it's

By

hard.

contrast, a high-

resolution digital imager takes billions of steps every second

consumes scores of watts of power and heat

and

to calculate a single

picture.

Only with agonizing

VLSI

would Mead's analog

delays, however,

gain adherents outside the circle of his

senting his ideas to an audience at

MIT

own

students. Pre-

few months

a

classroom revelation of the analog retina chip in 1986, unfriendly classroom guffaws and endured

ment provoked by Mead's new

insights.

some

1

after his

incurred

of the resent-

The MIT

professors

were proposing optical computers that used photonic devices

modeled on

borrowed from Mead, that the absence of

assertion,

optics in the brain

processor

They laughed out loud

digital transistors.

—

—the

at

my

digital

world's only fully successful image

cast serious doubt

on the prospects

for

image pro-

cessing with digital optics.

Only slowly did the analog years

later, in

May

retina chip crawl forward.

1991, after between twenty and thirty itera-

tions of the device in Carver's lab,

American. Representing

was the face of

But four

this

it

made

the cover of Scientific

technology to the world of science

a cat registered

by

nal camera. Inside, the story by

Mead and Mahowald's

Mead and Misha was

reti-

confi-

dent: "The behavior of the artificial retina demonstrates the

remarkable power of the analog computing paradigm embodied in neural circuits. ...

tations are based

on

A

neuron

is

an analog device:

ones and zeros. Yet neural systems

work with basic physics rather than against

it.

.

.

compu-

on smoothly varying ion currents rather than

bits representing discrete

."

Its

trying constantly to

work

The

As Mahowald explains for Stereoscopic Vision,

that

world.

.

.

measured much ration

—with an

log system

An

Analog VLSI System

same

level as the

as part of

system [the

interacts directly with the visual

It

responses are real-time electrical signals

[Its]

.

181

"The analog system functions

emulates.

it

Eye

her book,

in

physical world, at the

the real, retina]

Silicon

.

.

.

as are the signals in a real physiological prepa-

oscilloscope.

and the

The one

biological

similarities

between the ana-

comparison between

facilitate

the two and create a milieu of serendipity."

Mahowald was

expressing her delight with the similarities

between analog electronics and biological processes. In contrast to the

immediate translation of

numbers

be crunched into an image, the analog and biolog-

to

light signals into digital

ical

imagers shape the light into a cascade of related chemical

and

electrical radiations.

to

They do not cut

off nature

and

resort

mathematical abstractions. They use the amplified signals

from the

light

and allow them

to flow as a pattern across the

neural plane.

The ican,

result, as

Mead and Mahowald

was huge energy

wrote in Scientific Amer-

efficiency: "In digital systems, data

and

computational operations must be converted into binary code, a process that requires about 10,000 digital voltage changes per operation. Analog devices carry out the

step

and so decrease the power consumption of

by a factor of about 10,000.

They pointed that

same operation

would prove

"They respond

in

one

silicon circuits

." .

.

to a little recognized virtue of

pivotal in the

analog devices

development of future imagers:

to differences in signal

amplitude rather than to

absolute signal levels, thus largely eliminating the need for pre-

1

George Gilder

82

cise calibration.

.

." .

As Misha pointed out

only sees changes, or by changing. objects or

sees

it

still

movement

is

movement

treat

moving

movement

is

frozen in one place,

as noise,

becomes

it

of

While

itself.

the key signal and guide for a biological imager.

the eyeball, for example, It

down and

her book, the eye

detects the

It

objects by constantly

imagers are bolted

digital

in

If

blind.

moving and focuses on movement. Vision machines

sees by

that try to

remove the noise of movement defy the lessons of

nature.

Misha concludes: "Because

[in

Claude Shannon's theory of

information] only changes and differences convey information,

constant change

source of

is

a necessity for neural systems

difficulty, as

it is

for digital systems.

of this venture will give rise to an entirely tion processing that harnesses the

tems

to

digital

All

solve

— .

.

.

rather than a

The success

new view

power of analog

of informa-

collective sys-

problems that are intractable by conventional

methods/' this

was

theory,

however. Regardless of

its

academic

significance as evidence of an advance in understanding the

nature of vision, the cat on the cover

blue

—

actually

was

a

downer

for

—

a

monochrome

most observers.

It

blur in

belied both

the confident assertions inside and the grandiose claims of

the Synaptics's business plan. Captured in only 2,500 pixels, the

image seemed

to

pose no significant threat to the Moore's

juggernaut of digital electronics based on devices

machine

that

was already propelling

a

charge-coupled

thriving

vision for manufacturing applications.

"bucket brigade"

CCD

Law

industry of

With

a single

chip holding millions of pixels,

many

The

company

laboratories

Silicon

Eye

183

were experimenting with

that offered resolutions far higher than Mead's.

digital

cameras

Few were awed

by his claim that he could scale his device to densities a hundredfold greater than the early rendition.

chrome

pixels scarcely

Some 250,000 mono-

endangered Kodak or Sony.

17 Teleology at Oxford

After Misha's

Scientific

American breakthrough and her

where she would

thesis triumph, she left for Oxford,

confront the world of biology in

its

own

Unlike

lair.

Carverland, congested with computers and oscilloscopes and other scientific instruments, the Oxford lab was filled with

books and prowled by

real cats.

Her

colleagues,

Rodney Douglas

and Kevan Martin, though pursuing the neuromorphic were nervous about

As Misha put goal.

They

it

its

implicit critique of biological practices.

at the time: "Biologists don't

call that 'teleology'

measure everything

vision,

and think

it's

want

bad.

to

have a

They want

objectively, all the infinite details,

to

without

understanding the purpose. But in order to understand something,

you have

to take things out. If

cat, here's a cat"

— mind

"it's all

—

a black feline

there. Perfect."

"But to understand a

judgments. Have a

cat,

you want

to

understand a

jumps onto the

lap of her

She holds out her cupped hands.

you must reduce

goal.

185

it

somehow. Make

George Gilder

186

"Making models of the

almost everything out that the biologists think out the chemistry, the In

making

DNA,

a silicon model,

we have

retina with Carver,

we

take out everything but a few elec-

—amazingly the same —

same

the biological properties and signal paths. But salt

'The

water

it

important. Take

is

the shape, the salt water, the lipids.

tronic properties that look the

chip in

to take

reacts differently.

if

dump

you

as

the

will short out.

It

do the same thing every time they do a meas-

biologists

urement. They take everything out they don't measure. But they don't admit

it.

So they never develop a clear agenda and a

set of

goals for their research." Biologists at Oxford that year in fact

were studying the neurons of

live cats

by probing them with a

sensor that could measure their electrical activity on an oscilloscope. But these crude measures yielded

and were very bad

for the cats.

understanding

little

Misha conceived

vision as a

com-

plex collective feat of billions of neurons, rendering the blips of

one neuron essentially meaningless. But

at

times she thought

that even this bootless torture of cats offered

the brain than her

own

efforts to create

During the long winter league ogist life

Rodney Douglas,

a genial

moved

my

work,'' she said.

bogged down and other

in

silicon.

with her col-

and accomplished English

and neuromorph, recently divorced.

from

insight into

neurodes on

Oxford, she

in

more

"I

cannot separate

biologists at

Oxford outside their

little

when ETH

Zurich established and endowed an entire

interest or support.

institute to support Misha's

new

building.

It is

my

As time passed, though, the work

group showed in

biol-

The team was

work and housed

it

in a

little

exultant

new

spanking

called the Institute for Neuroinformatics.

The

Silicon

Eye

187

1995, Misha and most of the group

In

moved

to Zurich,

including Douglas, Martin, and a team of ten scientists. Their goal

is

make to

familiar: "to identify the

computational principles that

the brain so formidably versatile and powerful, and attempt

embody them

into a

new and

innovative type of computer

architecture." Their chief achievement

is

the "canonical cortical

microcircuit," a kind of minimal electronic neurode that theoretically

could be ganged into groups to perform neuromorphic

computation.

meanwhile back

in

San

Jose,

Mead was

pursuing his

imager project in a corner of the Synaptics Lab. In

late

1994,

impressed by claims of progress on the imagers, National Semi-

— revenues — made conductor

a Silicon Valley

a bid to

behemoth with some $2

billion in

buy Synaptics. The purchase did not

go through because of resistance on the Synaptics side, but National

made

a $5 million investment.

Sanquini on Synaptics a joint nies.

development

To Mead,

s

put

its

COO

project, to

be negotiated by the two compa-

this proposal offered the

development be devoted

appealing chance to

He

fab.

suggested that the

to imagers.

In charge of the joint venture,

Mead

hired Tobi Delbruck to

build the imagers and National assigned two engineers.

up

a lab at Synaptics

Dick

board of directors and agreed to pursue

have ready access to a leading-edge joint

It

They

set

where they contrived small cameras based

on imaging chips that

Mead and Delbruck had

developed.

Carver began having fun again because "we were doing fun

George Gilder

188

stuff."

But as time passed, he discovered that despite weekly

Fri-

day meetings with National executives and engineers, he lacked leverage with the National fab.

Mead was

near the end of his rope

when Mark

charge of Nationals patents, showed up

meetings

in April 1996. After

and asked him how

He to

said

he

didn't

is

with

know, because

he approached

over,

We

was so hard

way your

will

Mead

at the time.

to get National

replied: "You

know, Carver,

have cross-license agreements

the other semiconductor companies.

come up with on imagers only

it

Grant

silicon.

not really the issue.

all

was

one of the Friday

was going. Mead was seething

it

put anything into

that

it

at

Grant, in

be available to

ideas will have any value

is if

Any

patents you

The

the others.

all

they are spun out

into a separate company."

Mead was son

why

exultant.

Grant had given him a perfectly valid

National would benefit

if

the imager project

rea-

became

independent. The company would not want any of the newintellectual property being

away

to Intel

accumulated on Zanker Road

to slip

and Sony or any other major microchip producer

in

the world.

The group was sensors.

already developing the

first

CMOS

imaging

Using Mead's invention based on bipolar latch-up

sistors that

could be

made

into photodetectors in an ordinary

icon fab, they could achieve densities

advance of

CMOS

tran-

technology.

sil-

bounded only by the

Doubling transistor densities

every eighteen months under Moore's Law, the process was already scheduled to produce a billion-transistor

the next century.

DRAM early in

The

Next

to

Eye

189

be hired, in August 1996, was Nick Mascarenhas.

particle physicist

he had devoted trinos,

Silicon

who had joined Carver

much

A

as a postdoctoral fellow,

of his academic career to detecting neu-

massless particles that pervade the universe but interact

with almost nothing, making them incredibly hard to catch.

If

he

could detect neutrinos, photons should be a snap.

from the outset

of the

new independent imager

Carver upheld two key principles.

He knew

could not succeed making imagers alone.

ence had confirmed

whims to

company

The Verifone

his resolution to avoid

of a large company.

that the

project,

experi-

dependence on the

The imager joint venture would have

produce entire cameras, from shutter

to software.

Even

if

they

never marketed a camera, they would need to build one in order to prove the capabilities of their imager.

was

to create a color

camera without

The second

arrays of filters

resolution

each dedi-

cated to just one color. Eschewing digital guesswork, the

camera would have

One day

in

new

to register all the colors at every pixel.

September 1996 Mead showed up

an old tube-based video camera.

It

used a prism

at the lab

with

to separate the

three colors of light for processing into a full-color image by

three tubes. Carver suggested that they extract the tubes from the prism element and do a color imager with three imager chips,

one

for

each

cumbersome, but all

the light from

color,

it

all

attached to the prism. This design was

possessed the supreme virtue of collecting three primary colors at every pixel.

By Jan-

uary 1997, Tobi Delbriick completed a working prototype, based

George Gilder

190

on chips manufactured than two months.

It

was the

first

camera they made.

clean and vivid images of 640 by 480

cheap PC, or some 300,000

With in

a tiny

took him a

at National. It

pixels. It

VGA

was

more

little It

produced

resolution, like a

a start.

team and few resources, they had demonstrated

two months the

ability to

make

a

camera with images of

higher quality than the prevailing standard in digital photogra-

phy

in 1997.

But they could not proceed further without support

from National. The key event was a demo done by Mead, Toby Delbruck, and Nick Mascarenhas

at

Friday meeting with

a

National in April 1997. Assembled in a National boardroom

were

CEO

Brian Halla, Dick Sanquini, and technical

including an imager and wafer fab expert

named Dick

staff,

Merrill.

Tension was high. Delbruck and Mascarenhas had never seen

Mead

so nervy

and focused. "Assembled with duct

device consisted of a cuit board

and attached

Mead

set up,

told Tobi

The National looked

bad

at

TV

camera lens mounted on

to a

executives

themselves

all

live in

sharply, "Don't

quiet.

touch

it

was

it."

paraded by the machine and

VGA

color.

pixels, the device offered a clean

uration.

a single cir-

computer color monitor. After

and Nick

the

tape,

With few defects

image with good color

or

sat-

Everyone seemed impressed, although Merrill was

The high

resolution,

evident. National

low noise, and high potential were

began exploratory negotiations

for a deal with

Synaptics.

Mead

then met with Sanquini and patent counsel Grant, and

together they

made

company and put

a proposal: National all

their

would

invest in a

imager patents into

it.

new

Synaptics

The

would

Mead

way they add value

summed up

in the lawyers, to

is

hope, Sanquini called:

.

Let's

"Isn't

months

six

to close

they have to add value.

change the deal

does not work anymore/' But just as

communicating?

and

the deal that was finally

"The process took

recalls:

because once you get

.

191

namely Mead, Delbriick, and Mascaren-

Although those terms

negotiated,

.

Eye

also put in their intellectual property in imaging

assign key personnel, has.

Silicon

in

The

such a way that

Mead was

it

near to giving up

we

the problem that

are just not

have a another meeting, just you and

me

and the key lawyers, of course." Mead gulped ("key lawyers,

of course"), but he actually exactly

which lawyer

to bring.

Sanquini came with

Mead

was pleased, because he knew

Mark

Clark, the National counsel, and

Law Group,

brought Craig Johnson of the Venture

leading entrepreneurial lawyer in Silicon Valley,

man

of Garage Technology Ventures. Johnson

is

now

the

also chair-

known through-

out the Valley as a wizard at structuring win-win technology deals.

As they began hammering out the agreement, he began

talking reflectively about the structure of arrangements

seen work and those that out

is

neers

that the big

room

for

guidance, they

didn't.

"The key

for

any good

he had

to

come

companies leave the entrepreneurs and engi-

independence." With Johnson's authoritative

made

Mead and

a deal that gave

his

team the

space to innovate, and National and Synaptics a bountiful share of the upside. At the time National held

49 percent of the equity

and Synaptics 16 percent. Before launching the

new company,

however,

sure of one thing. There were two people he

Mead had

to

be

knew he would

George Gilder

192

have to sign up.

and teacher,

One was

at the

Richard Lyon, former Caltech student

time resting on a gilded six-month severance

package from Apple. The other was Nationals leading inventor of imagers and silicon processes, Dick Merrill. Merrill

suspicious of

Mead

understand quite

as a pointy-headed

how

side the hothouse

still

was

academic who did not

to design a device that

worked well out-

environment of a Caltech

laboratory.

But

Mead was

quick to recognize Merrill as "the most creative engi-

neer that

had ever met."

I

"He was extremely the visit

elusive, though,"

Mead

said.

company could be consummated, Mead would Misha

And first

before

have to

in Switzerland.

J

18 White Rabbit Sometimes

I

doubt the

consciousness.

reality of a separate

—Misha Mahowald

September 1996, Carver Mead got

Inwas

in serious trouble in Zurich.

to focus

Misha

She had moved out of Rod-

ney Douglas's apartment and was

been able

a report that

She had not

living alone.

on her work. She needed "space/' She needed

"time."

As everyone it is

discovers,

a hard problem.

step, like

bionic

murky

when

they take brain science seriously,

Mead had modest

goals of

moving step-by-

an engineer. Misha was more impatient. She wanted

breakthroughs,

psychedelic

Beseiged by

revelations.

data, dendritic loops within loops, neuronal

mazes within

mazes, a susurrus of analog noise, a buzz of bugs and

flies,

howls

of dying cats bristling with metal probes, she felt trapped.

Seeking the doors of perception, she kept hitting the walls of recursion. In confinement, no system can be fully understood.

No

logical

scheme, mathematical code, or algorithm can be

proven without resort to premises beyond defined the problem.

itself.

Kurt Godel had

Max Delbruck had couched

J

93

it

in his

Mun-

George Gilder

194

chausen epigram. Misha resorted mistic prayer.

She even returned

She resorted

to yoga. fitfully,

but recurrently, to the

forms and symbols of her original Catholic to extract her

mind from the swamp by

to ani-

faith.

She struggled

pulling on her

own

long

braid.

Like so ley to

many

Timothy

brain researchers before her, from Aldous Hux-

Leary, she

had sought

in her desperation a facile

Disney-like epiphany, an artificial ride into the mind, and out into a higher domain.

and

THC —gave

At

first

the drugs

her a sense of

new

—

particularly the

insight

LSD

and power. But over

the years they began to evoke frightening specters beyond her control.

She then halted drug use

enhanced form of

ing even an for a

entirely, to the extent of refus-

aspirin offered her

by Feinstein

headache. But without drugs she found herself prone to

depression. She had wanted to transcend her limits, enter a universal consciousness

own mind from phantoms

fly,

Mead and

beyond the cerebral

down on

her

a universal eye. But there, knowledge stops,

and demons his

trap, look

lurk.

Checkmate.

companion, Barbara, flew

to Switzerland to see

from

her. Arriving at

her apartment with flowers after a

California, they

were greeted by Misha with a strangely cold and

flight

she were not really there and they were

dismissive shrug, as

if

not really there, as

the world had receded and she were a waif,

diminishing

down

if

a long tunnel,

all

Disney magic gone, and they

were inspecting her from a microscope above. They did

their

best to reach her, without success. In

late

December, Misha summoned David Feinstein

to

Geneva. Her old Caltech lover and most enduring friend and

The

Silicon

confidante, he had been the one

map and

nal to

grasped

its

Eye

who

promise.

It

first

195

contemplated her

reti-

was he who introduced her

Carver Mead. Although in 1992 she and David had amicably

broken up to pursue their divergent careers, they had continued to talk

Misha

weekly on the phone, Feinstein in

at

Boeing

in Seattle,

Pasadena and Oxford. Feinstein came now

to try a

rescue.

Misha wanted him

on Christmas morning, and so he

to arrive

did.

There were

ing.

Churches beckoning. Swiss burghers thronged the

amid

St.

Nicholas decorations everywhere. Bells ring-

the lights and consolations of the ordinary

all

Misha had once wanted:

streets

love, family, children, revelation,

She greeted him bearing

a

King James Bible and

that

life

God.

restlessly

shuffling rosary beads. Pointing to scripture, she told

him she

was being invaded by creatures crawling up from the base of her spine.

They were beginning

on her mind. They were

to prey

relentless. For distraction, she insisted

by a friend from the

carol party given all

in

German. She did not seem

her. Feinstein called

that this

Rodney Douglas

had happened before

effect in six hours

to

—

on attending institute.

okay.

Feinstein lay sleeping in her living room,

Feinstein was

He

Panic seized

assured him

that her medication

and she would be

Ten hours

Misha

Christmas

The songs were

know anyone. for advice.

a

would take later,

while

left quietly.

awakened the next morning by policemen

knocking on the door. Surveying the apartment, they opened the

bathroom floor ful

was

door. a

The tub was

ruddy kitchen

full

and red with blood.

knife. After

On

the

an apparently unsuccess-

attempt to cut her spinal chord, Misha had

left

the apart-

George Gilder

196

jumped

merit for a nearby train station. She to

Geneva. She was thirty-three years

feinstein wrote to Misha's

old.

friends:

myself exclaiming, 'How could you do really a mystery.

chosis,

eternally

if

damned, whereas

however she conceived

scripture,

youth

—

Misha?' But

it

isn't

I

if

if

a psy-

hope she found redemp-

it."

—contrived from from her

figmentary recollections

she died before Christmas ended at the place of

her birth in Minnesota, seven hours behind, she could find vation.

to

own

she died by her

told Feinstein of her conviction

imagination,

that

find

madness triumphed, then she

hand, then she might be redeemed.

Misha had

I

madness was coming

to believe that

take her. She explained that

tion,

this,

"Sometimes

She was beset by demons within. She had

and had come

would be

in front of the train

sal-

Otherwise the demons would capture her mind and she

would be

lost to

madness and

perdition.

She did

arrive at the sta-

tion before six o'clock.

Feinstein continued:

"I

find Misha's story eerily like the story

7

of Carl Jung. However, Jung's psychotic period in his thirties

ended

finally,

releasing and

empowering him

do

to

his

life's

work.

"Misha was more connected than anyone

I

to the collective

subconscious

have ever known or known about, save perhaps

Jung himself. That connection intensified abruptly during her 'long gray winter' in

ued

to

Oxford two and

a half years ago

and contin-

deepen, increasingly threatening her sense of herself.

My

The

understanding of her death her

when

Silicon

is

Eye

197

that suicide

became

possible for

her fear of loss of self surpassed her fear of death."

In 2000,

Tim Allen went

to visit his old friend

Tom Tucker. At

Caltech, Tucker was the incandescent one, as intellectually sparkling as

was Misha, with

whom

he tested the doors of per-

ception and the elasticities of the mind. Allen found Tucker ing on his mother's

expression and

couch

in Littleton, Colorado.

for

leader on neural networks and then start-up called It

seven years as a technical

became

chief scientist at a

MicroMonitors that created liquid

crystal dis-

Now

failed during the millennial technology crash.

white house propped up on the side of the

lives in a

social worker, a

huge dog, and several

mathematics as a volunteer

cats.

to

On

he

over-

hill

looking Portland, Oregon, with a no-nonsense young

teaches

a blank

little to say.

feinstein worked at Boeing

plays.

He had

liv-

woman

Thursdays, he

troubled youths in

prisons.

Through

his

company, Analytic Animations, he consults on

the intractable problems of applied mathematics with compa-

when some

scholars write of the

assert that all the major

problems are solved,

nies around the globe. At a time

end of science and the frontiers of sides.

He

human

learning

still

beckon

to Feinstein

on

believes that "the horizons of knowledge are no

than a week away. Within a

week

a smart researcher will reach

its

all

more

of deeply delving into any field limits

and begin asking ques-

tions that the leading thinkers in the field cannot answer."

George Gilder

198

Delivering "Feinsteins" of ever-increasing density and elo-

quence, he gives mesmerizing sermons before large crowds local

churches on the analogies between the findings of physics

and the nature of the

down and limits).

in

at

soul.

"Waves are neither

local (pin

them

they disappear) nor infinite (to propagate they need

But

all

the action happens at infinity."

some way Misha's waves flow on

He

believes that

still.

Carver Mead, meanwhile, never solved the perplexities of the

mind. But he did find a project

man who

—however transformed—

could bring Misha's retina

to a practical climax.

Part Four

FOVEON

—

19 Merrills Magic

Walking through

the Foveon Corporation parking lot

with Dick Merrill on a cool February day in 2001, did not

know what

to expect. Merrill is

I

an analog

chip designer, and analog people are different from digital people,

who

favor neat streams of ones

and earnestly entertain physical layer,

journalists.

where everything

skewed and connected

in

Analog people work

teams at the

noisy and intimate

and

to everything else in the universe.

This

sense of exposure and connection firewalls

and zeros and work

is

—

of a lack of thresholds and

and the clear numerical boundaries of digital systems

makes analog people defensive. They often become of black arts

and trade

secrets, volatile

loners, full

resentments and spiky

prejudices.

One

of the greatest,

worked

some

twenty-five years for Analog Devices of Nor-

for

wood, Massachusetts, from

Mead had met Lion

a

named

Barrie Gilbert,

cabin somewhere in Oregon.

with Merrill four years before, in 1997,

& Compass

has

at the

Restaurant, not far from Foveon's offices, in an

George Gilder

202

effort to enlist this silicon

manufacturing sage

start-up.

Mead was

industry,

and they were meeting

Valley.

in his

new imager

probably the most important intellect in the in

one of the

elite eateries in

the

But Merrill had given the impression that he would rather

be chomping on a ham-and-cheese sandwich in a cabin in

Vermont.

for several years, Mead had urged me rill,

whom

to

meet with Mer-

he compares with the industry's most famously

feral

analog chip prodigy, the late legendary Robert Widlar. This was less

than reassuring. As

researched Microcosm,

I

semiconductor industry,

for

Widlar had led

a hero,

Lawrence Station

which

me

on a

Sunnyvale

in

I

my book on

the

merely wished to make him

futile

wild-geek chase from

to the Hilton in

Puerto Vallarta,

Mexico, without yielding a single interview.

On

this bright Silicon Valley

intense,

and

quiet, as

But Merrill was or shoot

it,

as

if

noon, Merrill seemed

shifty,

he was planning a Widlaresque getaway.

at least unlikely to

be drunk, or

Widlar had been known

to flaunt a gun,

to do, in efforts to attract

the attention of his National Semiconductor bosses ("Always

worked," as he

said).

And

the trip to the Lion

be short. Merrill would not

likely

escape on the way. Mapquest

estimated a seven-minute jaunt, just one exit

which was only

a

& Compass would down Route

101,

few hundred yards up San Tomas Expressway

from Foveon. But Merrill had a shortcut. I

steered

parking

lot,

my

rental car, an ungainly gray Lincoln, out of the

squeezed across a small bridge and into a series of

adjacent parking

lots,

snaking past the Intel Santa Clara plant

The

and companies with names such onto what

Eye

Silicon

203

as Swixx, Svee,

and Luminant,

thought was Central Expressway. Merrill was mut-

I

and assured us

tering directions

would be no time

it

at all,

what

with the short cut, avoiding the jams and terrors of 101. Chiefly

new

engaging Merrill, though, was his denunciation of the

Nikon D-l

digital

Nikon on

ital

camera.

Using standard

said Merrill, the

camera

Nikon was

know you have

Mekong

this

CCDs

River with

photography

with

all

lec-

their noise,

horribly flawed, inflicting ghastly

where there should have been whorls, and

forcing delays and wasting

only

the

was fascinated by

I

digital

whirls on the pictures

taken the top-of-the-line dig-

down

a recent trip to Asia

his Laotian wife, Sang. ture.

He had

power (no ready plugs

a real

in Laos). "You

camera when you want

to take

it

mountain climbing," he explained. After several turns, in the midst of a shameful capitulation

Route

toward

announced

that

from

101

Lawrence

we had missed

Expressway,

Merrill

the key turnoff and overshot the

mark. Turning onto a backstreet by a company sign with three Xs in

it

—whether adult

or

nervously that perhaps

pre-IPO

I

could not descry

we should

much lunch

the Lion just off total of

anyway." But Merrill

& Compass

any

moment

a

Nikon

digital

Foveon had arrived

By

thought

we

"I

don't

could find

now, somewhere across 101 to thrash

around

for a

twenty-five minutes.

By the time we reached the buy

suggested

reassured him.

I

still

Magdalena, and we continued

some

I

return to Foveon and eat in

the cafeteria. "That will be fine for me," eat

—

his shifty

restaurant,

I

camera, but Merrill had at its

knew enough still

not to

to explain

how

miraculous alternative.

manner, Merrill conveyed the impression that

George Gilder

204

he

really

wished he could return questions

intimate

distractingly

on

arrival at

work and escape

all

these

about semiconductor P/N

and charge-coupled devices. But

(positive/negative) junctions right away,

to

the restaurant, he clarified Foveon's

route to a revolution in image catchers.

He

said that our cir-

cuitous path to lunch offered a perfect analogy for the road that he,

Mead, and

new imaging

his colleagues

had followed on

their

way

to their

product.

Foveon and Synaptics had indeed traversed a twisting and swiveling route.

They narrowly missed

a possibly fatal collision

with digital camera monster Sony. They overshot key turnoffs

toward simple solutions. They pursued lengthy roundabout paths and kludges devoted to complex three-chip camera sys-

tems with exquisite precision optics and color supplied by epoxied prisms,

handcrafted, during the course of which the

all

embattled team frequently debated whether they wanted to go to the destination

anyway. Perhaps Foveon should have merely

exploited the niche market of professional cameras that cost

more than $70 thousand apiece.

amount would

Maybe

curve.

few thousand Bell.

in

.

still

.

in

a

be cheap tuition for a

them

trip

for half that

down

the learning

the end they could lease the things for a

month,

like a T-l line,

and get

as rich as Pacific

.

the late summer

Mead

Selling

of 1997, preparing to launch Foveon,

also set out to recruit

Dick Lyon,

his old student, friend,

teaching assistant, and a camera buff to boot. Inventor of the optical

mouse, master of signal processing, and creator of retinas

_

J

The

and cochleas

who

at

Silicon

Eye

205

Caltech, Lyon was the kind of practical scientist

could bridge the realms of laboratory and production

imager component and camera system.

Mead had

to

line,

have him

aboard. Living on his golden severance from Apple, he readily

succumbed

to

Carvers invitation. More challenging was Merrill,

with his secure and lucrative role at National Semiconductor.

As much

as Merrill valued his National position,

intrigued with the chance to launch

the historic lunch with

Mead

new imagers

at the

a great guy,

himself. But at

& Compass,

Lion

harbored suspicions toward these Caltech types.

was

he was more

he

still

He knew Mead

but he feared that he might have undue pride of

authorship for his inventions and excess loyalty to the Caltech

crowd and

their

sometimes figmentary

ence.

"He wanted

Mead

said.

to

make

sure

artifacts of laboratory sci-

we were

going to do

By the end of the lunch, Mead had persuaded him

that despite forty years teaching physics, computation, trical

engineering at Caltech, he

ing for

mass production

become

right,"

it

He

too.

and

knew something about

elec-

design-

would

also agreed that Merrill

technical leader of the effort.

When

Merrill decided to join,

pany on the road.

On

August

7,

Mead knew he had

his

1997, the imager effort

com-

moved

out of the increasingly cramped and busy Synaptics facility on

Zanker Road and into new offices on Bubb Road Arriving on August

7,

Mead

in Cupertino.

took along Delbruck, Mascarenhas,

and Orion Pritchard from the Synaptics imager project and signed up two more National engineers: later

became Foveon's VP

of engineering,

Rich Turner,

who

and layout master

Milton Dong. Responsible for

all

the manufacturing of chips, Merrill had

George Gilder

2 o6

one major concern as he joined the company, namely those bipo-

between every two

phototransistors. Already latent

lar

in every

CMOS device,

the bipolar transistor photodetector was

supreme elegance and com-

a beautiful idea, with the virtue of

Crammed between

pactness. tors,

enabled dense retinas

it

alone

still

had feature

transistors

CMOS transisCMOS transistors

the two ordinary at a

when

time

sizes far too big for a high-resolution

imager. Pushing the technology for two years, Delbriick

Mascarenhas would

exploit

its

efficiency to create imagers with

a full nine million pixels in 1997. Still

cameras eight years

digital

later, it

design. But, as both Delbriick

cations

it

CMOS

had

beyond the reach of most

was

a dazzling feat of circuit

and Merrill knew,

for future appli-

fatal flaws.

geometries by the mid-1990s had dropped below a

half micron. This itself.

and

was around the wavelength of

With Moore's Law taking care of

density, the

visible light

new

imper-

was ease of manufacture. Creating bipolar phototransistors

ative

with consistent behavior in the midst of an industry standard

CMOS

process was going to be a bear, Merrill thought. At the

least,

would require

it

fab teams

A lag.

would

risky process

changes that the National

resist.

more crippling problem of the bipolar Because

worked

it

was part of the

like the eye: It

CMOS

had no hard

transistor

was image

pixel, the bipolar

reset.

device

This meant that each

subsequent frame was haunted by a brief ghost from the previous one. Though perfectly acceptable for a lag

would be

era that

a

showstopper

Mead had

for the hybrid

still

still

camera, image

and motion cam-

targeted from the beginning.

The

knew

Merrill

Silicon

Eye

207

Meads

that in order to displace

he would have

tricky bipolar transistor,

of a design of his own. Just two

months

elegant but

prove the superiority

to

after the

founding of the

company, he delivered. Merrill came into the weekly Monday

meeting with

test data

from a new imager

—the

3-T

—

that

he

had gotten back from the National fab two weeks before. Based on

be instantly reset after

a photodetector design that could

each exposure,

it

with low noise, no image ities.

"Merrill

up with,"

said

... for the

Mead

showed us Mead.

first

2K by

provided a

"It

lag,

it

2K, four-megapixel imager,

and dual

was

still

and motion capabil-

a lot better than

was time

to bet the

what

I

had come

company on

Merrill

time."

resolved to use the 3-T to

make

a professional high-end

studio camera with a prism that directed light to three separate

image sensors. Saving

two of the

tering out

perform

all

all

the light at every pixel rather than

colors, this

other digital

fil-

system would eventually out-

cameras

in

color

accuracy and

luminosity.

But

this goal

would be achieved only

science from Dick Lyon.

after

some arduous

color

20 Lyon s Den of

At

Many

Colors

the heart of the headquarters of Foveon Corporation

are

two emblematic spaces, reflecting the two different

paths to the future pursued by the company's chief technologist,

Dick

Merrill,

and

Dick Merrills space evokes ing in the middle test gear that

is

the

chief scientist, Dick Lyon.

its

his time-travel trappings.

aluminum

he attaches

like

chassis for the rasterfarian

an electrified dreadlock wig of

wires and lasers to the pins and sockets of his

chips

—applying merciless

Gleam-

little

imager

tortures until they confess every alias

and aberration, pixel-leak and pico-capacitance, of their photoelectric behavior.

(Hey,

it

drift

matters

all

and

—

jitter

this

is

analog.)

Dick Lyon's space, by

dim corner of the second lamps, photographic

contrast, floor,

it

is

a library.

offers plush chairs, reading

relics, esoteric slide rules,

209

Occupying one

and archaic cam-

George Gilder

210

eras surrounded

books

—shiny

fraying backs,

on four sides with a

new books

and color images. The

full

range from canonical works by

titles

Graham (RWG,

William

The

Reproduction of Color.

hundred

of black-and-white

James Clerk Maxwell and Hermann Helmholtz tions of Robert

five

with jackets, moldy old books with

photography catalogs

tall

some

total of

some

to

to you)

five edi-

Hunt's classic,

shelves bulge with several

MIT

Handbooks of Colorimetry and an array of Kodachrome manuals and stacks of handbooks

for

Kodak Ektachrome development

procedures E-3 through E-6. Discreetly horned into the corner of a bottom

row

is

a

copy of Roundup

that memorializes Lyon's third

1

970, the El Paso yearbook

camera and

his

promise of a stun-

ner of a fourth.

Both of these emblematic displays are dead serious, as

Foveon

itself.

Merrill's ability to extort detailed

is

performance

data from every device has been critical to the fast progress of the

and

company

as

constantly experiments with the

it

most of those books, and

science

—was

designs

he concocts. Lyon, meanwhile, actually read

circuitry that

labyrinthine rune

new

his

knowledge of

and wrinkle

like Fill

—every

in the often cryptic lore of color

crucial to transforming

imager consultant,

their contents

Foveon from an innovative

Factory in Holland, into a possible

supplier of comprehensive camera and imaging solutions, hard-

ware and software,

So

let

treatise

like

Kodak

of old.

us retreat to Lyon's den and curl up with an exciting

on color theory

.

.

.

Technically referring to a set of electromagnetic wavelengths or frequencies, the

word

color tempts physicists

and engineers

to

The

imagine that they understand

Running from

Eye

Silicon

when

it,

211

they have barely a

glint.

infrared through visible light to ultraviolet, with

ever shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies, the spectrum of "colors" climbs a rising slope of energies (the formula for elec-

tromagnetic energy

is

Thus the frequency of

The confusion

the frequency times Planck's constant). a color

is

proportional to

energy.

arises in relation to "brightness''

an image most striking

erty of

its

—the prop-

humans. Frequency only

to

vaguely relates to brightness. In physics, brightness signifies the

number

of photons arriving per second, while frequency

measures the number of waves per second

in

each one of those

photons. All the regnant imagers in the industry

CCDs

and

CMOS

ness, photons per second.

basic physics. it

will

Even

— measure

photo-sensors

if it

But no imager can

all

the

physical brightrestrict itself to

gauges energies as well as intensities,

produce graphic gibberish without any "colors" that

humans

will

To build

deem a

accurate.

useful camera entails entering Mishaland and

acquiring a mortifying knowledge of wetware" '

to

—

—

biology.

You have

master not only the physical spectrum of frequencies but also

the

sensitivity

medium, and

spectrum of

short receptors

"blue," the six million

human

(LMS

eyes.

Divided into long,

curves) for "red," "green," and

cones of the

human

eye will detect zero

"brightness" in radiant infrared, zero "brightness" in sizzling ultraviolet,

and a peak of brightness

at

around the 500-nanometer

wavelength of yellowish green on a forsythia bush. will see different materials as the

same

color in

some

Human lights

eyes

and

different colors in other lights. Things that are objectively

as

and

George Gilder

u2

such as dollar

spectrally different

same

be the

color.

common

anyone who wishes

to

and maple leaves seem

Heck, they are the same

Called metamerism, these

problems

bills

to

to

color.

anomalies pose baffling

reduce photography to mere

photo-detection. Things that look red to the

human do

not

have to look red to the camera. Digital processing can adjust the

hue

as long as the

color.

camera and the eye both

But no amount of

digital

register the

same

processing can correct for an

imager that reports as different two items that the eye sees as the same, or reports as the

The eye and less

same what the eye sees

must

the camera

same way

err in the

an image than a splash of expressionist

At

its

as different.

or

you have

art.

mad

photoreceptors, an eye or an imager receives a

lightspeed rush of unfiltered frequencies, reflected

through, and diffracted around objects in

its

off,

refracted

ken, traveling

diverse distances through the atmosphere in different phases,

illuminated by sunlight, fluorescence, tungsten bulbs, lasers, stars,

and candles and bearing no obvious signs or signatures.

Taking

this nearly infinite

radiation ors

is

the crucial

"How all

and reducing

time.

first

that step

You

MIPS and

can't

all

is

it

dimensional space of electromagnetic

to the three

dimensions of primary

col-

step in designing an imager.

performed," as Lyon observes, "fixes

undo

that.

the king's

You

can't get

DSPs cannot

it

it

for

back." All the king's

retrieve the colors in a

scene once they have been inaccurately represented. Then once

you have the primary colors, you have play technology and to

human

to

adapt them to your

dis-

spectral sensitivities by applying

the right coefficients in a process called matrixing.

When

Mer-

The

rill

invents a

new

Silicon

Eye

213

device for registering pixel values, Lyon must

then do the work to adapt them to humans. At Foveon, this translation did not always go well.

arriving at the new Pritchard, on

what

August

offices with

1997, Lyon had no clear guidance on

7,

his role as chief scientist

seemed

to

mean

Mead and Orion

Carver

would

be.

At

janitorial aide, setting

first

"chief scientist"

up desks and

chairs,

computers and white boards. After the setup was done, Lyon

poked around awhile, looking rance behind

On

first

all

for dusty areas in

shadows of igno-

the shiny Ph.D.s.

would

glance, knowledge abounded. At Foveon there

soon gather experts on the neutrino, authorities on retinal design, masters of microchip layout

Carver

Mead

and

fabrication,

and image representation

circuitry,

to the esthetics of power-line insula-

the enigmas of neuronal and dendritic processing, the

topologies of at his

in

himself there was a polymathic repository of infor-

mation on everything from quantum tunneling, VLSI

tors,

and

computer systems, and the husbandry of hazelnuts

farm in Oregon.

One

thing he didn't

know much about

was color science, beyond the theory of the physics. But he

nudged Lyon toward the canonical book by Reproduction of Color, saying:

'Why don't you

soon figured out that the path through the thickets of

As he began, the

this

first

to his fourth

R.

W. G. Hunt,

look at this?" Lyon

camera would run

science of color.

challenge was the endless prism

Like everything that happened to Foveon,

it

was nearly

crisis.

fatal

and

— George Gilder

214

nicely fortuitous.

turned out that projection prisms of the sort

It

that Carver brought to the

ductor were

company from National Semicon-

but useless for color accuracy. As Lyon shortly

all

discovered in the pages of R.

W. G. Hunt, prism

metrical. If a prism projects accurate colors,

torted colors. Inc.

(OCLI)

But their supplier

—was

first

Why

the leading optical modules

JDSU,

would anyone want

a receiver

in

prism for

making

visible

that.

Delbriick tore apart a camcorder and extracted a solid-

prism from

it.

But as the supplier of that prism, Collimated

Holes Corp., pointed out with alarm, 'That patented by that

to sepa-

wavelengths in wavelength division multiplexing

anyway? They weren't interested

Then state

cathode ray tube in billions of computer

optical systems for

company. colors

— Optical Coatings Laboratory,

and then with the better idea of using prisms

rate infrared

(WDM)

will receive dis-

entranced with the idea of using projec-

tion prisms to usurp the

displays

it

colors are asym-

IBM

IBM

—

can't use that."

had patented

bar Foveon from using

it

it

is

an

IBM

prism

Lyon investigated and found

for projection only,

as a receiver.

which would not

So they proceeded. In the

end, the Foveon prisms would evolve into "a color-separating, beam-splitting prism assembly"

made

of five pieces of glass,

including two "dichroic" mirrors that divide light into two frequencies.

The contraption could be

help of a glass rated into a

company

in Russia

fabricated only with the

and then could be incorpo-

camera only through an exquisitely exacting

involving epoxy and

craft

picomotors that could pick and place

imagers with submicron precision in three directions for gluing

onto the prisms.

The

When light that

all

that

Silicon

Eye

work was done, you

215

had three streams of

still

could be rendered as fully authentic colors only with

the help of ingenious software from Lyon that merged a glint of violet into the red.

That was a patent, and

ing color accuracy, but

made

it

it

led to world-beat-

the manufacturing challenge

even harder. Any error got manifested as a purple end, they achieved

some

of the

fringe. In the

most accurate colors and most

—

expensive cameras in the industry

great cameras, endorsed by

Hasselblad, buying in and briefly branding them. But for two years Hasselblad, despite increasingly harried visits from

could not get itself,

its

lenses in line.

Making

a

Mead,

few hundred units

Foveon became an exotic niche supplier of $50,000

cameras, which was not what

Mead had

in

mind

as a serious

market. Beyond the near-perfect colors, the chief appeal of the

instrument was to studio photographers

who

could

triple their

output by avoiding the time-consuming hassle of Polaroid

first

takes.

While Lyon juggled the hues of the prism camera, he contin-

ued

push on through

to

books of color science. piles of

his reading agenda.

He

He

scoured the

pored through the ever-increasing

One

proposed inventions and other ideas from Merrill.

day he stumbled onto Merrills old concept of a vertical color ter

based on the wavelength-dependent absorbency of

didn't

know about

this,"

he told Merrill. "Will

it

fil-

silicon. "I

work

for a

camera?" "I

doubt

it,"

Merrill said.

"It is

hard to make good colors out of together.

Ask

Carver."

a real physical effect, but it.

The

colors tend to

it is

merge

George Gilder

216

Lyon went

to

Mead, who

referred

him

paper written by

to a

Delbriick reporting on their previous experiments with the idea.

The

results

were

lousy.

The

Lyon was discouraged.

seemed

colors

smeared

Beyond the

into a delta of

prisms,

exotic

be running out of options. Would

to

mud.

Foveon

be another

this

—ingenious analog technology

episode from the Synaptics story

ultimately dwindling into an academic stunt?

Then Lyon began

He

more

closely.

depth

at a time.

to scrutinize

Meads and

Delbriick's data

noticed that they had tested the colors one

The

charge from nearly

result

all

was that the junction would

of whatever color light

collect

was focused on

it.

But Lyon speculated that the results might be different using a stack of three junctions at once. three junctions should divide

it

Competing

for the light, the

in accord with the principle of

wavelength-dependent absorption depth. More of the highenergy blue should gather in the junction closest to the surface, while the green and red would sink a micron or so down.

asked Merrill to test

this proposition.

In a process that took six weeks, Merrill

workable

test pixel

inserted

it

murky,

but

and run

into his

the

Delbruck

it

it

pattern

offered

results. Merrill

managed

to design a

through the National fab. Then he

torture chamber.

telltale

detectable. At least

He

The outcome was

of absorption

still

depths was

more promise than the Mead-

thought he might be able to tweak

it

to

separate the colors more.

Before Merrill accomplished the superior separation, Lyon resorted to his

data

—the

Mathworks program

to

combine the relevant

three stacked junctions in Merrill's pixel and the spec-

The

tral sensitivities

of actual

Silicon

human

Eye

217

eyes. Correlating the differen-

tial

capture of the three electronic junctions with the differen-

tial

responses of the long, medium, and short cones in the retina,

he noted that the error curves

—the

difference

—was below 10 percent. The

Merrill

between the two mix and the

retinal

mix were both messy, but they were the same essential mess.

The neat Kodachrome tate

were nice

separations that they were trying to imi-

for projections

—and the

slides

—but

Lyon

recalls:

"Everyone looked

can't

make

camera with

said

strikingly different

a

rich saturated colors of

from the curves of human

that.'

I

prism.

I

could

make

a better

said, 'You

looked at Merrill's results and

could make a better camera with that than

I

and

at Merrill's results

vision.

I

could with a

camera with that than

I

could

with film." This finding,

if

true,

promised a supreme fulfillment of

Mead's career-long romance with

silicon

con had become the perfect substrate

and

its

for

computation

properties.

Sili-

—and

you got the PC. Silicon had become the perfect channel light,

to

and you got

fiber optics.

Now

for

Lyon was opening the way

an ideal silicon single-chip imager. Using the physics of the

material,

form

all

formed

one

silicon sliver

some

five

microns thick could per-

the feats of photodetection and color separation per-

in other

systems by at least three chips plus millions of

tiny color filters that

blocked out two thirds of the

pixel, plus a "blur" filter to

smear out borderline

light at every

errors, all

cou-

pled with digital signal processors to retrieve the lost colors by

guesswork. Lyon graphed his results and showed them to Mead. For the

first

time,

Mead

believed that Foveon was near a single-

George Gilder

2i8

chip color imager.

Then

The

silicon

camera was declared

March 2000, Foveon received

in

feasible.

from on high.

a call

Kodak

Intrigued by the color accuracy of the prism camera,

Rochester

summoned

New

of upstate

moment

the Foveon team to the bleak gray reaches

York to discuss

they had been waiting

ing chief Rich Turner flew east

Mead

technology,

said they

showed them the new and promised

to

for.

its

innovations.

make

now," he said. "This

is

had

and arrived

much

pany

will

will license

late," said

Foveon's

it

The Kodak

when you can make

it."

Mead. "Some other com-

Kodak was unimpressed by

the meeting deteriorated,

He

working on

the future of photography."

be too

it."

on the way.

better. "Merrill is

pictures like these prism photos with it

of the prism

still-murky colors,

its

people laughed and then said, "Call us back

"But then

was the

in Rochester. After

a still-better idea

Merrill chip, with it

It

Mead, Lyon, and engineer-

Kodak engineers the advantages

explaining to the

in

the threat.

As

Rich Turner offered yet

another of Merrills ideas. National had just completed the conversion of

its

Portland, Maine, fab to the .18 micron industry

state of the art. Extrapolating

how many more

pixels the smaller

geometries would enable him to put on the Foveon black-and-

white imager, Merrill calculated he could pixel device

on one chip,

then maxing out

be interested

at

far

ahead of the

make

a

16-million

rest of the industry

around 4 megapixels. Perhaps Kodak would

in leading the industry to

16-megapixel imaging.

Again, the Rochester colossus was unwilling to buy a license for a technology that did not yet exist.

Foveon's assurance.

But they were impressed by

The

Silicon

When Mead heard the idea, Foveon

itself to

create this

"Why do you want customer need. There

Eye

219

he was also impressed, and urged

awesome 16-megapixel

product.

to

make something with no market? No

is

no camera that can use

it,"

one of the

Foveon marketing executives protested. "That has never stopped us in the past,"

Mead

said. "If

we can

build the world's best photon catcher, the world will beat a path to

our door."

A month

company

the

Mead's decision began

later,

got a call from a

said

portraitists,"

when

Greg Gorman of Los Angeles.

Who's he? was the general response. most acclaimed

to bear fruit,

"Just

one of the world's

Foveon's marketing chief,

Eric Zarakov "He's got great shots of such stars as Leonardo

diCaprio and Sharon Stone .

.

.

.

Richard Gere

.

.

.

Kim Basinger

Drew Barrymore. Heck, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Who do

.

you want?"

An

Gorman was was

.

in black

white),

old friend of Foveon sales chief Larry Stevenson,

"always ready for something

new

—

particularly

and white" (90 percent of his work was

and he had

a

male model ready

in

in

black and

San Francisco.

In the photo journal Eyestorm, Zarakov read that

Gorman's

more informal pictures ranged from "intimate glances Hollywood demimonde let,

to a

if it

sweaty Jeff Koons,

sitting

of the

on the

toi-

flanked by two leather-clad strumpets."

"Just imagine

how

they would look with Foveon," Zarakov

said.

"But what are

we supposed

to

do with

this

guy

this after-

noon?" asked Turner. "He's already seen our prism camera."

"Get on the stick and show him that 16-megapixel camera you

George Gilder

220

were playing with the other

map

of the U.S.

the paper

it's

day.

and zooming

You know, photographing the you could see every

in so

fiber in

printed on."

"Hey, that's not a camera!'' Turner protested with a note of desperation.

'That's just

enhanced through

a

The images

prototype chip.

a

Photoshop hack." But Gorman had

prism camera and found that

it

produced

of noise, "like a perfect negative."

files

are

tried the

wonderfully free

Now he wanted to try this new

Foveon chip he had heard about that could produce the world's highest-resolution black-and-white images. "Well,

he's

When?

already on the plane from

L.A.,"

sales

chief

Stevenson interjected. "From there he goes to his house in Mendocino and then to Europe. This

is

the only day he's got."

"You guys are crazy," said Turner. But he and Dick Lyon rigged

up the 16-megapixel chip on

breadboard and created a crude

a

camera using the chassis from the prism product, with attached on a cardboard cylinder. the door, they tried to interest

prism camera, but he said he

When Gorman

him

knew

new

in

all

about

a filter

appeared

at

refinements of the that.

He'd come

to

see the 16-megapixel black-and-white imager. "We've got a few chips,"

made "I

first

Lyon confessed, "But

a picture with

want

it

isn't in

to use that,"

Gorman

said. "I

want

16-megapixel picture." They set up the

unbuttoned

No one

has ever

it."

traption in the old prism studio. hat,

a camera.

his shirt,

to take the world's

new "camera"

The model donned

a

con-

cowboy

and assumed a brooding pose of a

Rodin "thinker." Gorman was at the electronic viewfinder,

thrilled.

But when Turner looked

he saw nothing there. The scene

The

Silicon

Eye

221

was apparently fuzzed out by infrared radiation from the smoldering model. While sion,

Turner taped a further

which removed more of the the chassis and

looked on with a bemused expres-

Gorman

Gorman

filter

onto the cardboard cylinder,

light. Finally,

with Turner handling

and

triggering the shutter

a strobe light,

they took a series of portraits.

Turning over the raw tions.

files to

Lyon, Turner had low expecta-

But over the next three days, Lyon extracted from the

some 20 megabytes

of

monochrome information one

of Gor-

man's best portraits, a riveting black-and-white image of the model, with amazingly sharp definition and vivid

blew up the image

to a lifesize

ceptible degradation even ity

detail.

Lyon

photo eight feet high with no per-

when viewed from

inches away. Vital-

shone from the model's features, bringing

to

mind

a classic

photo of actor James Dean from the movie Giant and recalling "Pope of Trash" director John Waters is

the only person It

I'd let

was indeed a

photograph

s

comment: "Greg Gorman

my

corpse.''

historic picture, offering

white pixels than ever before in a

digital

denser black-and-

image. Beyond that one

photo extracted by Lyon's alchemy, however, Foveon had nothing

more

to offer

Gorman.

A

cameras, he ended his return to Foveon.

The

fervent devotee of leading-edge trip at his studio in

early years at the

Canon

L.A. and did not

company seemed

to

be

repeating the pattern of the early years at Synaptics: great laboratory stunts ucts.

and

scientific

advances but no marketable prod-

Foveon had no color system beyond the prisms and no

market

for a

16-megapixel black-and-white imager.

Meanwhile, there would surely be

a

market

for a

one-chip

George Gilder

222

color imager. But the effects of the device

improve

it,

and

it

Kodak people had

more work Lyon lavished on the color

from Merrill, the

less

he found he could

was nowhere near good enough. Perhaps the a point.

Lyon had miscalculated the interplay

of the silicon physics with the particular parameters of the

CMOS

fab process. Silicon might

theory, but there

was no

silicon

make

imager in

a great color

semiconductor process that

could yield an effective camera chip. Perhaps that was the reason that Kodak, Fuji, Canon, and Nikon had

all

previously

patented the one-chip vertical imager and then abandoned

The

CMOS

process entailed crucial steps that nullified the

advantages of the material as a vertical per.

in

filter. It

As they approached the key industry

Cologne, Germany, in

late

for

them even than

Then Dick another idea.

Merrill

was

a showstop-

exposition, Photokina,

September 2000, they

color process to sell but prism cameras,

market

it.

still

and there was

had no

a smaller

for exotic black-and-white imagers.

emerged from

his

aluminum cave with

21 Photokina 2000 and Beyond

a

huge industry such

In

that a

new company

like

as cameras, rare are the occasions

Foveon can

arrest the attention of

the relevant world of experts, media, and rival engineers.

Held every two years

in the vast reaches of the

Cologne, Germany, with several

total floor

KolnMesse

in

space 800 meters long and

hundred meters deep, with tens of thousands of

exhibitors

and hundreds of thousands of

thousand from the media, Photokina

is

visitors,

including five

Comdex for

most intense commercial showcase and crucible

in

cameras, the

photography

Every company, every shutterbug and photo-bird on the planet, it

seems,

is

there and on stage, testing the son et lumiere, tout-

ing prototypes and photo-types, waving his arms and amplitudes,

swinging her hips and chips, flashing her bulbs, and zooming his lenses, in front of towering multistoried exhibits

shaped

like

cameras.

As Photokina 2000 approached September

— scheduled

— Foveon had impressed people 223

like

for

late

Greg Gorman

in

as

George Gilder

224

of technical leader with

some kind

its

prismatic contraptions,

but you wouldn't want to commit your career to one of their

cameras. passed,

And Foveon had nothing would be

it

else to

sell.

When

September

two years before the industry would

a full

again gather in such frenzied force.

Nonetheless, just one month before Photokina 2000, while the

company was

filter.

preparing to push

a

his alu-

chassis with yet another concept for a single-chip color

Added

to his original idea

was

a simple but revolutionary

process step entirely compatible with the Still

prisms to a mostly

its

camera market, Dick Merrill emerged from

indifferent

minum

still

company

secret today, the

showstopper inside out.

What had

ble obstacle to a vertical filter

and improvement.

An

new

CMOS

Merrill

process flow.

scheme turned

the

previously been an impossi-

became

a radical simplification

invention as elegant as Carver Mead's

exploitation of the parasitic bipolar transistor as a photodetector,

was

Merrill's idea

still

more commercially promising.

"But you can't do that," said Lyon. "That's crazy.

been able "Don't

done

tell

it

if

Merrill

me what

I

can't do," said Merrill., "I've already

it."

you can," said Lyon.

had made

an existing

change. There were to

"It

sure would work."

a basic invention to render the

CMOS

pany would have

one has

before."

a lot of stuff like

"Well,

in

do

to

No

process.

The output

many imponderables. put

its

X3

possible

of the chip

would

In essense, the

faith in Merrill's

magic

com-

in the fab.

Even some of Foveon's own executives were doubtful. At that time in late 2000,

just

Jim Lau, the hero of Synaptics touch-pad

The

Silicon

Eye

225

new CEO,

replacing

for professional

cameras.

manufacturing in Asia, came aboard as the

Ray de Moulin,

Kodak VP

a former

After a nearly fifty-year career in the industry, de Moulin had

announced

a well-earned retirement.

By following de Moulin,

the master of high-end professional photography, with an expert

on low-end manufacturing, Foveon signaled readiness in all

new

directions.

and make

set to go off

camera.

I

But what directions?

said that

a

Mead

recalled: "Jim

more automated version

by the time you get that

to

—and

amazed

Mead and

that

was

of the prism

happen we

have the vertical colors working." Having seen the chip results

move

to

heard of the Kodak rejection

first

will

messy

— Lau

was

Merrill could see anything there. But for

experienced silicon sages such as

Mead and

prototype was no cause for dismay at

nearly every experiment

Merrill the

murky

all.

in electronics starts within a

shroud of noise, a mass of overlapping curves and spiky anomalies.

Only with long experience can the engineer nurse

signal

— the meaningful

and amplifier ronmental

result

distortions

fuzz.

—from the

in

froth of "dark currents"

and electromagnetic skews and envi-

The prototype

Advanced Techology Group fab duced data

forth the

that Merrill got

from National's

in Santa Clara late in

2000

no obvious way better than the output of

his

pro-

two

previous vertical pixel designs. But looking at the results, apparently a

swamp

Merrill

was pleased. Scrutinizing the mountain ranges of arrayed

of noise

mixed with

curves on the oscilloscope, the

a turbid chromatic overlay,

summer

storms, and electrical

George Gilder

226

turbulence, he could descry a workable retina.

The mountains,

they could be laid low, one at a time; the storms could be tamed, step-by-step;

and the

valleys raised up, oh, so delicately;

and

above the wilderness could arise a rainbow of perfect colors. Merrill

Doing

was a past master his

own

and so was Mead.

at this process,

calculations "so

could grasp what was really

I

new

going on in the physics/' he was also convinced that the

approach would work.

"we bet the company on knows when something off

and doesn't

it

up

the data.

as

the fab and

in his lab to

it

it's

will

have his

Foveon's friends in Rochester.

largest,

CCD

and had incorporated

era called the Pro-Back.

Kodak had

in his bones.

Goes

testers

little test

will

chip. He'll

and come back with

right."

photokina approached,

created a 16-megapixel

It's

"He

refrain.

and then some run of wafers

some twenty

And you know

was Mead's

going to work.

talk to anybody,

come back from hook

is

Merrill"

At

the

big

story

Kodak announced

imager, the world's it

into a

first,

that they

had

best,

and

first,

new $20,000 mosaic cam-

Mead and Lyon

stolen Foveon's thunder. But in fact

in

feared that

Kodak had put

Foveon on the map, by defining the focal feat of the

By the time Photokina opened

came from

year.

Cologne on September 23,

2000, the only actual image from a 16-megapixel chip loomed over the front of the Foveon exhibit area.

It

was Greg Gorman's

The

Silicon

Eye

227

incandescent black-and-white picture of the cowboy model. eight-foot-high image that revealed

nized one foot away,

it

no

announced

visibly

when

distortion

An

scruti-

a major breakthrough

from the tiny new company. Imager experts quickly calculated that Kodak's

CCD

was

a

monster device that would cost some $7,000 apiece, suitable only for the most costly cameras like the Foveon's

duced

in

Pro-Back, while

CMOS chip was one quarter the size and could be provolume

decision to

for

make

under $300. Massively vindicating Meads

the 16-megapixel device was a huge flood of

visitors to Foveon's display area.

Mead had

contrived a gigantic

The people came

game

of mega-bait

and switch.

16-megapixel imager and to be pho-

to see the

tographed by the high-resolution prism cameras, and de Moulin, formerly chief of professional photography at Kodak, was there to push the advantages of prisms to serious inquirer

was steered

Lyon, and Turner pitched a existed chiefly in their

Dick Merrill back

One

Compared

room

comers. But any

in back,

where Mead,

single-chip color imager that

minds and hearts and

in the

hands of

Santa Clara.

to

Canon

was Michihiro Yamaki of Sigma

or Nikon,

Sigma was

a relatively

company with fewer than one thousand employees and

revenues of $140 million.

But the ostensibly tions.

new

of these serious inquirers

in Japan.

small

in

to a

all

still

He wanted

camera company.

to

shy,

It

had previously specialized

in lenses.

dapper Yamaki harbored higher ambi-

break out of Sigma's niche and build a major

When

he heard of the 16-megapixel

imager, he insisted on visiting the Foveon exhibit.

CMOS

George Gilder

128

Conceding camera,

X3

Foveon did not yet possess a 16-megapixel

that

Mead

steered Yamaki into a back

which was even farther from

prototype,

smoke and mirrors and team

in Rochester,

could soon be

it

filter.

first

was

It

immediately saw

Meads

assurance

Before the end of the day,

Mead and

trusted

Yamaki shook hands on an agreement create the

show him the

realization.

his engineers

X3 design and

built.

to

But unlike the Kodak

a sprite of silicon.

Yamaki and

the significance of the that

room

launch a joint

to

effort to

commercial camera based on the Foveon

vertical

Sigma would do the mechanical camera design with expo-

sure and

ISO

and would create the

controls

single-lens-reflex features that allow

you

lenses, with the

preview the image

to

through the same lens that captures the picture. Foveon would

do the imager hardware and software, the readout process, the display preparation, to software

and

file

and the

storage for an entirely

the two companies faced an

down the hall

from

From chip design

file-saving code.

awesome

Merrill's

new

kind of camera,

challenge.

office

Foveon

at

is

what

appears to be a heap of colorful Navajo blankets, with a sheet of glass resting

do you

on the

realize that

hue and

fiber

top.

Only when you

try to

remove the

glass

a photograph, utterly indistinguishable in

it is

from the

pile

below

it.

Fooled by

this device,

you

can understand Merrill's impatience with his mere Nikon in Laos. But this trompe

l'oeil trick,

done with prisms,

is

designed

only to grab your eye, not to grab the entire imager market.

On

the wall as you enter the Foveon building

is

a

more

sig-

,

— The

Silicon

Eye

one with a story that portends

nificant photograph,

it

likely suc-

Taken by Merrill

cess in the company's imperial quest. spring of 2001,

229

in the

depicts a vividly colorful totem pole in Van-

couver, Washington, shot against a perfect blue sky. Sky, Merrill

points out, offers the best visible index of the noise level in an imager. In Merrills picture, the sky

normal course of events

is

impeccably blue. In the

in the silicon business, a

new

chip

based on an original design and a novel manufacturing process goes through scores of iterations before

Many never do. But

designers hoped. the

first

product of the very

was based on the very tion,

from the

first full

first

run

first

this

it

works the way

its

impeccable image was

single-chip camera,

which

itself

chip to emerge, under Merrill's direcat the

National Semiconductor wafer

fabrication plant in Portland, Maine.

Thus, Foveon's revolution begins to take shape. Yes, the totem pole picture

supreme

is

flawless, with exquisitely authentic

resolution.

But more

crucially,

the

is

it

hues and

first

working

photograph made with a single-chip, full-color imager. The

Foveon camera

is

no mere

"digital

camera,"

microprocessors and mirrors and shutters state

it

is

of chips

still

(like

the

and

a fully solid-

machine, based around a single analog chip and

no mechanical paraphernalia, capable both

—

full

human

virtually

retina) of

and moving images.

Single chips have a singular virtue:

manufactured

in

volume

at a cost as

They can eventually be

low as 80 cents a piece

about the price of the packaging. In other words, Foveon's X3, as the marketers have colors at each pixel

dubbed

—

will

it

—

make

for "times three," signifying three

possible throwaway cameras and

George Gilder

23

surveillance devices with a resolution today's

and accuracy approaching

most costly Hasselblad. Merrill simply plugged

new microchip

into a circuit board, installed the board in

his

an old-

fashioned nineteenth-century camera chassis, snapped the picture,

and potentially transfigured an

industry.

Between the invention and the marketplace, however,

lies a

long shadowy slough: a treacherous competitive realm, where

dragons

lurk.

Clayton Christensen, author of

The

Innovator's

portentous challenge to Foveon: "Foveon cannot lose.

"

Glenn Davis

Dilemma,

issues a

make cameras.

It

will

22 Foveon's Disruptive Challenge

Greg

Gorman had

a world

moving

sisted as a

long held out as an advocate of film in

cameras and then long per-

to digital

champion

Hollywood scene garish with

of black-and-white images in a

But

color.

in early

2003, this virtu-

oso photographer finally found an electronic camera that fied his exacting

satis-

demands.

Although confessing that

"I still

love shooting

my own

and-white images on film and then scanning them into

new

his

he

says. "It far

exceeds what film can

ity,

more

"It's

digital,"

fabulously sharp and fast,"

he raves about

camera.

black-

realize. It

color range, smoother transitions. Its

has more tonal-

more

sensitive in

dark scenes and more responsive to different color temperatures.

It

has

16 bits of resolution and creates

files

of 63

megabytes. That's huge."

The challenge

to

Foveon

single-lens reflex called the

mosaic

filters. It is

made

is

that

Gorman's new camera

IDs based on

entirely

CMOS

a

imagers and

by Canon Corporation

233

is

in Japan.

George Gilder

234

With ordinary camera, do the

CMOS performing such feats in a professional CCD champions skulk away into the night?

Hardly. Early in 2004, tronics paragon

Sony Corporation, the consumer

elec-

and champion of CCDs, would emerge with

DSC-F828 Cybershot based on

a

new

its

CCD,

four-color filter

adding emerald to the usual red, green, and blue, to reduce color errors by 50 percent

and enhance reproduction of treacherous

borderline blue-green and red colors where Foveon's technology excels.

With 8 megapixels,

a Karl Zeiss

optical

and the capability of doing either high-resolution

new Sony

quality movies, the It

stills

Framing" for accurately composed photos

mode

when

a

dominant force

in

to sink

soon

using flash, and

ahead

at a

down

an

for

all

below $1,000. is

dominant

in

are both pushing

tremendous pace. With volumes

millions of times greater than Foveon's,

careen

far

cameras, Sony

consumer electronics and CCDs, and they their technologies

"Night-

for black-and-white picture taking in total

announced price of $1,200, sure is

DVD-

or

light,

darkness without flash, using infrared illumination,

Canon

lens,

offers a featuristic photocopia.

provides a hologrammatic laser focus for low

"NightShot"

zoom

Canon and Sony

the learning curve, harvesting gains of scale and

scope, making their leading-edge imagers and the cameras

based on them ever better and cheaper. Carver warriors at Foveon faced the

Mead and

complex business challenge of

attacking an incumbent industrial establishment.

they do

the

How

could

it?

In every

new

era,

companies

prevail

by grasping the

cance of a new regime of abundances and

scarcities.

signifi-

Foveon

— The

would have

to exploit

Eye

Silicon

an amazing

235

new abundance

in

photo-

graphic technology.

Advancing through an interplay between what

volume and what

is

They use

maws and middens

ter to preserve the scarce arable

silicon to

abundant

oil

to save

human

of fossils in Earth's cen-

spaces on the surface. They use

economize on humans unwilling

abundant bandwidth

available in

not, entrepreneurs exploit the

resources to relieve the scarcities.

muscle, the interior

is

to tote

up

detail, or

to obviate scarce local data storage (or stor-

age to compensate for choked connectivity).

men and

If

scarcity,

nations ignore the abundance, and obsess on the

they plunge their companies and economies into an

abyss of ever-narrowing horizons and possibilities. nations

who

Abundances end

a

promised land.

with a price of zero. Scarcities

in infinity,

in zero, with a price of infinity.

Power, for example, has a

and

glimpse the glow of abundance beyond the deserts

and culs of scarcity can lead the world toward

end

Men

become an abundance with

few cents per kilowatt hour

from batteries

—has

become

a price of

for electricity. Wireless

power

a scarcity with a price of a

few

thousand dollars per kilowatt hour.

Bandwidth has become an abundance, with gigabit per

a

price

per

second almost free on worldwide webs of glass and

light.

Connectivity has

become

scarce, with a price of

megabit per second per month down a T-l Storage has

become abundant, with

per gigabyte on

new

disk drives.

$600 per

line.

a cost of

around 50 cents

George Gilder

236

Wireless storage for cameras has

become

scarce, at a cost of

scores of dollars for a gigabyte on a flash card.

Both entrepreneurs and economists

live in a

world of

scarcity.

Only entrepreneurs see the abundance beyond.

foveon possessed the

secrets of a

new

canonical abun-

dance: high-resolution low-power imager pixels. In theory,

it

could combine this abundance with complementary abundances of bandwidth, storage,

and wireless connectivity

theoretical.

Foveon could find markets

tapping using the

its

for a

It

could be realized only

huge volume of

potential, Foveon could

X3 s high

resolution

and accuracy

Sigma.

Since

But the

relatively small

trade.

That is

is

mar-

the strat-

a

leading

may work for them.

high-end market would leave most of the

new abundance untapped by Foveon,

CCDs

chips.

to invade the

Sigma

high-volume producer of lenses, the strategy

its

if

attack from above,

kets for professional single-lens-reflex cameras.

egy being pursued by

new

cheap imaging. But Foveon's

global paradigm of ubiquitous

abundance was purely

to create a

while the producers of

and cheap black-and-white imagers took the volume

With volumes thousands of times

their costs

and even

their

performance might eventually become

better despite their relatively

After

all,

the

Canon

1

larger than Foveon's,

cumbrous

designs.

Ds celebrated by Gorman was based on

an advanced 11-megapixel

CMOS

imager and mosaic

filters.

The

Silicon

Eye

237

Foveon's Rich Turner acknowledges that the entire system

is

beautifully designed. For a high-end camera, the actual imager is

a relatively small portion of the price.

this

Canon could dominate

market without ever confronting the technical superiority of

the X3.

Perhaps then Foveon could attack from below, using chip cheapness and dual function,

still

and motion

its

one-

versatility, to

enter the mass markets for throwaway cameras, cell-phone imagers, and camcorders. That full

—

company

albeit with the world's highest-resolution imagers.

That

not be easy to accept. Otherwise Foveon could perhaps

attack from the side, pioneering surveillance applications.

by chasing

all

new markets

Or should they

for high-resolution

risk diffusion of focus

these markets at once?

As Foveon emerged slowly from its

a

of photography connoisseurs into a pure low-end imager

house

may

means changing

stealth

and began

to

market

product in 2003, these strategic issues remained unsettled.

for many years, camera company,

the leading competitor for any microchip

digital

believes that this era theatrical films in

all

is

or

analog,

was

essentially over for

their forms,

from

But Gorman

film. still

images. Only in

70mm IMAX

to

Cin-

erama, does film continue to hold on against the persistent incursions of digital, and that too

may soon

change.

At the high end, Foveon's key competition film or even from

from Moore's

Law

Canon and itself,

as

it

will

come not from

the other Japanese producers, but steadily improves the

performance

George Gilder

238

and lowers the price of every

whether

Foveon then

will face the

new system cannot as the

camera based on

silicon

uses Foveon technology or imitates

regardless of

it

digital

grim challenge of Drucker's Law:

prevail unless

it is

it.

A

times as good

at least ten

incumbent system.

Repeating the military defender's edge in an entrenched position,

Drucker's

incumbency.

It

Law

reflects the

momentum,

scope, and scale of

feeds on the cumulative investment and tacit

learning of both consumers

tions. Similarly in

merely

is

cameras,

of manipulating lenses,

suppliers. If

Windows, you

intricacies of Microsoft

operating system that

and

if

five

you have learned the

are not ready to learn a

many

times faster for

you have mastered the

filters,

and

f-stops to shape

your picture, you will not welcome a

new

applica-

intuitive lore

and enhance

system, no matter

superior in resolution and simplicity, that relegates

new

many

how

of these

functions to post processing in software. Counterintuitive to most people, Drucker's

Law

explains the inventors angst (and lawyers'

glee) suffusing every conference

on patents,

as the creators of

things "at least two times better, five times better, eight times better"

than the prevailing 'junk" concoct conspiracy theories of

incumbent crime and malice

to explain the facts of

life.

Subverting the military analogy of Drucker's Law, however, the counterexample of guerrilla terrorism. stances, the attacker has the advantage.

is

Under some circum-

He

can select one vul-

nerable point to assault, while the defender has the impossible

challenge of preparing for not

know what

power of

all

to expect or

surprise.

eventualities.

where, and

The incumbent does

may underestimate

the

The

"do you think me

a

Silicon

Eye

239

me

dog that you contest

with sticks and

stones?" roared Goliath, the Philistine giant of biblical times,

among

expressing the contempt usual

established elites toward

a disruptive challenge. Confronting rivals from

observe the rules of "the road ahead," as first

fail to

Gates entitled his

Bill

book, powerful incumbents belittle the tools and talents of

their upstart rivals. David's slingshot

was what Clayton Chris-

tensen, the author of The Innovator's Innovator's

Solution,

"disruptive

a

calls

Dilemma and now The technology." Defying

Drucker's mandate of tenfold superiority, this

is

traption that could even be tenfold inferior by

standards and

still

blow away

Disruptive technology

is

all

the prevailing

a treacherous concept, easy to grasp

surprising effect on a seemingly fixed status

Hugely

a slingshot con-

a regnant Goliath.

too quickly. Akin to David's disruptive sticks

car.

below who

and stones

in

its

quo was the motor

inefficient at converting oats to energy, inept at hik-

ing the available

trails,

prone to constant breakdowns, and sup-

plying no fertilizer for the garden, early automobiles practically

required their users to uct was that? Perhaps

become mechanics. What kind it

was

a disrupter.

With

of prod-

their obvious

advantages in speed and comfort, though, cars seem too clearly superior to equestrian technology to be a clear case in point.

Some

upstart technologies are so vastly better than the incum-

bent that they blow

it

away by raw

ruptive stealth. Perhaps Foveon

Gorman's enthusiasm attack will not

work

for his

superiority rather than by dis-

fits this

model, but judging from

Canon, an overwhelming

for Foveon.

frontal

George Gilder

240

A

more familiar

Based on Faggin's microprocessors and their descendents,

puter.

early

and pure disrupter was the personal com-

PCs could

not execute the graphics, computer-aided engi-

real-time

neering,

transactions,

Fourier transforms, and

fast

database access that comprised prime functions of established

computers.

And

to

use one, you had to

computer technician. Yet ers,

and then

early

PCs found

become some kind a

market among hack-

companies one by one

infiltrated large

of

for use in

running spreadsheets. Within ten years between 1977 and 1987, they

moved from under

ket for

percent to over 99 percent of the mar-

1

computer power. That's disruption.

disruption becomes possible nological paradigm.

the old paradigm rate

and

versatile

market wants a

—

When

a

in the face of a

new paradigm

faster horses, bigger

cameras

—may

flyswatter,

arises,

new

tech-

advances

in

mainframes, more accu-

offer technology overshoot.

The

but industry keeps improving the blun-

derbuss. Every advance pushes the incumbents deeper into a

zone of disruption, what Christensen

calls a "failure

using gunpowder in ever-more sophisticated ways to In the context of the radical

new paradigm

framework," kill flies.

of portable instant still

and

conventional digital imagers

may

cellphone cameras or teleputers that can do both

motion images, advances

in

bring scores of impressive companies into jeopardy. Heading for

the zone of disruption today at a rapid pace

panies as

Canon and Kodak.

may be such com-

The

Silicon

Christensen explains for the

even against giants. against

what he

first

Eye

time

He shows how

241

how disrupters can win

inferior tools

calls "sustaining technologies,"

can prevail

such as ever-

mainframes and minicomputers or ever-faster and more

faster

cornucopian mosaic

digital

cameras. Analyzing a wide range of

from disk drives

industries,

from excavators

to steel mills,

to

pharmaceuticals, from motorbikes to electric cars, he brings rare

new

light to the

No

matter

predicament of the dominant firms

how

superior your technology, you

in a

may

market. well be

attacked from below by vendors of cheap convenient devices that your

The

own customers

disdain.

become

alleged success of inferior technologies has

misleading cliche. antitrust lawyers

Unleashing aggressive class-action

a

suits,

promise to save our economy from a blight of

'market failure" and bad product "lock-in." Cited as cases in point are such defective items as

QWERTY

videocasettes, and IBM-Microsoft standard

edly

won

economies

to foster

monopolies. In

was superior

QWERTY

equal in performance.

tapes,

that suppos-

Apple

lis,

fact,

each of the allegedly

in the relevant features,

record an entire movie

(IBM). Even the tially

PCs

VHS

over better designs because of a sly bent of free

inferior products ability to

keyboards,

(VHS)

or

16-bit operation

keyboard turned out

None

to

of the competitors

and Dvorak keyboards

such as

be essen-

— Betamax

— could begin

to

meet

Drucker's requirement of tenfold superiority.

Christensens theory has nothing to do with such fables of "market

failure." Instead,

to foster not

he cogently explains

monopolies but their overthrow.

how markets tend

George Gilder

242

In part, the inferiority of disrupters

an optical

is

The new

reflecting the vantage point of the establishment.

ucts are inferior only by the prevailing metrics.

ures they

may be hugely may

established tools

or

may

how much

faster

its

By other meas-

not be able to function at

hold or

prod-

or even infinitely superior, since the

market. For example, no matter disk drive

illusion,

how

how many

superior

is its

all

in the

new

gigabytes a 5. 2 5 -inch

seek-and-rotate time

data throughput rate,

it

could not supply

room only

storage for a laptop computer, let alone a camera, with

for 3.5-inch or smaller disks. In that market, the superiority of

became suddenly

the larger disks '

irrelevant.

The

smaller, slower

were competing not against another technology

'inferior" disks

but against the alternative of doing without. As Christensen says,

"Competing not against

existing competitors with existing

customers but against nonconsumytion cameras, and

cell

—

against

teleputers,

phones with no internal hard drives

at all.

Christensen shows that in the history of technology tern recurs over

and over

again.

The

this pat-

inexorable dynamics of

innovation render dominant companies of one industry para-

digm feckless Since most their

digital

cameras and camcorders currently receive

images through a silicon array of

CCDs

now

are

some $5 Sony

in another.

billion,

still

a fast-growing,

CCD

photodetectors,

Japanese-dominated business of

and the pride of wafer fabs from Sony

cherishes high hopes for

its

to Sharp.

future. Shigeyuki Ochi,

Sony's venerable semiconductor chief, predicts the ubiquitous

use of

CCDs

agrees: "As

for video teleconferencing. Hiroshi

we move

into the multimedia era,

Inoue of Sharp

CCDs will be used

The

Eye

personal computers will have

all

Wherever

human

there's a

eye,

Carver

Mead

need

for

electronic,

if it's

CCDs

something it'll

X3

Tokyo early

visited

CCDs

device. Japanese engineers

very politely to his case.

Then amid

.

.

"When you make

your chip behave

same power

as a

like a

CCD

in the

could be

would

listen

various permutations of

same

smiles and bows, they would respond in the

uses the

.

to play the role of the

century to bring the good news that

it

them.

built into

thus did not cause dancing in the clean rooms

replaced by Foveon's

so

lines,

be the CCD."

and design centers of Japan when he

new

243

images and send them down phone

to capture all sorts of

and

Silicon

essential way:

charge-coupled device,

and plugs

into the

same

CCD and emits the same kinds of signals as a CCD, exhibits the same noise level as a CCD — and you make

sockets as a

and

it

significantly

cheaper

—then

you come back and we

will talk

to you."

The source

of the stubborn opposition

is

no conspiracy of

threatened incumbents or blindness to opportunity. Drucker's

mandate of the tenfold advantage other Japanese Goliaths, with

all

applies. Facing their sales

Sony and the

momentum,

learn-

ing-curve progress, knowledge base, cumulative investment, and

customer

familiarity,

Christensen, unless

Foveon has "no chance" it

to prevail, declares

adopts a disruptive strategy.

goes up head-to-head with the incumbents,

"it

If

Foveon

will lose,"

he

says.

In his entire Harvard database of technological innova-

tions,

he has catalogued no case of an outsider displacing an

incumbent

in

what he

ing core business.

calls a "sustaining"

—

technology

its exist-

George Gilder

-44

"Foveon cannot make cameras," he

must pioneer new markets.

camera customers but tions.

done

It

asserts.

To win, Foveon

must compete not

for entirely

new customers and

Foveon can meet both these requirements. But it

a

applica-

it

has not

yet.

Returning from Japan without any significant the

for existing

X3 beyond Sigma's high-end camera, Mead

problem,

it is

an opportunity.

nearly all the

We

are going to

new

orders for

said: "This is not

make cameras."

world's executives have learned the apparent

lesson of IBM's decision to adopt Intel microprocessors and

Microsoft operating systems for the

IBM

personal computer.

Therefore, companies such as Nikon, Kodak, Sony, and will mightily resist pasting

Canon

"Foveon Inside" on the fronts of their

cameras. According to Christensen,

Mead

will fail if

he

tries to

capture these existing camera markets. Yet following his trips to

Japan

to find

customers for the X3,

Mead

many

believes that

in

order to demonstrate the superiority of his chips, he will have

to

make cameras. The

solution to his problem

the Japanese camera journals full

significance of the

is

now

emerging. Early in 2003,

became the

first to

recognize the

Foveon breakthrough. Three leading

Japanese photography magazines put on their covers alone or with one

SD9, made by

rival

a lens

—the image of

company

that

a

—

either

new camera, the Sigma

had never before manufac-

tured a digital camera. Like Intel's logo on a personal computer,

the camera bore the distinctive

X3 svmbol

of Foveon.

The

lead-

— The

ing Japanese

Eye

Silicon

245

camera publication

digital

Digital

Photo

—

devoted no fewer than twenty-eight pages to a detailed comparison of the Sigma

SD9

with Canon's

EOS- IDs

single-lens-reflex

Canon

camera. The journal concluded that although the

pos-

sessed certain advantages in ease of use, the resolution and verisimilitude of the

Sigma were

essentially equal or superior in

every category. Operating near the peak of their resolution, the

Canon

CMOS

with some five

$1,000 "blur"

imagers suffer from the distortions inevitable of every pixel. Included

filters in front

filter to

smear away color

even a

is

artifacts that result

from

the inability of the chip to define colors near borders between

two different hues. Without any way sor to re-create information that has alternative

is

for a digital signal proces-

been thrown away, the only

to blur the colors together.

Although camera technology connoisseurs such as Merrill

and Mead can detect these

flaws,

so brilliantly performed that

it

is

Canon's invisible

digital

even

processing

is

to professional

photographers.

With camera man.

all

the very

is

It is

cence of that the

the other features

honed

same machine

that so captivated

the device that prompted

his cherished film.

Canon IDs

photography can

get.

is

to perfection, this

him

it

Greg Gor-

to assert the obsoles-

Even Foveon's own experts agree

a superb camera, about as

But

Canon

costs

some

five

good as

digital

much

as the

times as

Sigma camera using the Foveon X3. Inside the pages of Digital Photography

was

a full portfolio of

photographs from the two cameras. To the lay person, there

seemed

to

be no discernible difference

in quality.

The Sigma

George Gilder

146

camera proved that the Foveon technology was and effective

erful

in its initial

form

be introduced near the

Canon camera used

top of the market. But the expensive plex multifiltered

to

pow-

sufficiently

com-

a

imaging system, while the Sigma camera

image reception and processing

in just

one chip. That chip might ultimately be manufactured

in vol-

embodied

ume

all its

crucial

for as little as a dollar.

As

Merrill explains,

"The fundamental advantage of the

cal color filter technology

is

verti-

two-and-a-half-to-three-times

its

greater efficiency in the use of any particular silicon area or lens

quality

With

a lens of given quality that can resolve a spot of

more information

given size, Foveon can measure three times

than can a

CCD

with a plastic color

Silicon area

filter."

is

a

rough index of unit cost, so three times the efficiency in the use of silicon area

means one-third the chip

cost.

Lens quality com-

pounds

this advantage, since for

quality,

Foveon can use a lens with one-third the focal area

(which means

far less

any particular

than one-third the cost).

As Foveon's volumes increase, cheaper applications. Because of be incorporated ability to

market of

in every cell

render both billions, cell

still

its

its

imager

is

moving

supremely low power,

phone handset, imparting

into

it

can

a joint

and motion images. With a potential

common

digital

for imagers.

From

phones are now the most

machines and represent the cell

image

level of

largest

market

phones, Foveon can move to every computer screen for

video teleconferencing, which

is

the next major broadband

Internet application. Multiple Foveon chips can be deployed for surveillance in every convenience store

and gas

station

and can

The

guard every automatic

teller

Silicon

Eye

247

machine. Foveon imagers can sur-

vey every security point in every airport. Fulfilling the

eventually

Christensen mandate, the Foveon device can

become ubiquitous without

incumbent camera company then

—not before —

into the

This

that the

ever challenging any

for its current customers.

It

is

Foveon chip might move massively

mainstream camera market.

is

the disruptive path of Foveon

vator's solution" that

Christensen

compete not

is

s

triumph.

It is

proposing in his

the "inno-

new

book.

chiefly against existing products but

Foveon

will

against

nonconsumption of imagers. By making the imaging

function cheap and robust, Foveon can open huge

new markets

for its innovation.

Foveon s ultimate achievement onrush of

translates into a digital file of

up

characters; this

book

Foveon pictures

to take over the

less

depend on the continued

Each Foveon picture ultimately

digital electronics.

is

will

to

40 megabytes (millions of

than one megabyte). In order for

world of photography and film,

these dense images will require broadband communications and trillions of

bytes of storage in a combination that

"storewidth."

Meads

I

have dubbed

analog technologies will change the world,

but the world will also have to change to accommodate these

new

capabilities.

Intel

and Microsoft are among the leaders

in

moving Foveon

toward mainstream applications. Intel has staked

much

of

its

future on the success of wireless broadband communications.

To transmit Foveon's streams of images from surveillance devices or cell phones will entail ever

more

wireless bandwidth.

George Gilder

148

Now

spreading through "hot spots" across the country from

Bryant Park in Manhattan to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, from the top of the

Mark

2.4-gigahertz

and

to

Starbuckses everywhere, WiFi in both the

5 -gigahertz

bands can play a key

role in public

places and offices. However, in accord with Merrill's rule

camera ing to

satisfactory unless

is

—photography

Foveon

that can cell

will

be

is

you want

it

mountain climb-

not restricted to "hot spots."

Qualcomms

More

capabilities

everywhere that

are deployed.

Preparing for the Foveon revolution in software

When tem

Bill

Gates launched

at a trade

relevant

CDMA 2000 EV-DO technology

endow broadband imager

phone systems

to take

— no

his

is

Microsoft.

XP-network-based operating

sys-

show, this king of the digital age did not begin by

entering a password or clicking icons in a pop-up window. Instead he put his finger firmly on a glowing biometric touch

pad that recognized Gates, loaded

him access

to his personal files

pany that supplied But

its

and

digital

open sesame

is

innovation in pattern matching

cal leader,

another

this

his personal settings,

Vance Bjorn,

fruit of Carver's

a former

campaign

and gave

kingdom. The com-

called Digital Persona.

is

analog and

Mead

its

techni-

student, represents

to transform the

world of ana-

log interfaces to the digital world.

Microsoft has also developed a

new

standard for representing

photographs on the net. The GIFs and

World Wide

Web

JPEGs

of the current

are grossly inadequate to capture the vividness

and verisimilitude of Foveon pictures. As new standards are perfected, the world of the

image of a cat

—

Net

will

be able

to

render yet another

a cougar, in the act of leaping off the screen

The

Eye

Silicon

249

toward you. Mead's revolutionary camera

make your com-

will

puter brim with the intense dynamic colors of a

new

era.

Like

the apparent glass on the top of the pile of carpets, your screen will

disappear into a luminous

Still,

most poignant

the

new world

is

cat. It is

first

Mead and Mahowald. But

a three-foot-high

It is

based on the same essential

con technology used twelve years before ican cover heralding the

in the Scientific

photography of any kind.

sili-

Amer-

working retina chips made by

rather than the blurry

matic sketch offered on that old magazine cover, the offers a full-color vividness

color.

the picture on the wall

outside Mead's corner office at Foveon.

image of the face of a

and

symbol of the amazing

feline

advances achieved by the company

of art

and verisimilitude

Some

resolves every hair, whisker, glint,

six

square

lifelike

new image

rarely excelled in feet,

and gleam of the

renders the eyes of the cat with a

monochro-

the image

feline fur

and

glow that gives the

viewer the distinct and disturbing feeling that a formidable ani-

mal

is

To

watching him. Yet the picture fulfill

would have

of a kitten.

the promise of kitten or cougar, however, Foveon to find

down market would be

is

live

new

leadership that could take the

into the realms of disruption

cougars galore.

where

company

in its

path

23 Holy Kammol

On

his daily

dawn walk

the Arastradero Preserve,

in

intently chatting in Italian with Alvia, his wife of thirty-

Federico Faggin met a cougar in his path.

six years,

Early in the twenty-first century, cougars, terrorists, class-action lawyers,

begun

and other

to gain

feral creatures all

"had their rights" and had

an edge on humans in Silicon Valley Faggin had

home

seen several big cats around his

Admiring the sleek

feline,

Los Altos

Hills.

Federico and Alvia waited for

cross over into the sepia grasses side of the road.

in the

and twisted

Then they made

their

trees

way

it

to

on the uphill

briskly

down

the

mountain. Entering his large predators,

with a jaunty

sixties,

Faggin was no longer inclined to confront

whether sepia or

gait,

the

investor." "After all," so I

Graying

at the

temples,

dimply smile, and a modest paunch, he was

slowly retiring into

Altos Hills,

silicon.

Silicon

Valley

role

of "gentleman

he says with a gay chortle,

could hardly be a gentleman farmer."

251

"in the

Los

George Gilder

2^2

By

dint of the insistence of Alvia,

who

corrected any journalists or historians icles of

gently but persistently

who

her legendary husband, the world

erred in their chron-

now

increasingly rec-

ognized Faggin as the true father of the microprocessor and the silicon-gate process that

proud of their also

done

artist

made

it

possible.

at

a biological father,

daughter, Marzia, and their two sons, he had

well. Eric, twenty-three,

philosophy

As

was

a graduate in physics

and

Santa Clara, making a leisurely survey of the uni-

verse,

and the other son, Marc, twenty-four, had done

major

in

math and chemistry and then plunged deep

a

double

in pursuit

of a doctorate at Cornell, in nanotechnology. "Ill leave that to

him," Faggin said with a smile. In the Los Altos Hills, he

sides by local venturers

found himself surrounded on

and investors devastated

technology crash and then by the in

public offerings.

initial

new

all

by the

first

century's long doldrums

But Faggin had mostly emerged

unscathed. After scoring handsomely in Synaptics, which had the

first

invested ates

and only major Silicon Valley IPO of 2002, he had

some $400,000

in

Foveon with

(NEA), the eminent venture

Kramlich.

He

New

Enterprise Associled by Richard

capitalists

looked forward to the success of this promising

technology in the midst of a booming market for imagers. Later

he joined the board of Blue Arc, the preeminent success ware

for storage networking, a British

and financed by

Italian friend

company

in hard-

initially

guided

Walter Allesandrini and run by

another Italian friend Gianlucca Rattazzi. Faggin also became a director of the Allesandrini telecom

equipment

start-up, Avanex,

which soared during the optics boom, collapsed

in

2000, and

The

Silicon

Eye

253

then morphed into a successful scavenger

among

the ruins,

picking up optical divisions from Alcatel and Corning.

Becoming call

a laureled lion in the Valley, Faggin

from Jim Thornburn of

Zilog, the

even received a

company begun by Faggin

and Masatoshi Shima when they defected from later

returned to Intel to head

its

Intel

Japanese research

(Shima facility).

Faggin had broken entirely with Zilog in 1981 and, until the mid1990s, the

company had

subsisted on sales of billions of Z-8s

and Z-80s, microprocessors embedded

in

kitchen white goods, and microwave ovens.

automobiles, toys,

Then

Corporation decided to cash in on the telecom the

company

for

network processors

private

and relaunching

it

Texas-Pacific

boom by

into the hot

— microprocessors used

to

taking

new market

run networks.

Milking cash from the Z-80 to support entry into the com-

munications chip business where Zilog built a

roots as an

Engaging talgia,

some

had no special competence,

$700 million wafer fab and nearly went bankrupt.

Thorburn asked Faggin its

it

for

guidance in returning the company to

embedded microprocessor

in a rare Silicon Valley

firm based on the Z-8.

success in the enterprise of nos-

Faggin enjoyed helping in the revival of his design from thirty-five years before.

In the late

summer

of 2003, the Faggins left for a vacation in

China. Both looked forward to more exciting travel as the years passed.

foveon, meanwhile, was

in the throes of a series of tur-

bulent board meetings. Under a search team composed of Dick

George Gilder

254

Kramlich and Forrest Baskett of

New

Enterprise Associates

(NEA), Dick Sanquini, formerly of National Semiconductor, and the absent Faggin, the board was attempting

CEO who could

take the

company

across the

to find a

chasm from

high-end cameras to the promised land of billions of

cell

new few

a

phones.

Under prompting from NEA, the Foveon board hired Lonergan Richards, a Silicon Valley headhunter, to conduct a nationwide search. Faggin

would presumably be covering China.

Previously chosen by Faggin as his chief financial officer at Synaptics, interim Foveon

porate leader. liked him.

An

CEO Jim

Lau was

a

competent

cor-

engaging man, with a friendly smile, everyone

As the organizer of Synaptics s

intricate

web

of Asian

manufacturers, Lau had been crucial to the success of Faggin's previous company.

CFO who

Lau would continue

also possessed a sharp

to serve

superiority for assert that pixels.

a

its

was cautious.

Foveons imager. Under Lau, Foveon did not pixels

were worth between two and three

master of the "no comment."

company was being passed by

company

to journalists,

He was no rivals

that

cougar.

most

digital

Lau was

And now

his

increasingly alarmed at

Lau had been

leading.

Full of photographers indignant about the artifacts tortions inherent in

CCD

with inferior products. As

members met, they became

the condition of the

and

dis-

cameras, Foveon had targeted

the top of the camera market, where Carver earlier at

He

by making grand claims of

That would be aggressive. Talking

the board

a

understanding of the manu-

facturing mazes of Asia. But in marketing he didn't like to offend competitors

Foveon as

Mead

three years

Photokina 2000 had uncovered one avid customer,

The

Silicon

Eye

255

Sigma. But in the subsequent years under Lau's leadership, no further buyers of the Foveon chip had emerged.

many customers era,

for Sigma's

which Sigma treated

much-honored but

Nor were

there

still-exotic

cam-

chiefly as a loss leader, a

Sigma's estimable line of lenses.

On

way

to sell

the board of directors, Brian

Halla of National Semiconductor brought everyone

down

to

earth by comparing Foveon's search for customers to "a fellow

with a metal detector combing the beach."

foveon's chief hope

breakthrough

for a

at the

bottom of

the market was Sanyo, the major independent Japanese

manu-

facturer of mass-market digital cameras, including Nikon's pop-

Ask anyone

ular Coolpix model.

beyond Sigma and those to

know would

cite

in the

Foveon about customers

at

know

talking to those with a right

Sanyo, sure to sign any day now. Foveon's

marketing department under Allen Rush had been negotiating with Sanyo for nearly two years. All the reports were "highly promising, deep interest, excited by the technology," but some-

how no

deal was closed. "You

know how

Mead

panies are. Takes them forever,"

Now

in the fall of

companies

meeting

cell

in

Lau went

to

Sanyo

in

told

me.

phone imagers from other

selling in the millions, the

close a deal. a

2003, with

those big Japanese com-

board mandated Lau to

September 2003 and secured

Tokyo with the top executives

top Sanyo executives turned out to care

in the

little

company. The

about Foveon. Lau

reported to the board that while the lower-level engineers were enthusiastic about the Foveon sensors

X3 and XI 9,

the senior

George Gilder

them

executives were open chiefly to using

down that

CCDs

prices from rival vendors of

fit

CCD

snugly in

When

imagers

Faggin returned from China in September, he began to

tains with Alvia,

ture?" he asked.

On

visible results.

He was

"What

Sure

CCD

reminded him of the experience

ing

still.

the

company perfected

moun-

at the

slow

this pic-

beginning to doubt what he had been

the light at even pixel, but the

It

in the

wrong with

is

told about the superiority of the technology. all

walks

his

he expressed increasing frustration

development of any

it

was better

to

was not standIntel

at

when

dynamic random access memory

its

(DRAM). Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore

DRAM

CMOS

and

slots.

hear distressing reports on Foveon.

capture

as a foil to force

projected that the

would displace the regnant magnetic-core memories

two or three years. But challenged by the

DRAM,

core

in

memory

engineers improved the cost effectiveness of cores tenfold over the next five years.

decade.

Now to

reduce their pixel

pixels

size

Challenged by

Foveon's X3, however, to

triumph was delayed by half a

and Merrill declare that

square microns).

managed

D RAM's

Faggin at board meetings heard

CCD inventor) be able

The

CCD

reduce their pixel

5

CMOS

size to

(himself a

CCD makers would not

below

engineers

Mead

at

microns square (25 imagers,

including

Sonv and Canon soon

4 microns square.

were soon not only smaller than Foveon

CCD

scientists believed

possible but smaller than Foveon itself could then

make

at its

National Semiconductor fab. Dick Lyon insisted that the smaller pixels yielded

More to

errors.

worse images. Less

light

was collected per

But the fact remained that the

CCD

pixel.

was on track

put three pixels, together with admittedly tricky plastic color

The

filters, in

a space that

tical pixel.

Eye

Silicon

Foveon could put one three-transistor

So what was

this

Foveon

huge advantage?

would be

and

taste. Yes, the

less

power, and so on. But Foveon

pixel

problem persuading anyone nology in favor of a

257

new

to

still

A matter of design more

elegant, use

would have

throw out their old

a serious

CCD

tech-

device that did not even yield smaller

and thus did not even allow Foveon

pixels

far

ver-

to claim leadership in

the heralded "can-you-top-this" megapixel sweepstakes.

But then, under Lau and Allen Rush, Foveon was not even claiming more pixels, except by the backhand "times 3" after the 3.6 megapixel

number (even though

the "times 3" was always

elided in press reports). Foveon's marketers had allowed themselves to be intimidated by the Japanese

from even asserting that

with three colors at every spot a Foveon pixel was worth 3 onecolor pixels

on

a

CCD

or ordinary

megapixels were actually said the

tive,''

1 1

CMOS

imager. Foveon's 3.6

megapixels. "Better be conserva-

Foveon marketers. "Better be wrong, and

lose,"

said Faggin.

Faggin argued that the board could not find a promising until

it

tigate.

determined what the problem was.

Then

as

He

offered to inves-

he began his inquiry, he realized that he could

not succeed in diagnosing the problem unless he had to

probe anywhere in the company.

Lau

by

as interim

CEO

He

full

power

suggested that he replace

CEO.

the next board meeting

in

September, Faggin was ready

to

take over. Before leaving on his search for powerline artifacts in the Appalachians,

Mead had one

final

meeting with Faggin.

— George Gilder

"Faggin chose to have one of his hissy

Carver

fits,"

recalls.

"According to him, no one had done anything right since the

founding of the company. Before he took

show

else

the day.

He

—

knew what they were doing built himself up.

up the pressure, the do the job. that

he wanted to

everyone that the situation was nearly impossible

to

no one

over,

Much

of

But

that

that only he could save

he was building

in the process

intensity, the

competitiveness he needed to

what he

was exaggerated.

Sigma was not the

said

final solution.

We

We

all

knew

knew we had

all

to

enter the cell-phone market. But that said, there was no doubt that he

had a much better view of the competitive

situation than

any of us had." Faggin's investigation

who had

passive chairman

"Mead was

had persuaded him that Mead was

allowed the company to go off track.

He knew

infatuated with the technology.

advantages, in principle.

a

He was

with the theory.

in love

all

the

When

you are infatuated, you cannot see the flaws. Faggin concluded that in principle the Foveon process was

indeed superior imagers. But in

And

in the

to its

charge-coupled devices and existing

form

it

CMOS

was not superior

digital

in practice.

imager business, as opposed to the image business,

the market for principles remained small.

from time to

time over the years. Carver

had clashed. Carver was always listening while Faggin was listening to the market. to

open up technological

possibilities,

Mead and

to

Mead

Faggin

the technology,

normally angled

while Faggin sought to

anneal them into a sword. But just as Faggin had previously

— The

deferred to

Mead

in

Silicon

Eye

259

shaping the technology,

readily deferred to Faggin in running the it

now needs

Faggin's

Faggin

is

mused on

needs his own technology

it

no slouch on technology

Reflecting on

company, believing that

marketeering insight and strategic

resourcefulness more than

And

Mead

at this point

either.

Mead

twenty companies,

experience with

the Foveon saga:

insight.

what happens when you

"It's

start a

company. The unlimited potential of your new technology.

huge high it

just thinking about

becomes

thing.

.

.

.

a product,

It's

it's

it.

But once

a

manifest, once

it is

not a myriad of anything

happened with every company

It's

—

one

it's

worked with

I've

they get to the point where they're successful, they're on track,

and

there's less

and

less that

You actually become

someone

a distraction

—

like

questions. That's

when

Mead

observed:

"He

these interesting

all

right

man

to lead the

doesn't take a lot of input.

always seeking win- win situations, but Federico loves a All the

good

And

today Foveon

Japanese want to knock

no one can "I

fight.

am

fight

having the time of

Faggin was focusing

over,

Kammoli!"

my

in the

a fighter.

midst of a

None wants

am

I

He

fight.

to give in.

And

"If

life

not having to do this," says

in better hands."

fiercely.

runway," he commented. is

off.

it

is

is

com-

more resourcefully than Federico.

Mead. "Foveon could not be

way

and

time to leave."

it's

Concluding that Faggin was the pany,

can contribute.

they're trying to focus

you're wandering around thinking about

new

me

"A small company has

you don't gain

lift

you see the fence coming ahead

.

a limited

before the run.

.

and

it's

Holy

Dick Merrill

tells

the Telecosm conference about the myriad

cations for cheap, high-resolution imagers. Glenn Davis

new appli-

RAW in Vegas

Foveon

couldn't

happen

to a

guru more

digitally

Delphic than John

ItDvorak, beetle-browed futurist, nerd supreme, PC magazine doppelguru, cynical seer through the industry's swell and jig-

raw

gle to the

new

crazy

silicone below, virtuoso italicizer, brazen imbolder,

talent at

the

Consumer

Electronics Show, serial

keynoter at the Photography Marketing Association, maturing as a

vamp

Teller

in

and proud owner of a

From ics

Vegas as familiar as Cirque de Soleil or Penn and

Show

free

Sigma 10 camera.

the record-breaking January 2004 a

month

earlier, full

of

Consumer

Electron-

HDTV specs and scams,

so goes

the story at Foveon corporation, Dvorak went on to the wedding of a friend.

When

his chance.

the photographer failed to show, Big John

He would

become: John Dvorak, ier

I

can

bravado

tell

take the official

wedding

pictures.

photographer, which

He would is

a lot eas-

you than expectorating two pithy columns,

in bold,

and i-pinions

in italics, every

magazine.

261

saw

two weeks

full

for

of

PC

George Gilder

262

Under

a

canopy on

a

sunny

blithely with a dark foreground

images.

If

day,

the wedding unfolded

and bright background

all

the

there had been a professional photographer, he would

have been gnashing his apertures and didn't

for

notice.

He

clicked

just

away

filters.

But Big John

relentlessly.

Just

like

columns. Write enough of them, with enough pungent wild-

eyed predictions, and

if

you are Dvorak many

prove to be

will

More

amazingly on target and your column will be a gas to read. is

more.

them

More

will

better.

Take enough photo shots and some of

be great, right?

era bearing the all

is

And

with this super

Foveon X3 imager that collects

new all

digital

cam-

the light and

the colors at every pixel, he couldn't go wrong. His host sure

was lucky

to

have

all

that extra

luminance and chrominance of

a

beautiful day and lucky to have Big John to memorialize the

event for the ages. Arriving

home, Dvorak booted up the Sigma Photo Pro

soft-

ware, linked the camera to his computer with a universal serial

bus (USB), rendered his harvest in

JPEGs

(the familiar

pression standard of the Joint Photographic Experts is

com-

Group

that

ubiquitous on the Web), and prepared to bask in the magnifi-

cence of his work. But what

is

this

garbage on his screen? Dvo-

rak was shocked. Every picture he took

was under the dark

canopy with the bright background and every picture was dungeon dark with a dazzling halo. In botching the scene

same way each and every and

time, the

Sigma was

in the

entirely robust

reliable.

With JPEG images was no way

to fix

it.

—

a global

Change the

compression algorithm settings

and you

—there

just get

new

— The

Eye

Silicon

permutations of bad pictures. You darken

263

enough

it

to mitigate

the blinding brightness outside, and the bride's face disappears

under the shadowy canopy. Brighten up the side scene

face,

whites out" along with the wedding dress. Ready to

'

write the experience

he made a plaintive

No problem,

off,

call

perhaps with a column dissing Sigma,

back

to Eric

says Eric. This

Zarakov

at

Foveon.

the digital era, John, just as you

is

said last year giving your friendly keynote advice to crafty analog photographers,

etors of all

cramped

just skulk

was time were

little

away and use

Once

Foveon

moldy

all

fig film retailers,

the artsy-

and

propri-

photography shops that they might as well their stores to rent

to sing a Hallelujah

right.

and the out-

chorus of

digital fiber alles.

again a prophet in your

you have

DVDs, because

own

it

And you

time. But for the

use the correct

digital for-

mat. For redeeming botched exposures, you can't use

JPEG. You

full-scale

have to do

it

effect,

Vegas

style, in

image frame.

just

one simple

light sensors

shadow

is

ness will be

made

lambdas and

be well.

early February,

totally

an

accu-

And

FillLite slider bar in

to a level of perfect balance

days, or years after exposure it

and the brightness

lines will lie

By

it

and serve

and the luminance all will

Hubel

shift of the

RAW data

light

it is

in

in

there.

—even hours,

you can cook up the

on the camera

but don't panic,

your Sigma Pro software, moving of light and

undressed,

and bytes from the scene arrayed

will look awful,

information

rate; all the

With

It

RAW. The pure

the

uncompressed output from the digital form. All the bits

to

au will

down with so

it

point.

The

dark-

be made mute,

the chrominance

was.

when he rekeynoted

the Photography Mar-

George Gilder

2^4

keting Association bash, also in

member

ecstatic

Las Vegas, Dvorak was an

of the Foveon cult.

benefits of a real accurate

He had

window (RAW)

at

experienced the

every pixel coupled

with FillLite, a simple ingenious software algorithm contrived by a hiree of

Dick Lyon named Paul Hubel.

RAW

unique. Given accurate

files,

ware conversion programs can do

with an array of some it

soft-

six dif-

simple and elegant

to use. Just slide the bar, in either the positive or nega-

tive direction, into

suits

not exactly

is

Photoshop and other

Hubel had made

ferent adjustments. But

and fun

it

FillLite

the sun or into the shade, until the picture

your dream. Professionals

may

cavil,

magazine, Dvorak was right to be bold and

but afterwards

in

PC

italicized.

the crest of the digital revolution, the 2004

PMA

show

was the organizations eightieth and the biggest

ever,

with

On

17,000 exhibits, mostly

digital

cameras and accessories, sprawl-

two

levels of the

Paradise

on

South End of the Vegas Convention Center

off

Avenue (occupying the North End near the Hilton were

the spruce armies of the ing

show

floor

ing over fifteen acres, or a million square feet of

many comments on

Gun and

Rifle Dealers' show,

prompt-

the comparative firepower of digital

cameras and machine guns).

As Dvorak had long predicted, death of photography but digital

its

digital

turned out not to be the

efflorescence. In 2003, worldwide

imager sales of nearly 50 million exceeded the experts'

consensus of 38 million by over one-third. Commandingly the product of the year, the

digital

camera

in all its manifestations is

giving vision to

computers and telephones, twenty-four-hour vig-

ATM

machines, taxicabs and convenience stores, and

ilance to

The

Silicon

Eye

265

high resolution to cheap, adaptable cameras. the

PMA

RAW.

convention was

And

the

theme

of

Sashimi, sushi, Canon, Sony,

Nikon, Konica, Minolta, and Olympus. But the big news, for those

who knew

the plot, was Foveon, which sold a nearly

imperceptible share of those 50 million imagers but offered the best raw

of

files

all.

New York

Dvorak, Markoff of the editor of Wired,

much

as

all

were

if it

Markoff 's piece,

knew a

the plot, so they covered the

his third

the

initial

new Foveon

show

Foveon product launch. For the Times, on Foveon, appeared on the front page

of the business section on

Today and the

Times, and Chris Anderson,

Monday

of convention week.

USA

issue of the convention tabloid also featured

product. To the industry-leading cost perform-

ance of the Sigma 10

(DSLR), Foveon

digital single-lens reflex

had added the industry-leading cost performance of shoot camera and

a point-and-

DVD quality VGA (video graphics

array)

cam-

corder for an announced $399. Still,

Foveon

in

Vegas was chiefly in demonstration mode.

The new point-and-shoot camera liant

new

partnership with

Kodak

somewhat tarnished name Polaroid either. Polaroid

did not spring from or

Sanyo or Nikon.

of Polaroid. But

it

ital

cameras

to

new

financial crisis

an

bore the

was emerging from bankruptcy with an

legacy gear that was finding its

It

bril-

was not made by

array of instant digital kiosk printers, cameras,

the stresses of

some

Italian

it

the digital era. But under

had licensed

its

name

for dig-

from Hong Kong named Giovanni

Tomaselli, head of a firm called

Surely you have heard of

life in

and Polaroid

World Wide Licenses Limited.

WWLL.

It is

an important design and

George Gilder

266

manufacturing subsidiary of an even better-known company called the Character

Group PLC. CG-PLC,

were quick

is

the

to stress,

as the

Foveon

folk

on the London Stock Exchange

listed

Media and Photography

Sector, just in case

in

you are so

benighted as never to have heard of the Character Group PLC.

Marketing the camera Uniden. Don't ask.

in the

United States, however, would be

the familiar Japanese vendor of cordless

It is

telephones and exclusive U.S. distributor of Polaroid digital

may

cameras, which as you

Wide Licenses Limited

of

recall are

manufactured by World

Hong Kong and

in

one instance

employ an X3 imager from Foveon. In the midst of this

magpie 's nest of commercial and manu-

facturing entities lies the pearl of Foveon's intellectual property

and conceptual

superiority,

which Dvorak came

to appreciate at

the wedding and which to nearly everyone in Foveon's circle

seems resplendent and undeniable. The inelegance of the competitors'

language

Bayer it

filter

evokes.

color routine

The

is

evident even in the twisted

result of using filters to focus light of

only a single primary color on each pixel sensor, the conventional

Bayer pattern sor

is

needed

is

a

to

mosaic of red, green, or blue

compute the

pixels.

A proces-

actual colors from the colors of

adjacent pixels.

Describing the process of converting a Bayer pattern into a usable

RAW file —here Foveon chief scientist

with distaste

and

—

de-alias.

are terms

such

as demosaic

Lyon's lips pucker

and de-Bayer, de-jag

Accurate from the outset, Foveon's colors do

not need to be demosaiced and their edges do not have to be "blur filtered"

and "de-jagged," and

their patterns

do not need

The

Silicon

you can see every

"de-aliasing" so

design on Carver Mead's

its rivals

surrounded on

the-line pictures

high-resolution

thirty it

curlicue in the swirly

last

it

was obvious sides.

all

high-accuracy

company

that the

You want perfect

and you get the Sigma 10

megapixels, 12x zoom,

can buy that too

267

shirt.

to foveon's partisans, had

Eye

for $1,200.

point-and-shoot,

top-of-

You want

with

4.5

RAW files, and FillLite software, and you

in the Polaroid x530.

frames a second of

full

motion

You want

a camcorder,

VGA video and you can get

from that same point-and-shoot device.

Dick Lyon could explain

to

you the

intrinsic inferiority of all

the hundreds of other cameras with slightly different features glittering across the pullulating floor.

pixels (and

more "megapixels"), but each

electric charge

ation

between

and thus could capture its

to using the

would be worse,

camera

— and

of those pixels held less

less

dynamic range

darkest and brightest level) and was

sitive to noise. Plastic color filters

compared

They may have had smaller

as

silicon

more sen-

over every pixel were a kludge

itself as

Sony discovered with

don't

(vari-

a its

filter.

new

The

picture

12-megapixel

even mention the fiasco of the new

14-megapixel Kodak.

Supporting Lyon's claims was Lawrence Matson, one of the earliest

among

Sigma enthusiasts and

a staunch defender of the faith

the professional photographers on the

tography

Web

site.

DP

Review pho-

Flying in from Switzerland to attend the

Vegas unveiling, Matson recounted the original excitement he

"

George Gilder

felt in

He

encountering Foveon imagers. seen on the

tos (even as

distortion

Web

1

)

cited early

Sigma pho-

of eyes reflecting the sky without

—

of a frog's eye mirroring an expanse of blue sky and

clouds, or the eye of a cormorant suffused with a span of heav-

enly blue.

He

described a portrait of an old

man

with a single

curl of white hair precisely distinguishable. Perfectly rendered in a

Sigma

Matson

portrait,

become

said, "that hair in a

Bayer mosaic would

a blue-and-red rope or a 'barber pole."

Because of the accurate borders between etches sharp edges that give

its

colors,

Foveon

pictures a three-dimensional

property with images seeming almost holographic. In order to avoid "jaggies," mosaic cameras use "blur

Canon images what

smooth but

it

"I

call

it

Xutella.

cameras, the Bayer burden also

per second,

It

makes the

transi-

also flattens out the picture."

Just as important for the future of

Because of the

"That gives

their devotees like to call 'buttery smooth'

textures." said Mattson.

tions

filters."

still

afflicts

difficulty of processing

and motion combo full-motion images.

huge raw

files thirty

times

systems for full-motion capture must cluster

all

adjacent pixels and process

them

together.

But non-Foveon

imagers cannot readily cluster neighboring pixels because in a

mosaic the adjacent pixels capture different colors. They would

combine

into

chrominance murk. The Bayer-based cameras

thus have to perform time-consuming and image-distorting digital

acrobatics to join together the pixels of the

same

color.

With

Foveon, the combination of neighboring pixels was natural, simple, fast,

and accurate.

In theory,

all

the Foveon claims were true and had been true

for several years.

The Foveon

design, in one form or other,

would

The

ultimately

Silicon

dominate photography.

Eye

269

Dramatizing the business

challenge faced by Foveon, however, were the exhibits

them on the

floor of

inventor Federico Faggin put ter,

but in practice

it

CEO

PMA. As

is

it,

not."

all

around

and microprocessor co-

"In principle,

Foveon

is

far bet-

Canon, Sony, Samsung, and the

others might have to push their technology harder to get a per-

formance comparable If

Sony's

ter

CCD

colors

but they had the clout

to Foveon's

were

distorted,

with emerald hue to correct them.

imagers produced jaggies, gies are invisible to the If

make

naked

to

do

add yet another Bayer If existing

Canon

it.

fil-

CMOS

the pixels so small that the jag-

eye.

people judge imagers by the

number

of megapixels, build

wafer fabs with 12-inch (300-millimeter) wafers holding more than twice as

many

chips as current 8-inch wafers and inscribe

the pixel transistors with geometries of 45 nanometers, about a third the size of

most current technologies (130 nanometers).

Sony and Samsung were already planning ries. If

Foveon cameras are

duce Samsungs and Sonys

intrinsically

in

to build

such facto-

cheaper to make, pro-

such volumes that manufacturing

scale dwarfs the imager edge.

Meanwhile, make sure that era are superior ter

how good

all

the other features of your cam-

and multiply the features year by

the Foveon imager

is,

what

is

year.

No

mat-

the chance that

WWL Limited and "Polaroid" will eclipse Canon and the rest of the Japanese in overall camera quality?

And

if

the large-volume

orders go to the Japanese camera giants, the quality of their

imagers, by brute force of scope and scale, will also likely eke

ahead.

George Gilder

270

that

ume

the message from

is

rules quality.

the semiconductor industry. Vol-

Long experience

in the

semiconductor trade

has confirmed the validity of [Nick] Tredennick's Law:

volume and you get

quality.

and eventually quality

Go for

quality

for

and you forgo volume

As the chief designer

as well.

Go

of the high-

quality Motorola "68000" microprocessor, Nick knows whereof

he speaks. Chiefly used computers,

relatively

in

low-volume Macintosh

was eventually eclipsed by once-inferior PCs

it

based on Intel 8600 family microprocessors. The x86 line sold

in

such volumes that they attracted enough investment and learning-curve improvement to

Now

same process

the

non dooms Foveon

become dominant is

in quality as well.

befalling cameras. This

phenome-

to a "spiral of decline," declares Karl Guttag,

an eminent former Texas Instruments inventor/engineer with 123 patents mostly in graphics and imaging.

Foveon on gain the

DP

of

Review, Guttag believes that Foveon can never

momentum

Yet the

A relentless critic

to

make money.

power of volume

will

be the ultimate source of

Foveon's coming dominance in imagers. All the talk of pure

camera refinements in the future,

will

dwindle into commercial irrelevance

when high-volume imager

leadership

is

set in

the market for cell phones. In 2003, the world's largest unit seller of

phone

cameras was already not Canon or Sony but

titan

cell-

Nokia. In the course of time, the highest-quality

imagers for the mass market would

come from

the cell-phone

imager market, already 150 million units in 2004 and set to

double again

in

2005.

The

All the greater simplicity

Silicon

CCDs

in cell

will ultimately

phones. The power con-

prove to be a showstopper for

CCDs,

battery-based devices. Against yields a fivefold

271

and elegance of the Foveon imager

can translate into a decisive edge

sumption of

Eye

RAW efficiency low-power CMOS

Foveon's

power advantage. Against

(complementary metal oxide semiconductor) imagers, the Foveon stacked

pixels yield at least a twofold resolution

accuracy advantage, and the

means

a decisive advantage in

ability

and

simply to cluster pixels

camcorder applications.

So emerge the lineaments of the coming world conflict photography. Foveon

first

would face

off against the

in

photography

establishment of Canon, Sony, Nikon, and Olympus backed up

by a second team of

Fuji, Konica, Minolta, Pentax,

Packard, and Kodak, and then

it

would have

Hewlett-

to confront the

imperial pretensions of Nokia, Samsung, Kyocera, Casio, and a

host of others rushing into the cell-phone space. Nearing midpoint in the essentially

first

decade of the new century the score remained

100 percent market share for the establishment

team, essentially 100 percent for Bayer mosaics. Fighting alone against this massive array of established as Clayton Christensen declared four years earlier, "zero" to

chance of success. As Faggin

says,

"Obviously

rivals,

Foveon has

we

are going

need partners." For the necessary reinforcements, he was

clearly not going to

depend

chiefly

on National Semiconductor,

Sigma, and the Character Group. At the show in Vegas, he was

busy seeking partners and finding more every ners would take the

company

into the

day. Foveon's part-

new markets

for low-

power, high-resolution imagers where the war would be won.

George Gilder

272

The argument ter

for

Foveon

is

that

it is

intrinsically simply a bet-

technology in every way. For Foveon, therefore, the chief

shadow on the show was the notion

that the best technology

often does not win. In the Times, John Markoff reported speculation that

Foveon might become the "Betamax" of the

digital

image revolution. The difference between Foveon and Betamax, though,

is

superior to rior to

that

Foveon

CCDs

CMOS

indeed decisively superior:

is

power efficiency and some

in

mosaics in efficiency of

five

times

2.5 times supe-

capture and far

light

superior in superfast full-motion and stop-motion functions,

adding up to the necessary tenfold edge. Indeed for power, high-resolution applications, there the case of Foveon, there

CMOS lacks.

is

no tradeoff

in

no

low-

alternative. In

which

CCDs

or

mosaics offer some virtue that the Foveon technology

The

superiority of the

momentum, brand financial

Canon, Sony, Nikon lineup

new world where

clout. All are

powerful assets, but they intrinsic

doubt or doldrums,

I

am

of

its reveille,

which

is

my

telecosmic

inclined to be churlish. But

following Mead's call to "listen to the technology," rising in joy at

technology in

imaged or protected.

with foveon challenged and many in

their

the camera disappears into the fabric of every

location that needs to be

champions

is

manufacturing prowess, and

recognition,

and marketing

do not eclipse the superiority of Foveon's a

is

many

all

I

still

find myself

sounding with new urgency.

Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs

and

built the foundations of

an industrial nation,

The

fiber-optic less

Silicon

Eye

273

webs, store width breakthroughs, data centers, and wire-

systems installed over the

last five

years will enable and

endow

the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth.

Mead sums

up: "During the bubble

starting Foveon.

rience.

It

hire people.

their chests

didn't

all

middle of

was an absolutely awful expe-

struggled.

have a business plan, but were pounding

and going public

The hardest

thing

company going during

"Now," he continues,

I

months, and you could

in three

We

struggled and struggled and

ever had to do in

my

life

was

"there's

deals with people; you can

you.

It's

telling

to

the bubble.

space available; you can get fab

runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can

whole time

to

being sucked off into these brain-dead

start a sensible business.

get a

It

in the

You couldn't get fab runs. You couldn't

call.

They were

companies that

not

horrible.

was

You couldn't find space. You couldn't get your vendors

answer the phone

on

was

I

sit

down and

make

they don't spend their

you how they're a hundred times smarter than

absolutely amazing. You can actually get

which means what's happening now

is

work done now,

that the entrepreneurs,

the technologists, are building the next generation of technology that isn't visible yet but

upon which

will

be built the biggest

expansion of productivity the world has ever seen." of the network,

bring radical

new semiconductor and

new

On

the edge

optical innovations will

technologies to market across the span of

microcosm and telecosm. Synaptics has already taken 70 percent of the touch-pad busi-

ness and devices.

now

supplies haptic technology for iPods and other

Foveon could ultimately take a similar share of the

George Gilder

274

imager market. National Semiconductor retains 30 percent of

Foveon and

is

manufacturing

its

revolutionary devices in a lead-

new

ing-edge fab in Portland, Maine. Foveon's are the single tronics riott at

most elegant new commercial invention

have encountered since

I

silicon imagers

Newark

meeting

New Jersey the Web as it

Airport in

dominate the next era of vessel of images

first

and videos superior

Mead

in elec-

Mar-

at the

1983. Foveon can

in

becomes

in resolution

broadband

a

and quality

to

analog films. Following Synaptics and Foveon will be several other

companies. Chaired by by

Mead

Mead and based on

student Chris Di Orio

self-adaptive semiconductors.

is

Mead

technology designed

Impinj, a radical innovator in

Located

in Seattle,

Impinj has

achieved the goal of robust analog floating-gate technology envisaged by Federico Faggin at the launch of Synaptics. Impinj chips can be trimmed or adapted after production by adjusting the charges on the floating gates.

One

be a tiny analog radio frequency

tag,

of the

first

products will

usable everywhere from

superstores to transport containers. But with the aim of drastically lowering the

applying

its

power usage of

cell

phones, Impinj

is

also

technology to an array of low-power mixed-signal

devices.

A further Mead-inspired venture is Audience, able breakthrough in speech recognition.

offering a prob-

Launched by Lloyd

Watts, formerly at Synaptics, and based in part on Mead's

cochlear researches and on Dick Lyon's cochlear model, Audi-

ence shows that the key problem of speech recognizers digital pattern

matching but analog audio reception.

A

is

not

kindred

The

Silicon

Eye

275

company, also associated with Mead's cochlear researches, called Sonic Innovations, has created directional hearing aids.

Emerging

in

1999

in Salt

Lake

City,

has

it

become

the fastest-

growing company in the global hearing-aid business. This jumble of apparently unrelated ventures embodies the singular

new

vision unleashed by

in his classes at

Mead some

Caltech and brought

twenty years ago

to diverse fruition

by an

amazingly ingenious cohort of his students and associates from

Misha

to Lyon.

There have been many setbacks on the long

toward the Foveon revolution, and there

will

trail

be further setbacks

ahead. But these and hundreds of other comparable innovations signal the first hot flare of revival

millennial crash in technology.

from the devastation of the

Epilogue

Cameras End

moments

In

Merrill,

of weakness

and Lyon

at

and enthusiasm, Mead, Faggin,

Foveon speak of transforming the cam-

era business. Perhaps, en passant, they goal.

But

as a target,

and practical goal fuse

it

is

will lead

it

to

them

astray.

may

A

achieve this

more

plausible

dismantle the camera altogether and

dif-

throughout the world.

Both

in the

etymology of the word and in the history of the

device, a "camera"

is

a

curved room, a vaulted chamber, an

arched vestibule, a cavernous black box. In camera the judge

meets privately with Perry Mason, excesses. In a camera obscura

shone on side.

a wall

—an

to

upbraid him for rhetorical

original dark

from a lensed hole that passed

Often made

in the

form

room

—

light in

pictures

from out-

of a circular building, the

camera

obscura enclosed a group of observers around a plain white table,

on which a luminous image was projected by a lens above roof.

By

rotating the lens around, the "camera" casts

in the

on the table

a periscopic view of the surrounding scene. In other words, the

camera began

as a theater, bigger even

than a mainframe computer. In the case of camera lucida

277

(a light

George Gilder

278

room), cameras project an image on paper as an aid to sketching or drawing.

Made

in the

shape of a cone with a lens and a

and

reflecting mirror or prism at the apex

a

drawing table inside,

these devices allowed painters to trace out a sketch of the scene.

At an opening on one side of the "camera" the

artist sits, partly

enveloped by a dark curtain. The camera lucida caused a small

media scandal

in

2002 when the

New

York Times revealed that

several great artists used this crutch as the first step in their

painting.

Technological advance eventually banished the

artist

from the

room, allowing considerable miniaturization and automation. Replacing him was a

silver halide

plate or film. In 1839, in Paris,

homunculus,

came

L.

J.

a light-sensitive

M. Daguerre and

the

daguerrotype, using actinic effects (the impact of radiant energy

on certain metals)

images through chemistry

to create better

7 .

Imparting a distinctive jaundice or sepia look to these pictures

were the vapors of iodine used

With the daguerrotype and

in developing

its

them.

descendents, the portrait pho-

hooded hangman

tographer

became

subjects.

Despite letting the victims remain unhooded, this

a

fixing stiff

images of posed

process inflicted a facial malady that might be called rigor photos,

hardly distinguishable that has

tis

now

befallen

much all

of the time from the rigor mor-

the subjects of these otherwise

benign attentions.

The

sepia saga of portable "boxes," vaulted chambers,

hangmen, canopied cal

baths,

cavities,

arched

little

caves of

light,

hooded chemi-

emulsions, tripods, and films dwindled over the

decades into sleek metal vessels,

full

of tiny lenses and mirrors,

The

that could easily be held in

Silicon

Eye

279

two hands, and then into miniature

Minoltas that could be held between two fingers of one hand.

Now,

in the pattern of the

computer, the camera

ther onto a sliver of silicon and

mon. Then wires.

The

it

become sand cheap and com-

will diffuse across the

final liberation will

will shrink fur-

network, often connected by

dispense with the wires, linking

the one-chip silicon imagers through the air to storage facilities

capable of holding their voluminous reports.

The

future after Foveon will confine the old paradigm of

vaulted 'cameras" chiefly to images that cannot be seen.

Still

needing a curved protective chamber rather than a mostly bare microchip

be tools for semiconductor photolithography

will

and etching, scanning electron tunneling microscopes, nuclear resonance imagers, Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) scanners,

X

rays,

and inspection machines

for

baggage and

shipping containers. But even in these applications, the chip itself will increasingly

bear lenses and other apparatus required

for capturing high-resolution

images wherever they are needed.

Already available from National Semiconductor are chips in the form of pellets that are

which take and

a series of

consumed

orally

by the user and

photographs of the esophagus, stomach,

and then are unceremoniously extruded and

intestines,

flushed along with other

offal,

having wirelessly transmitted

their report.

Foveon can do puter:

Reduce

and disperse

it

it

for the

to a chip

camera what and make

it

Intel did for the

com-

ubiquitous. Dismantle

across the network. Render

it

it

wireless, wanton,

and waste-able. Then, as Moore's Law shrinks the actual imager

George Gilder

280

an ever-smaller portion of the chip

to

CPU tem

—

just as

relegated the

it

an ever-smaller corner of the modern single-chip

to

— the

Foveon device

longer merely a sensor,

will it

assume ever-more functions. aim toward

will

evolve into a vision system.

It

sys-

will

intelligence.

become something

It

No will

of an eye,

something of a brain.

That

is,

it

will

no longer serve merely

to reflect the visible

aspects of the world. Attaining powers of recognition and pattern

matching,

it

movements,

will identify

prints, faces, scenarios, poisons,

threats, anomalies, finger-

weapons.

manufacturing processes and descry trends will

sit

in

ambient

traffic. It

prevent automobile accidents by recognizing dangerous pat-

terns.

his

will find defects in

It

It

will

help the ornithologist find his rare bird, the hunter

dangerous beast, and the rescuer her

lost child. It will

baby-

and house-sit. It will

be described as an enemy of privacy. But

it

will

enable

us to defend privacy against the muggers, rapists, and terrorists

who would most

brutally rend

it.

It

will eliminate

most

false

charges that rip open the privacy and smear the reputation of

nonmuggers and nonrapists.

It

will allow us to take

the knowledge that our fate can be observed police will

more often be

in

—

of

human

and

reach and informed.

history people lived in small

cally difficult to escape,

risks in

that doctors

Today human beings have more privacy than

much

more

ever.

Through

towns economi-

where repute remained

at the

mercy of

rumor, and from time to time, delusionary vigilantes burned a

witch or lynched an adulterer. The increasing ubiquity of imagers will

empower

us to

document our

lives

and prove our

The

innocence against ators,

Eye

281

false charges, protect ourselves against pred-

and enable more

many long-term for Foveon.

Silicon

reliable

and

challenges

just

enforcement of laws.

ahead

lie

To save the databases

and

for the industry

of the world from diluvian

exabytes of image data, pouring in everywhere from billions of highresolution chips gushing pixels twenty-four hours a day, graphic intelligence

must be

intelligence

was distributed and

still

distributed

and

localized just as

by the PC. Capable of

localized

and motion coverage, the imagers

will

have to select their

gets, identify their subjects,

and

remitting endless raw

Foveon s chip

files,

Ironically these roles will lure the

will necessarily

selectivity

it

when Misha Mahowald when

signaling.

the

birth in Carverland,

Delbriick burst in upon the young Carver

schematic of the retina, and

Mead

created her

with first

the band of brothers began

their pursuit of brain science. Revived will intelligent

and

move

company back toward

kind of neuroscientific missions that gave

a biological challenge,

tar-

interpret the scene. Rather than

toward recognition and pattern matching,

when Max

computer

be the challenges of

imaging embodied in the neuromorphic devices and

neural-network recognizers that the company pursued under Federico Faggin in In one of his

explains

how

its

original incarnation as Synaptics.

freshman physics

lectures, Richard

the retina develops in the

embryo

as

Feynman

an extrusion

of brain tissue, with long fibers later growing back to link the

eyes to the visual cortex. Through the retina, as

Feynman quotes

an unknown observer, "the brain has found a way to look out into

George Gilder

282

the world."

Thus the

retina

is

a

window not

the realms of light but also inward into the "the whole It

is

Mead

only outward into

life

of the brain and

problem of physiology."

the prime example of the "transducer physiology" that

studied with Delbriick.

technology

—the

interface

It is

between the outside world and inside

computation, the links between thought.

It

the key challenge of analog

light

and

logic,

sensation and

addresses the ways in which analogies for the shapes

of things arise in the brain.

And

it

offers a

new way

to

under-

—the way

that

the computer can extrude photosensitive silicon and find a

way

stand the analogies between retina and camera

to look out into the world.

like the retina, the Foveon camera must fibers" to link

way

it

back

to its users

to look out into the world.

and

make

their

way

give the optical

network a

To be stored or transported,

Foveon pictures must be converted imagers are to

also find "long

to digital form. If

into the

Foveon

hands of every hobbyist

and onto every computer videoconferencing terminal and into every surveillance application, from convenience stores to ports, the pictures will require

and endow an abundance of

storewidth: voluminous storage linked to

The

natural

way

to process

air-

images

is

immense bandwidth. optical.

With much of

the information in the world interpretable as images, transmitted as images across fiber-optic lines, and stored as images in digital

video disks and image databases,

of the future world

much

of the processing

economy should move toward analog

optics.

The

The

advantage of It is

light

and image

is

283

wavelength division multiplexing.

wave network rather than

a

Eye

technology exploiting the parallel

optical

great

first

Silicon

a bit network. Exploiting the

wave network combines many

natural parallelism of light, the

different "colors" of infrared radiation, each bearing the equivalent of billions of bits per second,

width of a

human

But why

"billions of bits"

all

all-optical

—analog

convert

its

if it is

an analog system? The source

wave net

is its

indifference to content.

network can transmit any kind of information

or digital

—without

distortion;

waves into any readable form

In all-optical

down

a single fiber thread the

hair.

of the superiority of the

An

on

it

does not have

at to

until their destination.

wave networks, the different-colored streams pass

passive analog optical paths that perform in parallel

all

the

functions of active switching and multiplexing done in serial digital

form

in

mixed optical and electronic networks.

have to read the

where

traffic

digital

light,

or dropped.

are self-addressed in the very colors of the

the frequencies of the waves.

Each frequency designates

different path to a particular terminal. Like a

WDM

is

is

wave network

also

a

Foveon camera,

an inherently analog system optimized for the defining

and transmission of optic

networks

addresses on every packet at every point

must be added

Wave networks

Bit

colors. is

It is

camera on

a

a country.

The

fiber-

not merely a communications medium.

an analog processing path

at the heart of a

still

It

massively

digital Internet.

Despite the optical depression of the early 2000s, the superiority of the

wave network grows

steadily.

New

systems in prepa-

2,s

(

4

bear as

ration

many

as

-corge Gilder

one thousand wavelengths. Current 11,000-fold advance in

Corvis equipment represents an

six

years, a rate of well over four doublings every year. Parallelism

pays.

With more than 1,000

fibers

now sheathed

in a single

cable and 1,000 wavelengths per fiber and 10 gigabits equivalent

per wavelength, a single fiber installation will soon be able to carry over a petabit,

more than

worth of 2003

a full day's

Inter-

net traffic, in one second. Emerging will be a global Foveal econ-

omy, engaged in dense image

traffic,

teleconferencing in high

resolution, with full exploitation of the parallel advantage of light

and image.

As image-bearing wavelengths become asymptotically

free,

they will be wasted in unexpected ways, enabling global simulations

and experiences and transcending the

beings in time and space. Counting the

needed

to

accommodate some

width consumption

computers needed ing the

number

of

is

number

human

of wavelengths

extrapolation of current band-

tantamount

in the

isolation of

to

counting the number of

mainframe world of 1960, or

steam engines needed

to

tabulat-

run mines and fac-

tories in 1790.

The continuing prevalence

of the routine digital

camera and

the digital switch in fact represent a forced stopgap on the to

way

analog solutions that respond to the physics of the media.

image or a path, a

surveiller or a

map,

tor or a retinal recognizer, a routing

none of these

is

calculations

happen

explained to

me on

naturally

and

a spectrographic calcula-

scheme

intrinsically digital at

An

all.

or a pattern matcher,

In analog form, these

instantly.

As Misha Mahowald

our long walk in the mountains of Pasadena,

The

your ears and eyes do

it

Silicon

constantly.

Eye

285

'They do not even know

its

hard."

By the inexorable evolution of the imaging

will

become

the analog

first

industry,

Foveon s color

step in a long process of

cerebration that will end in simulating ever larger reaches of the

human

brain and extending back over fibers into a

consciousness suffused with color and

That was the

original

dream, and

new

global

light.

it is

the continuing quest.

Glossary

—A device

Amplifier

for increasing the strength of

by allowing a small force on a control element in the circuit.

force

it

The proportion between

controls

a faucet, in

called the amplifier's gain.

A

hydraulic analogy

is

flow.

a continuous electronic representation of an image,

sound, or pressure, simulating

waveform

the small force and the large

which the force on the handle controls the

— Giving

Analog

is

an electrical signal

to govern a large force

using

it

(rather than translating

it

all

points on an electrical

into digital bits

and bytes).

Rather than "crunching numbers" as digital devices do, analog devices imitate real-world inputs in electrical form. Examples are film cameras, watches with

evision sets,

and human eyes and

digital representations

tion

hands

to indicate the time, ordinary tel-

ears.

Nearly

and then convert them

all

computers employ

to analog for observa-

by mostly analog humans.

Analog- to-digital converter (ADC) inputs into digital outputs.

(DAC), which converts Aperture

—A device

Compare digital-to-analog converter

digital inputs to

—A hole admitting

for converting analog

light. It is

287

analog outputs.

measured

as the effective diam-

Glossary

288

eter of a lens, usually translated in photography as the ratio of focal

length

to aperture diameter, familiar as the

Bayer pattern filters as

—A prevalent mosaic with two times

red or blue

retinal sensitivities. is

Bit

used

—

f-number

filters, It

of a lens.

as

many green

a proportion that correlates with

was invented by Bryce Bayer

in nearly all digital imagers,

human

1976 and now

in

except Foveon's.

In information theory, the smallest unit of information, repre-

senting a zero or a one, on or

Black lipid bilayer biological

off.

— Synthetic chemicals

that function identically to

membranes, which sheathe nerves

substances

and both

in "bilayers"

protect cells and interface to other cells. Carver

Mead used

these

experiments comparing communications across

in

nerve channels with communication across transistors. Broca's Area

—A region

in the left frontal lobe of the brain that

is

active in the formation of language.

— Eight Capacitor—An Byte

bits.

sisting of

two conductors (bread

(ham) that can

briefly store

of a current.

A

memory

analogous to a

electrical device

microphones

direct current

sandwich, con-

separated by an insulator

slices)

an electrical charge or hold up the flow

ubiquitous electronic element used in dynamic

cells to store a bit, in

a finger, in

ham

(DC)

touch pads

to transmit a

reception of light intensities.

capacitors that collect

—A

It

movement

of

sound, and in converters of

to alternating current

Charge-coupled device (CCD)

to identify

silicon

(AC).

imager specialized for the

consists of a grid of light-sensitive

electric charge

and couple

capacitors in a chain that delivers an image to a

to

neighboring

memory

in a serial

stream of pixel values.

Complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)

—The

basic design of most microchip circuits, combining two comple-

mentary transistors with

a single input.

When

one transistor

is

— Glossary

289

turned on by an electrical charge, the other time at least half the transistors are

Cone

—A

light detector in the

encode trichromatic color with

Die

At any one

thus saving power.

off,

Cones come

their

wavelengths of

in three forms, to

broad and smooth but differing

The

light.

retina contains 6 mil-

—

measured

Electrical flow,

in

amperes ("amps"), analogous

water current in hydraulic systems.

—A

its

off.

cones (and 120 million rods).

lion

Current to

turned

retina that registers brightness at mod-

erate-to-high illumination levels.

sensitivities to the

is

single

unpackaged semiconductor device.

plastic or

becomes Digital

a

When

it

acquires

ceramic package and pins or other connectors,

microchip or just "chip."

Its

plural

is

it

also die.

— Numerical representation—based on bits and bytes—

that

uses only two points on a waveform or two positions on a switch (on or off) to convey numerical information.

known

as

Digital

computers are

"number crunchers."

(DSP)

Digital signal processor fast multiplication

—A

silicon processor that

and accumulation functions, which enable

handle signals, such as audio and video,

and convert them

performs

into a

DSPs perform much

form suitable

of the

work

in real

time as they

it

to

arrive,

for display or transmission.

in digital

cameras, where they

transform a digital stream of light measurements into a usable image.

Digital subscriber line

(DSL)

— Method of using an ordinary cop-

per phone line to send between 200 kilobits per second and 8

megabits per second, or in advanced systems up to 52 megabits per second.

Digital-to-analog

converter

(DAC)

See

analog-to-digital

converter.

Fan-in

— Number

connectivity.

of

inputs

that

a

device

can receive.

Inbound

Glossary

290

Fan-out

— Number

of outputs a device can transmit.

Outbound

con-,

nectivity.

—

memory The memory technology commonly used to store images in a digital camera. A nonvolatile memory chip that stores

Flash

values on an array of insulated capacitors called "floating gates"

because they represent an island of capacitance "floating"

con dioxide insulator with no active or leaky connections

memory

cuitry of the

exotic

quantum

grid

"tunneling" or "avalanche" effects.

—An imaginary device

Future that

was alleged

in

Steven Spielberg's film Back

to enable time

ever, accurately describes the

memory

travel.

cell in a

is

in constant flux in

in

which

CCD

cells also

to a

might be

flux capacitors.

—The

F-number

ratio of the

focal length of a lens to the diameter of

aperture. The smaller the f-number the larger the aperture and

its

the is

DRAM,

capacitors connected

microscopic grid of wires by transistors.

termed

The name, how-

computer memory

chip called a dynamic random access memory, or electric charge

sili-

on the chip. They are read or written by

Flux capacitor to the

in a

to the cir-

a

more

light

Focal length lens

enabled to pass.

rough index of lens

Maximum

aperture (low f-number)

quality.

—Gauges the distance between

a calculable point in a

and that point of focus where the image

is

sharpest. Focal

lengths are measured in millimeters. Small focal lengths

mean

wide-angle lenses, while large focal lengths are associated with tele-

photo lenses. In most lenses, focal lengths are

fixed,

but variable

focal-length lenses, called "zooms," are increasingly effective

and

popular. Together with the size of the imager's light-sensitive area,

the focal length determines a camera's field of view: the picture.

A

short focal length reduces or compresses the size of the image pro-

jected onto the sensor, resulting in

more

of the scene being cap-

.

Glossary

291

An

tured in a given sensor area, thereby increasing the field of view.

increased sensor area will also increase the field of view.

Thus the

benefits of reducing the size of pixels, or of imagers, are limited.

Fovea

—The

part of the retina dedicated to high-resolution color

and the inspiration

vision,

for the

company name Foveon.

an

It is

indented area composed of a dense array of cones directly behind the eye's lens, where parts of the retina.

it is

The

obstructed by less nerve tissue than other

fovea distinguishes detailed lineaments and

colors in an image, such as a crowd.

When you

words on

page or features of a face

in

focus on an image directly in front of your eyes,

you are using your fovea, but illumination, because

Fry's

a

it

it

doesn't

work

in conditions of

low

has no rods.

—A famous chain of electronics

stores in Silicon Valley, south of

San Francisco.

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) digital images, limited to

Imager ing

—

its

256

frequency

The key component

of a

charge-coupled device

cameras the imager

—A

and measur-

(color), intensity (energy in photons),

grid.

is

for

colors.

In digital cameras, a device for detecting light

on a

Ion

—A compression scheme

camera,

in a digital

or a

CMOS

and location

takes the form

it

chip. In

most analog

essentially film.

charged atom or molecule having gained (anion) or

lost

outside band of electrons, which deter-

(cation)

one or more of

mine

chemical behavior. The nerve channels of the brain com-

its

municate

electrically

its

by ionic conduction.

JPEG — Developed by the

Joint Photographies Expert Group,

JPEG

widely used to designate a method of compression of digital

images for transfer or tion),

JPEG

is

display,

but because

it is

lossy

(it

is

still

loses informa-

unsuitable for medical images where the details must

be exactly accurate. The compression

ratio

can be as high as 40

to

1

Glossary

292

Microprocessor

—A digital computing device inscribed on

a silicon

microchip and providing the "central processing unit" (CPU) personal computer or an of

equipment such

Neumann Mosaic

(also

[CFA])

embedded processing

in a

unit in other kinds

von

as cameras. Microprocessors are mostly

machines.

known

—An

as color filter

mosaic [CFM] or color

array of color filters, typically a

imposed on the imager of

filter

Bayer pattern,

array

super-

a digital camera, in order give color to

black-and-white imagers. Mosaics restrict each pixel to a single one of the three primary colors (red, green, and blue). Although that mosaics reproduce the in

humans respond

much

performance of cones

to all three colors,

though

as the three stacked receptors in a

Nanometer

— One

billionth of a meter.

in the eye,

Nerve channel

— An

(violet)

said

cones

in different degrees,

Foveon imager do.

Ten

silicon

atoms

would be roughly a nanometer wide. The wavelengths of

between about 400 nanometers

it is

in a

row

light are

and 700 nanometers

(red).

elongated biological cell through which

sig-

nals are passed as a result of differences in electrical or ionic

charge across the

cell's

membrane.

It is

analogous to a wire in a

computer.

Nerve membrane

—A

sheath consisting of fatty molecules called

phospholipids surrounding a nerve interfaces to other cells.

It is

to the silicon dioxide layer

on

as a

—A network

cells

and

analogous but not electrically similar

both insulates the

chemically.

it

of artificial

computer system. Based on

functions of a brain,

both protects

a silicon chip that

device electrically and protects

Neural network

cell. It

neurons

a cartoon

or

neurodes used

image of the processing

some neural networks can outperform ordinary

von Neumann computers

in functions of pattern

nal processing such as imaging or

matching or

speech recognition.

sig-

Glossary

Neurode

—A simulated neuron used

293

in a

neural network.

It

sums

inputs, using a threshhold level as a nonlinear trigger for decision

making.

Neuron

—One

of the processing cells of a brain. According to various

estimates by neuroscientists, the

and

lion

have

a

hundred

much

Nonvolatile

—

the

form of memory that does not lose

power goes

out.

don't

con-

its

Popular nonvolatile memories

Compare Volatile memory.

—The timing of an electromagnetic wave

(often signified by the angle that lar

still

it

or point in

its

progress

subtends on a 360-degree circu-

Two

graph depicting the wave as a rotation around the graph).

waves

bil-

of a clue.

include flash and disk drives.

Phase

brain has between ten

neurons. In other words, they

billion

memory A

when

tents

human

their amplitudes (crests); to the degree

two

waves are out of phase, they interfere destructively (the troughs

will

in

phase

will

add

tend to nullify the crests). In chemistry, however,

phase

signifies the condition of the ele-

ment. For example, the three phases of

H2

are fluid, gaseous,

and

frozen (water, steam, and ice).

—The bottom

Physical layer

level of a seven-layer

model of electronic

and communications equipment, comprising the physical hardware, such

as the silicon

microchip or silica fiber-optic

line.

Above the

physical layer are six levels of "firmware" and software, ending with

the application, such as

Word

or Photoshop, that performs the

com-

puter function by controlling the lower layers.

Pixel

— Short

for "picture element."

The information from one

spot in

an image, or one photodetector in an imager, conceived as a dense array or matrix of spots or photodetectors. Digital

monly measure

cameras com-

their resolution in megapixels (millions of pixels),

but actual resolution

is

determined not by the number of spots but

Glossary

294

by the quality, accuracy, and arrangement of the information delivered from the spots.

Polysilicon

— Noncrystalline

or

amorphous silicon used

chips. Federico Faggin's silicon gate

Quantum

theory

—The

was

for wires

on

in fact polysilicon.

theory of the interactions

between matter on

the atomic scale and light or other electromagnetic waveforms.

Combining waves and

quantum theory coherent.

particles

make

doesn't

in

apparently paradoxical ways,

"sense," but

mathematically

is

it

the theory of the microcosm of invisible

It is

phenomena

as distinguished from the macrocosm of visible things governed by

Newton's laws or

Retina

—A

relativity theory.

densely connected three-layer array of

neurons

back of the eye that gauges the intensity and color of incident

and sends the measurements on

Rod

to the cortex

to the optic nerve,

where they are formed

— Light detector

in the

the

at

light

which passes them

into an image.

retina that registers brightness

levels of illumination, as for night vision.

The

at very low

retina contains 120

million rods but only 6 million cones, suggesting that the

human

race evolved mainly in the dark.

Semiconductor

—An element,

adapted either

to pass or to

such as silicon, that can be readily

block current by doping

its

surface with

appropriate ions and applying a voltage or current. Semiconductors thus

can be made into solid-state electronic switches.

— Silicon Silicon — Pure Silica

oxide, usually

crystalline

common element in

encountered as glass or quartz.

sand used

in microchips.

The second most

the Earth's crust behind oxygen (mixed with

sil-

icon in the microchip's silicon-dioxide insulating layer) and ahead of

aluminum Silicon gate

(bauxite) used in

—The

part of a

most wires on the microchip's surface.

CMOS transistor that controls the flow

of electricity through the circuit. Analogous to the base in a bipolar

Glossary

transistor. Previously

made

295

of metal, the gate region

was

con-

first

verted to silicon in practical devices by Federico Faggin at Fairchild

Semiconductor Corporation and neered

at Intel following a

concept pio-

at Bell Laboratories.

Single lens reflex (SLR)

—An expensive professional camera

that

enables a photographer to control the functions of the camera manually.

—The physics of materials such semiconductors. combining 24 line —A telephone company

Solid state T-l

solid

as

service

voice-oriented

phone

data connection. T-l lines are

now

often rendered by

—A mostly analog device

Transducer form

to

another without altering

sors, photodetectors,

world and

its

64-kilobit

lines into a single 1.544-megabits-per-second

its

DSL.

that changes a signal from one essential value. Eyes, ears, sen-

and other devices interfacing between the

symbolic representations or

among

real

different represen-

tations are transducers.

Transistor

—A

"transfer resistor" or device that controls the flow of

relatively large electrical

on

its

"gate" or "base."

currents by varying the voltage or current

It

can function either as an analog ampli-

fier or as a digital switch. lions of transistors,

A modern

on

a single

hundreds of thousands of analog

Mead

that led to Foveon.

—A computer operating system invented

Unix

team

led by

tran-

microchip for sensory functions was the revolu-

tionary idea of Carver

a

microchip contains mil-

but analog transistors are often discrete (one or

several in a package). Putting sistors

digital

Ken Thompson and Dennis

at Bell

Labs

in

1969 by

Richie. Designed as a

single-user version of MIT's multiuser Multics,

Unix has become

the dominant operating system for powerful workstation computers.

Visible light

—Wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers and

frequencies between 430 and 750 terahertz

(trillions of hertz or

Glossary

296

cycles per second). that registers

not

The

portion of the electromagnetic spectrum

on the cones of the retina

deemed by

in the

human

eye and

A

influential phobics to cause cancer.

is

one over

24

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10

portion of the total

)

electromagnetic spectrum.

VLSI

—Very Large Scale

Integration, a phrase used in the microchip

industry to designate devices with

transistors. Essentially

which remains

in

more than

a

few score thousand

today's digital microchips are

all

more common use

in describing chips with scores

ULSI

of millions of transistors than the technically accurate

Large Scale Integration). Carver for creating

VLSI

circuits

VLSI,

Mead

(Ultra

developed design techniques

and then developed analog VLSI devices

that can interface directly with real-world sounds, images, pressures,

Volatile

and other phenomena.

memory

— Memory

to retain its content.

common volatile memories

(DRAM) and Voltage

—

static

that requires a

power source

are the

dynamic random access memory

random access memory (SRAM).

Electrical pressure, analogous to water pressure in hydraulic

systems.

Measured

in volts.

von Neumann machine

—A

computer architecture

storage devices hold both the software program

With

a single path

characterized by the von

and data

Neumann machines

Neumann

the time of the computation

memory

and the

data.

between the processor and the memory, holding

both instructions and data, von

instructions

which the

in

same

many

in order

memory. The most

Contrast Nonvolatile

is

bottleneck.

consumed

in a "Step 'n

That

tend to be

is,

the bulk of

in the process of

Fetchit"

manner

to

moving

and from

locations according to a regular clock or counter. Although

efforts

particular

have been made

neural networks

devices in the world are

still

to

transcend this architecture

—nearly

all

essentially

—

in

the billions of computer

von

Neumann

machines.

Glossary

Wafer

—A

297

silicon disk, typically either 200 or 300 millimeters in

diameter (8 or 12 inches) potentially holding hundreds of die. The wafer

is

Wafer fab

diced into die.

—A chip

factory, often called

simply a "fab."

Acknowledgments

The path

to this

book began twenty years

writing Wealth and Poverty

devoted a chapter to

book

called

One, now

The

I

when

for that

Spirit of Enterprise that

chapter later inspired a

then broke into two books.

was on

available as Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise,

entrepreneurship.

centered on Micron corporation, a tiny team of

It

chip designers in Boise, Idaho,

who were

establishment in the production of

memory

challenging the Japanese chips at a time

industry observers believed that the industry had Asia. Fifteen years later,

Micron reigned

The second book was

chip company. history

in the course of

encountered the microchip industry and

The researches

it.

ago,

moved

when

inexorably to

as the world's leading

called Microcosm.

It

savvy

memory

explored the

and consequences of the move of industry from the

visible

mechanical realm into the invisible domains of quantum physics.

The

combines the themes of Microcosm and The

Silicon Eye

of Enterprise.

It tells

Silicon Valley that

establishment followed

at a

much

the story of a small entrepreneurial

is

Spirit

company

in

challenging the Japanese camera and imager

time

when most

experts think that this industry has

of the microchip industry in

299

moving inexorably

to Asia.

Acknowledgments

300

Starting as part of Synaptics Corporation in the early 1990s, the imager

project

spun

off into

Foveon

1996. Employing the silicon technol-

in

ogy of the microcosm, both Foveon and Synaptics are engaged effort to forge interconnections

an

between the world of visible things and

the invisible world of the microcosm,

between sensory phenomena and

insensate computation. The Silicon Eye

and engineers have addressed sight

in

this

tells

the story of

how

scientists

sensory and biological domain of

and touch and hearing and linked

it

to the ever-expanding

world

of microchips.

The

journey

scientific leader in this

Gordon and Betty Moore Professor tech.

Hotel

I

first

at

met him twenty

the Newark,

Carver Mead, formerly the

of Science

and Engineering

at Cal-

years ago in the restaurant of the Marriott

New Jersey, Airport,

a trip devoted to teaching his

microchip division of Bell Labs.

new I

world's best teacher of the interplay

and the

is

where he was staying during

chip design techniques to the

quickly discovered that he

is

the

between the physics of microchips

larger world of engineering systems.

Without

his constant

guidance, wise and persistent teaching, and inspiring counsel,

my

would have been impossible and The

Sil-

career as a technology analyst

icon Eye could not have been written. In subsequent years,

I

became

a frequent visitor to Caltech, attend-

ing lectures in Carver's classroom, meeting his students,

with them.

Among the

students

who helped me most

were Misha Mahowald and David Gillespie, both of roles in this book.

Mead

also introduced

me

helping him teach his course on chip design.

to I

and studying

during this period

whom

play crucial

Richard Lyon, spent

who was

many hours both

with Misha and with Dick learning the intricacies of their science. In the early 1990s, at a conference on the biological origins of eco-

nomics based on Michael Rothchild's book Bionomics, Faggin for the

first

I

met Federico

time. Already a legend in the Valley as the creator of

.

Acknowledgments

the

microprocessors at

first

Intel,

301

Faggin told of the promise of the

company, Synaptics, that he had launched

in part to

pursue the ideas of

Carver Mead. Faggin led Synaptics into world leadership for

in

touch pads

mobile computers and other devices. As chairman of Synaptics,

Mead ended up gin

new

and

many

attracting

of his ex-students to the company. Fag-

his wife, Alvia, a technology journalist,

and attentive

in the course of

my

were unfailingly helpful

research for this book.

In telling the story of Synaptics,

Tim

Allen and David Gillespie

offered extensive interviews, documentary support, and valuable per-

sonal insights. Recounting the saga of the early years of Foveon as

it

emerged from Synaptics, Tobi Delbriick and Nick Mascarenhas were crucial. Delbriick also gave a critical reading to the book.

and Dick Lyon were indispensable

Dick Merrill

in explaining the intricacies of

Foveon's technology. In telling the story of the charge-coupled device, I

relied heavily

on Bob Johnstone's pathbreaking

text

We Were Burning:

Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age

From

W. W. Norton, Jim

Atlas Books and

proved to be book doctors in the Berkshires to give

who make house

me

be rare

in

the Discovery Institute in Seattle, where

ment

as

I

Chapman

worked

my way

me

Cohen

at

home

the kind of detailed and sophisticated edi-

torial attention that is said to

old friend Bruce

Atlas and Jesse

calls, visiting

gave

me

through

contemporary publishing. At I

serve as a senior fellow,

my

continual aid and encourage-

this project.

At the Gilder Tech-

nology Report, Nick Tredennick, Bret Swanson, Mary Collins, and

Charles

Burger

all

offered

Fleischmann became our technology forum

a

constant support and

www.gildertech.com.

Chase kept the business going while

draft with

Sandy

master of the Sigma camera and maintained

at

the author of Wall Street

insights.

I

Tom Owens and

wrote the book.

Andy

Meat and Running Money, improved

an astute critique. Former

MIT professor

Tina

Kessler,

my early

and now business

Acknowledgments

302

magnate Larry Sweet provided

a valuable early reading

orous definition of crucial terms than

I

a

could use here. The

most transformative editor of the book was self the

and

my

more

rig-

first

and

daughter Louisa, her-

author of a forthcoming work on the physics of quantum

entanglement.

My

wife, Xini,

is

at the

source and center of

all

I

do.

— George Gilder January 10, 2005

Index

abundance, scarcity and, 235-36

amplifiers,

ACM

analog, 27, 285,

(Association of

Computing

biological processes and, 181

(analog-to-digital converter), 34,

152, 155,

287

in

additive color projection, 43 airport security,

Alice's

Foveon chips and, 247

Adventures in Wonderland

167, 168-69, 179, 216,

Allen, Tim, 102, 106-8, 117-18, 130,

government

at Synaptics,

ROM

leader,

117-18

analog electronic

141-43, 147, 149-54

techniques

Allesandrini, Walter,

of,

circuitry,

140

analog photodetectors, 54

project,

analog potentiometers, 161

131-32

analog radio frequency

tag,

274

analog technology, neural networks and,

252

26-27

Allied radio catalog, 36

analog-to-digital converter

171

152, 155,

(ADC),

34,

287

analog VLSI, 97, 108, 118, 180

Altera Corporation, 108 cells,

165

analog memory, 104, 155

Alps, touch pad developed by, 164, 169,

amacrine

as,

283

Analog Devices, 201

and Synaptics touch pad 164-71 video

as,

247,248

180

analog chips, 201-2, 229

108

studied by, 139-41

as student

as,

sensory functions

WDM

131, 143, 146, 197

283-84

as advocate of, 97, 161, 166,

neurons

112

at Altera Corporation,

168-69, 179,

181, 182-83, 201, 216,

Mead

(Carroll),

flies

computers, 34-35, 64-65

digital vs., 165, 167,

253

Alcatel,

287

audio reception, 275

Machines), 102

ADC

287

neuromorphic, 175

122

"Analog VLSI and Neural Systems"

Amelio, Gil, 59

American Science Association, 93

(class),

303

108

6

1

Index

3°4

Analog VLSI and Neural Systems (Mead),

Bayer patterns, 268, 271, 288

Analog VLSI System for Stereoscopic Vision,

An (Mahowald), 181-82

Analytic Animations, 197

Betamax videotapes, 241, 272 biology, 122, 185,

Anderson, Janeen, 143

biosensors, 131

annealing processes, 63-64, 65, 144-45,

bipolar cells, 122

287-88

Bisset, Steve,

Apple Computer, 42, 59, 143, 192, 205

bits,

lis,

160-61, 163-64, 171

288 248

Bjorn, Vance,

241

Powerbookof, 164, 169

black lipid bilayer, 288 blind source separation, 148

applications, 83

Application Specific Integrated Circuits

(ASICs), 140, 169 Ardrey, Robert,

1

Blue Arc, 252 blur

filters,

268

Boeing, 195, 197

1

Boggs, David, 42

Armstrong, Neil, 77 artificial intelligence,

90-91

Bohr, Niels, 23, 24

Artificial Intelligence

Lab (MIT), 91

Bond,

ASICs

(Application Specific Integrated Circuits), 140,

169

Computing Machines (ACM), 102 astrophysics, 118-20

Association of

asynchronous

127

224

Apollo space project, 70, 75, 77

Apple

in,

bipolar transistors, 178, 188, 206-7,

258

171,

186

211-12

color and,

models of the brain

Anderson, Chris, 265

aperture,

58-60, 73

Bell Labs, 24, 33, 41, 57,

108

circuits,

104-5

Phil, 18

Boolean

logic,

90

Borel, Danier'Bobo," 160,

boulders, 53 Boyle, Willard, 58, 59 brain, 29, 42, 104, 120, 176-77, 193,

AT&T, 57

281, 285

Audience, 274-75

biological

audio reception, analog, 275

computational principles

Aurora Market Modeling, 33

electrical patterns in,

Austin High School Roundup, 31-32,

Mead's attempt

autochrome, 43 teller

models

of,

127

to simulate,

neural networks patterned

machines (ATMs), 264

Foveon chips and, 247

brightness, of color, 21

broadband, 246, 247, 274 Broadwing, 75 Future, 47

Broca's Area,

288

bandwidth, 235, 282

buried layers, 78, 80

Barrymore, Drew, 219

Bush, George

Basinger, Kim,

219

Baskett, Forrest,

Bayer

filters,

254

266, 269

127-28,

after, 63,

breadboards, 103, 128, 132, 220

axons, 177

to the

187

89

Avanex, 252-53

Back

of,

179-80

133, 140-41

39-41, 210

automatic

162-63

Born, Max, 23

W,

18-19

Busicom, 78, 79 Business Week, 143 bytes,

288

Index

Caere, 151, 154, 155, 165

economy

California,

canonical cortical microcircuit, 187

106-7

calculators, 60,

of,

70

Carroll, Lewis,

127-36, 139-41, 163, 180, 185,

126, 134

at,

281

computational neurophysics course

at,

at,

115, 116-18,

129-30

Mahowald

Mead

of,

at,

at,

analog imaging picture

14-15, 23-29, 58-59,

182,

Foveon X3 picture

CCDs,

189, 205, 275

CD

at, see

Carverland at,

93-97

at,

116, 117,

neural network research

physics

118-20

at,

imagers

power usage

CFA

277-78

Chandler,

cameras

digital vs. analog, 16,

182-83, 190

95

292

(color filter mosaics), Ariz.,

292

52

chaos, 87

Character Group

237

PLC (CG-PLC),

266,

271

imager joint ventures and, 189

charge-coupled devices (CCDs), 43—44, 57, 58-60,

mosaic, 226, 233, 236, 241, 268, 271,

272

182,226-27, 236,

242-43, 246, 254, 256, 257, 272,

obsolescence

of,

point-and-shoot,

277-80 265-67

prism, 213-22, 223, 224, 225, 227

288 as imager, 57, 59-60, 211

inadequacy

of,

203, 204, 258

power consumption

180

retina technology in, 155

Canon,

274

of,

(color filter array),

cameras, 282

solid-state,

255-56, 271

in, 16,

cellular automata, 88,

CFM

retinal,

27

Foveon chips and, 246, 247, 248, 258,

camera obscura, 111

film, 233,

discs),

270-71

camcorders, 60, 242, 265-67, 274

digital, see digital

185-86

phones, 75, 81, 96, 242, 264

129-30

Caltech Synchrotron Accelerator, 118-19

lucida,

lab,

60

(compact

digital

Ricketts coed dormitory 122,

cell

249

of,

neurology

charge-coupled devices

see

players,

CDs

174, 180,

of,

249

in Oxford's

101-8, 118, 121-22, 148, 161,

Mead's lab

camera

cats:

275

1-22, 125-36

1 1

tomography),

axial

279

29, 34, 41, 102, 204-5,

at,

(computerized

117-18

gendered culture

Lyon

Casio, 271

CAT

121-22

Dabney Hall

12

1

Carverland, 97, 101-8, 111-12, 117,

29,91, 150, 192, 197

tech),

Athenaeum

288

capacitors, 165,

California Institute of Technology (Cal-

120,

3°5

19, 163, 221, 227, 237, 240,

244, 265, 269

EOS-lDs, 233, 236-37, 239, 245-46 of,

233-34, 268, 270,

271, 272

one-chip vertical imager and, 222 pixel size at,

256

as

of,

dominant force

271 in,

234, 242,

269

178

market share

Sony

chemistry, molecular, 88

Christensen, Clayton, 232, 239-44, 247,

271 circuit boards, 161

Cirque, touch pads developed

169 Clark, Mark, 191

by,

164,

1

7

6

5

Index

306

Clauser award, 134

CMOS,

see

204

optical, 42,

computers, 96

clean rooms, 53

complementary metal oxide

semiconductors

analog, 35,

64-65

analog and

digital

aspects

of,

cocaine, 133

based on neural networks, 85

cochleas, 128

digital,

artificial,

26-27, 105, 130, 205,

1

89

(CFM), 292 42-45

color filter mosaics

"Copenhagen

234

Corning, 253

214 biology and, 21 1-12

digital

of,

of,

2

of,

212

of,

207, 209-10,

of,

current,

DAC

214

(digital-to-analog converter), 34,

289

Daguerre, L.

color separation, 2

J.

Dally, William,

Commerce Department,

U.S., 18

communications

106

theory,

Dartmouth

89

University,

Thayer School

dataflow, 177 of,

171-72

complementary' metal oxide semiconduc-

Dean, James, 221 Delbruck, Max, 22, 103, 127-28, 130,

193-94

51, 54-55, 155,

178, 179, 188, 206, 211, 222,

233, 236, 256, 257, 269, 272,

Mead

challenged

by,

23-29, 281-82

Delbruck, Tobi, 22, 26, 102, 140, 143,

288-89

155-56, 216

power consumption

271

in

Carverland, 103, 131

X3 and, 224, 227, 258 pixels, 55-56

at

Foveon, 205-6, 214

of,

complementary

at Synaptics, 187,

189-90, 191

complementary technology, 55

delta-based technology, 153

computerized

de Moulin, Ray, 225, 227

axial

tomography (CAT), 279

computer mice, 159

at,

49

discs (CDs), 27

Compaq, notebook computers

(CMOS),

M., 278

daguerrotype, 278

1

Comdex, 223

tors

289

152,

VGA, 190

compact

64

210-11

primary, 43

prism,

crystalline forms,

CTI, 154-55

39

of,

284

cross-license agreements, 188

212-18,220-22 matrix

129

Corvis, 75,

Crichton, Michael, 50

1

Lyon and science

physics

cortex, 26,

Cray, 72

211

processing

frequency

Faust, The," 24

Cornell University, 33, 89, 252

color photography, 39, colors, 189, 204,

88-89

Consumer Electronics Show, 261 Consumer Reports, 1

292

color filter array (CFA),

(Hillis),

235

connectivity,

Collimated Holes Corp., 214

in,

cones, 122, 179, 211,217, 289

Connection Machine, The

196

collective subconscious,

brightness

29

problem solving and, 90-91

Collective Electrodynamics (Mead),

accuracy

75

inability to see by,

274-75

Colley, Steve,

34-35

dendrites,

213

5

1

Index

Dennard, Robert, 49-51, 58, 59 Design Research

DOS

Dong, Milton, 205

system, 83

Doonesbury, 42

DOS, 83-84

diCaprio, Leonardo, 219 die,

289

Douglas, Rodney, 185-87, 193, 195

differential technology,

analog

165, 167, 168-69, 179,

vs.,

188,

93-94

DSL DSP

microcontrollers, 167

subscriber

(digital

Dvorak keyboards, 241

dynamic random access memory chip

182-83, 190, 204, 206, 229, 242,

(DRAM),

274

188, in

photography, 264-65

systems

43-44 43-44

and,

Edmund

237-38 27-28

247

27

Digital Photo, digital signal

Scientific,

39

Ektachrome, 44, 210

electrical patterns,

179-80

Electrochemical Lab (Tokyo), 60

electromagnetic energy, 21

248

electromagnetic waves,

245-46

1

electromagnetism, in vision, 26

processor (DSP), 41, 212,

289

electronic potentiometers, 150, 165 electronics, wires in, 71

digital subscriber line

electrons, 120, 128, 135, 178

(DSL), 289

digital-to-analog converter

152,

149

electroencephalograms, 127

high-resolution, 180 Digital Persona,

circuit,

electrical engineering, 131

Equipment Corporation, 84 VAX computers of, 107-8

Digital

digital imagers,

41

Edgerton, Harold, 36

as solving analog problem, digital electronics,

satellite,

edge recognizer

mass-market, 255

Law

dynamics, 66

Echo

237

film vs., 233,

51, 57-58, 59, 81, 155,

256

in,

colors and, 28,

Moore's

(DAC),

34,

video discs (DVDs), 27

Power Company, 34

33

energy, 128

neural flow

of,

122

energy equilibrium, 66

Diptera, see flies directional hearing aids,

El Paso

EMC,

289

Di Orio, Chris, 274

275

Enigma code, 90

Women, 134-35

erasable programmable read only

Disneyland, 111-12, 116, 119, 133, 194

(EPROM), 59,81,

Discovering

disruptive technologies,

DNA, 93

212,

Dvorak, John, 16, 261-66

cameras, 16, 27, 60, 75, 81, 96,

CCD

289

289

storage devices, 27

and boom

line),

(digital signal processor), 41,

180

photography, see digital cameras

digital

256

Drucker, Peter, 61, 159 Drucker's Law, 238, 239, 241, 243

memory, 104, 152, 154-55

digital

270

(dynamic random access memory chip), 51, 57-58, 59, 81, 155,

283-84

computers, 34-35, 75, 90-91,

optics,

Review, 267-68,

DRAM

181, 182-83,201, in

DP

153

289

132,

digital,

3°7

239-43

ETH, 186-87 Ethernet, 42

memory

152, 170, 172

9

1

Ind ex

308

eyes,

Mahowald's romance with, 132-34,

243

visible

spectrum and, 21 1-12, 216-17

Eyestorm, 2

194-95 philosophical interests

1

Feynman, Richard, Faggin, Alvia, 78, 85, 251-53, Faggin, Eric,

256

Faggin, Federico, 12, 17, 66, 68, 69-75,

77-85, 138 of,

252-53

81-84 79-81, 149-52

floating gates and,

CEO, 257-59,

Factory,

film,

microchip cameras

flash

memory,

flies,

139-41, 176

Foveon interim

as

Foveon investor and board member,

269,

274

252, 254, 256-59

on Logitech board,

1

neural network and, 96 fluid flow,

as "gentleman investor," 56,

251—53 1

59-60,

162-63 by,

69-72, 79,

81,87, 88,96,97, 141, 240, neural network ideas

95-97, 142

71-75, 78-79,

82

Foveon Corporation, 45, 66, 108, 135,

and American competitiveness, 19 board of directors of, 16, 17, 253-55 business challenge

Synaptics and, 95, 97, 141-45,

147-51, 153-56, 160-64,

project, 160,

162-63,

cell

Zilog Corporation co-founded by,

CEO at

81-82, 85, 141, 253

252

fan-ins,

at,

253-55

54-56

Consumer

Show

Electronics

digital storage and,

of

Semiconductor Corporation, 82

204

239-44

Dvorak and, 261-66 future of, 277-85 Hasselblad investment hybrid

290

feedback loops, 125

by,

282

disruptive technology of,

Sherman, 77

289

fan-outs,

at,

development of imagers

252

59, 60, 73, 74, 77-78,

search

2004, 261

framework, 240

Fairchild

233-49, 268-69

phones and, 246, 247, 248, 258, 270-71

CMOS

167-72, 175

to,

camera manufacturing and. 244

168-72,252,274,281

Fairchild,

290-9

fovea, 45, 122, 291

296 of,

silicon gate process of,

and touch pad

290

f-numbers, 290

252-53, 269

failure

87

flux capacitors, 47, 50, 58,

focal length,

microprocessor invented

Faggin, Marzia,

233, 237

floating gates, 79-81, 149-52, 161, 165,

271,277

Faggin, Marc,

vs.,

290

59. 81,

50

flip flops,

as

210

263-64, 267

FillLite,

153, 154, 156, 167, 169

72,217, 283

fiber optics, Fill

as disenchanted with analog devices,

eclipse of,

74

fiber-optic glass,

belated recognition

141,281-82

106, 107, 121,

252

105, 196, 198

of,

15, 29, 50, 102, 104,

still

in.

215

and motion camera

of,

206,

265-67 imagers

Feinstein, David, 102, 104, 105-6, 140

of, 17, 59,

274, 285; see also

specific imagers

Mahowaldand. 121-22, 125-27, 130

in

Mahowald's death and, 194-98

Kodak's interest

Japanese camera journals, 244-45 in,

218, 222, 225, 228

1

Index

market share

Mead's

of,

16-17, 273-74

3°9

and Synaptics touch-pad

213-19, 225-28, 234, 243-45,

Godel, Kurt, 193

254, 273, 274, 277

Google, 88

Merrill's analog chips at,

201-4

National Semiconductor as investor

in,

Gorman, Greg, 219-21, 223, 226-27 Canon EOS- IDs adopted by, 233, 236,

190-91, 255,271, 274 at

239, 245

Photography Marketing Association of 2004, 261, 263-65, 267-69,

Grant, Mark, 188, 190 graphics interchange format (GIF), 248,

270 at

project, 162,

164-71

15-17, 23, 204-7,

role in,

291

Photokina 2000, 223-24, 226-28

picture size of,

247

prism cameras

at,

Grateful Dead, 143 Greenblatt,

213-22, 223, 224,

225, 227

Adam,

102, 143

Gribble, Glenn, 102, 103, 142, 147-48

Grove, Andrew, 73, 78, 82

Sanyo's consideration

Sigma's adoption of

of,

Gun and

255—56

X3 chip

of, 17,

Rifle Dealers' show,

264

Guttag, Karl, 270

227-28, 236, 254-55, 258, 262-63, 265, 267-68, 271

Halla, Brian, 190,

28—29

silicon as retina at,

single-chip imagers of, 217—18,

221-22;

see also

16— megapixel camera

Hamiltonians, 66

X3 of,

Handbook of Colorimetry, 210 218—22,

226-28

at,

vertical color filter at,

frequency, of color, 2

214-18

hearing aids, directional, 275

Helmholtz, Hermann, 210 heroin, 133

Hesse, Hermann, 114

1

Frohman, Dov, 81

Hewlett-Packard, 271

HP-35

155, 291

Fuji, 19,

Hasselblad, 215, 230

hearing, computer, 96

207

X3 of, see X3 X19 of, 255-56

Fry's,

273

HDTV, 261

with Foveon chip

3-T imager

haptics, 88, 175,

Harvard University, 243

as superior technology, 272; see also pixels,

255

Hamilton, William Rowan, 66

222, 271

Hillis,

scientific calculator of,

Daniel,

106-7

88-89

Hoerni, Jean, 74 ganglia,

Hoff, Ted, 50, 84

122

Garage Technology Ventures, 191 Gates,

Bill,

holes, 178

Holland, 210

83-84, 239, 248

Hopfield, John, 93-94, 96, 102, 104,

Gere, Richard, 219

106, 121, 122, 125-26, 141

Giant, 221 Gilbert, Barrie, 201

Hopfield net, 93-95, 170

Gillespie, David, 101, 102-3, 107,

HP Chipmunk computers,

computer-aided engineering at

of,

1

30

Synaptics, 143, 147-48, 152, 154,

155

102, 107

Hubel, Paul, 263-64

J58

Hubel

FillLite slider bar,

263-64

Hughes, 73 Hunt, R. W. G., 210, 213, 214

5

Index

3 10

I

lurlburt,

Japan, 94, 164, 237, 242, 243, 266

Anya, 26

Huxley, Aldous, 194

IBM, 49-51, Intel chip

58, 72, 214, 241,

used

in,

244-45

CCD as

in,

57, 59-61, 255,

imager

257, 259

244

83

by,

camera journals

cell

phones

memory

PCs, 154

Watson research

labs of,

49

touch pads

John Henry

Ibuka, Masaru, 60

42

iconic user interface,

270-71 in,

70

technology dominated

159-60

track-stick of,

in,

chips

in,

by, 19,

269

164

Newman

Society,

134

Johnson, Craig, 191

image representation, 213

Joint Photographic Experts Group,

imagers, 96, 103, 163-64, 172, 175-83,

Joy, Bill,

262

33

JPEGs, 248, 262, 263, 291

187-92, 291 imaging chips, 187

Jung, Carl, 196

impedance, 37

Justice Department, U.S., 83

Impinj, 274

Kao, Ting, 143

information theory, 106, 182 infrared, 214,

221

Karl Zeiss,

Mrs. Willie, 32

Ingles,

Innovator's

Dilemma, The (Christensen),

239

Kennedy, John F, 75 Kikuchi, Makoto, 60

The (Christensen),

Innovator's Solution,

Kilby, Jack,

Inoue, Hiroshi, 242

Kodak, 19, 163, 164, 183, 210, 225, 227,

inspection machines, 279 Institute for Neuroinformatics,

240, 244, 265, 271

186-87

integrated circuit, 74

color films of, 40, 42-45, 1

69-70, 72, 73, 74,

Intel, 53, 57, 59,

4— megapixel camera

247, 256, 279 "crush" as goal at, 17,

of,

as advisor at,

210 267

16-megapixel

CCD

imager

202

Konica, 265, 271

70-71

4004

chip,

Intel

8088

chip, 83

Intel

8600 microprocessors, 270

Koons,

Jeff,

219

Kramlich, Richard, 252, 253-54 Kyocera, 271

International Solid State Circuits Confer-

Kyushu, Japan, 52

ence of 1971, 58-59 Internet, 27, 70, 246, 248, 262, 274,

ions,

analog

291

iPods,

273

Ipsilon,

33

Iwama, Kazuo, 60

of,

Kodak Pro-Back, 226-27 KolnMesse, 223

1

of,

Intel

digital vs.

in,

by,

218,

222, 225, 228

one-chip vertical imager and, 222

83-84

69-71, 78-82, 141, 253

Santa Clara plant

of,

Foveon technology considered

77-85, 154, 160, 164, 188, 244,

Mead

74

Kodachrome, 42, 44-45, 210, 217

239

Faggin

234

keiretsu, 61

283

285

Laos, 203, 228 laptop computers, 242 laser printers, lasers,

42

60

latch-up devices, 178-79, 188 latents,

73

226-27

1

[ndex

Lau, Jim, 224-25, 254-55, 257

3 11

photographic experiments

Lazzaro, John, 103 leadership, types of,

144-45

&

Northrup computers, 34-35

246

lenses, quality of,

of,

192

neural flow

140, 204-5, 274

Lyon, Verna Mae, 32 L., Jr., 32,

34-38, 40

Lyons, Richard, 66

122

of,

McClelland, David, 89, 96

Linux, 83

& Compass

Lion

see-hear chip at Synaptics,

Lyon, William

Legato, 33

light,

Restaurant, 201, 202,

203, 205

McCullough, 177 McNealy,

Scott, 33

Lloyd, Christopher, 47

magnetic-core memory, 256

LMS

curves, 211

Maher, Mary Anne,

Logitech Corporation:

Mahowald,Al, 113

Faggin on board

of,

156, 159, 162-63

post-Synaptics touch pad project

of,

111-22, 124, 125-36, 139, 141,

160-63

London Stock Exchange, 266 Lonergan Richards,

Long Beach

State,

17,

1 1

Mahowald, Joan, 113, 118, 134 Mahowald, Misha (Michelle), 110,

163-64, 171-72 Synaptics' joint venture with,

148, 192, 275,

astrophysics and,

254

1

284-85

18-20

background and personality

of,

111-12, 113-15

104

Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien),

LSD,

31,

Lyon, Tom, 32-33

Leary, Timothy, 194

Leeds

of,

36-41, 42, 44-45, 210

Lauger, Peter, 25

1

14

Catholic background

133, 194

112, 114,

of,

116, 120, 134, 194

won

Lucent Technologies, 57

Clauser award

Lumiere, Auguste, 43

Douglas's relationship with, 186, 193,

Lumiere, Louis, 43 Lyon,

Bill, III,

by,

1

34

195

32-33

drug experimentation

of,

118, 133-34,

135, 143, 194

Lyon, Bob, 33

Lyon, David, 32-33

edge recognizer circuit

Lyon, Ellen, 32

emotional problems

Lyon, Jim, 32-33

Feinstein and, 121-22, 125-27, 130,

Lyon, Peggy, 40

Feinstein's

Apple handwriting recognition systems and, 42, 143

Caltech, 29, 41, 102, 204-5, 275

color science of, 207, 209-10, 212-18,

of,

31-41

Foveon, 204-5, 224, 226, 227, 256,

15,

imagers and, 175-76, 180-82, 185

impact of Disneyland ride on,

intellectual frustrations of,

Mead

1

12-13,

209-10

at by,

42,

204

193-94

mentor to, 121-22, 126-34, 143, 193-95

264-66, 267, 277

mouse invented

1

116, 119, 133, 194

education and childhood

optical

with, 132-34,

and gendered culture at Caltech, 116-18, 120, 129-30

220-22

office of,

romance

194-95

44-45, 57, 102, 105

at

149

193-96

194

Lyon, Richard, 17, 28, 29, 30, 31-42,

at

of,

of,

as

Oxford, 136, 185-86, 195,

196

Index

3" Mahowald, Misha {continued)

as

140, 143, 149, 175-76, 186, 198,

Merrill's

meeting with, 51-52, 55

249, 281

Moore's

Law

suicide in

Switzerland, 186-87, 192-97 Sheila,

1

to,

18-19 by, 24-25 96-97

nerve channels studied

13

neural networks and,

marijuana, 133 Marini, Giacomo, 160, 162 failure,

and, 15

National Medal of Technology awarded

195-97

of,

Mahowald,

market

Mahowald's mentor, 121-22, 126-34, 143, 193-95

retina project of, 120-22, 125-31,

romantic partner

Markoff, John. 16, 265, 272

Smith, Barbara

150, 152, 154-56, 191,

Martin, Kevan, 185, 187

by,

206

17-18, 257

128-29, 186, 249

"toy retinas" of, 125,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lab

24

transistor built by, 14,

megapixels, 267

(MIT), 26, 89, 180, 210 Artificial Intelligence

91

at,

Megatest, 161

memory:

massively parallel processing, 89

Math works, 216

magnetic-core, 256

matrix, of colors, 39,

processing power and, 88-89

212

Matson, Lawrence, 267-68

memory

Maxwell, James Clerk, 43-44, 210

Merrill, Richard, 17, 29, 46,

Mead, Carver,

i24, i46, 202, 224, 267,

272-75

167, 168-69, 179, 216, 247, 248

140-41

of.

54—56,

201, 212-13

education and work experience

of,

at

Foveon, 201-4, 205-7, 210, 222.

277

as business consultant

companies,

and founder of

15, 19,

274-75

as Caltech professor, 14-15,

23-29,

58-59, 101-8, 118, 121-22, 148, 161, 189,205, 275

on

CCDs, 58-59

on

digital

23, 206,

of, 19,

163-64, 172, 175-83,

187-92, 198

digital

disliked by,

56

Synaptics and, 192 created

by.

vertical color filter of,

207

214-18, 222,

246 and X3, 224-30 Merrill, Sang,

203

Metal Oxide Semiconductors (MOS), 49

Carverland

metamerism, 212

41. 4S

Metcalfe, Bob. 42

of,

camera

209

of,

3-T imager

15-17, 23, 204-7,

of, see

Nikon D-l office of,

213-19,225-28,234,243-45, 254, 273, 274, 277

Lvon as student

47-48 Mead's meeting with, 51-52, 55

patents

249

role of,

as intuitive experimental scientist,

203, 228, 248

cameras, 28

Foveon camera and research

laboratory

47-49,

48-49

brain simulations of, 127-28, 133,

of,

57-58

chip design and fabrication

Analog VLSI and, 97, 180

imagers

chips, 49-50,

51-52, 54-56, 57, 66. 190,260

13-19, 57, 65, 71,

12,

as advocate of analog, 97, 161, 166,

Foveon

274

technological relics collected by, 13,

Mascarenhas, Nick, 189, 190, 191, 205 imagers created

of, see

Synaptics and, 66, 141, 142, 143-45,

241

i

Ind ex

Michigan, University

MICR

National Medal of Technology, 18-19

177

of,

3i3

(magnetic image character recog-

National Semiconductor, 51, 52, 53, 56,

148-51, 153

nition),

205,214

59, 73, 202,

Microchip, 167

Advanced Technology Group fab

microchips, 28, 52

as

202

(Gilder), 135,

investor,

of,

225

190-91, 255, 271,

274

microcircuit, canonical cortical, 187

Microcosm

Foveon

in joint

venture with Synaptics,

187-88, 190-92

MicroMonitors, 197

279

Micron, 17

photo pellets

by,

microprocessors, 60, 82-83, 84, 108,

wafer fab

206, 216, 218, 229, 256,

292

171, 244, 253, 270,

274

Faggin's invention of, 69-72, 79, 81,

87, 88, 96, 97, 141-42, 240,

Enterprise Association), 252,

254 Negroponte, Nicholas, 90

neuroscience and, 66, 177

nerve channels, 24-25, 292 nerve membranes, 292

248 Microsoft Windows, 83, 238

Windows

Miller, Bob,

NEA (New

269

Microsoft, 33, 70, 83-84, 241, 244, 247,

Microsoft

at,

nervous system, 139

Network

XP, 248

161-62, 164, 165, 168-69

Mind from Matter?

(Delbriick),

24

Minolta, 265, 271

Files

System (NFS), 33

neural flow, of light and energy, 122 neural functions, 139, 164

neural networks, 19, 42, 63, 85, 102,

miniature cameras

by,

279

139, 140, 142, 149, 150, 151,

Minsky, Marvin, 89-91

152, 170, 172, 177, 197, 281,

MIT,

292

see

Massachusetts Institute of

analog technology and, 26-27

Technology

Mohsen, Amr, 58

Caltech research on, 93-97

molecular chemistry, 88

computations

Moore, Gordon,

as

15, 69, 73, 74, 77, 82,

15, 179, 182, 188,

206,

93—94

floating gates and,

96

general purpose processors, 153-54

237, 279-80 Morris,

66,

Faggin's ideas regarding, 95-97, 142

256 Moore's Law,

in,

computer model, 85, 89-91

Hopfield on, 93-95, 102, 121, 125-26

Desmond, 116

as parallel processors, 154

Morton, Jack, 58 mosaics, 43, 44, 292

neural reflexes, 176

Motorola, 19, 83-84, 270

neural system, 29

Motorola 68000 microprocessor, 83-84,

neurobiology, 121, 131, 136

270

neurochemistry, 179

neurodes, 42, 95, 150, 293

mouse, 42 optical, 42,

neuromorphic analog VLSI, 175

204

multiprotocol storage systems, 33

neuromorphic computations, 187

Murray

neuromorphic imagers, 139, 142, 151,

Hill, N.J.,

59

185, 186, 281

Naked Ape, The

(Morris),

nanometers, 292

NASA, 59

1

16

neuron chip, 130 neurons, 93, 95, 125, 127, 140, 180,

186,213, 293

Index

3H ncuroscience, 24, 118, 120, 125

OS

neutrinos, 189

Oxford University, 136, 185-86, 195,

New

Enterprise Association (NEA), 252,

(operating systems), 83

196

254

Newton handwriting

recognition system,

New York Nikon,

Times, 16, 265, 272, 278

19, 163, 164,

227, 244, 255, 265,

Nikon Coolpix camera, 255

Nikon D-l Nobel

digital

74

cross-licensing of, 73, 188

pattern matchers, 164,

274-75

Mahowald's, 113

PC

87

notebook computers, touch pads

magazine, 16,261, 264

PDP-8, 84 Pentax, 271

"non-von" computers, 87, 88 for,

59-72

personal computers (PCs), 70, 154, 164,

217,240,241,243,270,281

Nova, 106

development

Noyce, Bob, 50, 69, 73, 74, 77, 82,

touch pads

NTSC

78

PBS, 134

nonvolatile memory, 293

1

1

patents, 190

pattern recognition, 88, 91, 95-96, 280

Nokia, 33, 270, 271 nonlinearity,

77

semiconductor industry and, 73

camera, 203, 228

conference, 148 Prize,

parasitic devices,

of,

89

on color prism, 215

271,272 one-chip vertical imager and, 222

NIPS4

Padua, University Papert, Seymour,

42

41-42, 81

of,

160-72

for,

256

Pfeiffer,

television video, 131, 132

phase, 15, 87, 293

nuclear resonance spectroscopy, 127

Michelle, 135

photodetectors, 179, 188, 217

photography:

Ochi, Shigeyuki, 242

color, 39,

OCR

digital

(Optical Character Recognition),

Olympus Pen-F camera, 37 on-chip error correction, 169-70 operating systems (OS), 83

Operation Crush, 83-84 Optical Character Recognition (OCR), 151

(OCLI), 214 optical computers, 180

mouse, 42, 204

optical reading chip, 153

252-53, 272

depression digital,

180

42,44-45, 210 see also cameras;

in,

283-84

Foveon Corporation

Photography Marketing Association 2004,

261,263-65,267-69,270 Photokina 2000, 222, 223-24, 226-28,

254-55 photolithography,

Optical Coatings Laboratory, Inc.

optics,

in,

Lyon's experiments with, 31, 36-41,

77

Olympus, 265, 271

optical

boom

264-65

151 Olivetti,

42-45

technology and

53-54

photonic devices, 180 photons, 120, 179, 189, 211 photoreceptors, 178, 212

PhotoShop, 83, 220, 264 phototaxis, 23

physical layer, 293 physics,

118-20

solid-state, 131

1

Index

"Physics of Computation, The" (course),

3*5

recursions, 193

redundant memory technology, 170

102, 106

McKenna

Public Relations, 69

Pierce, John, 41

Regis

pixels, 28, 42, 131, 182, 183, 189, 190,

register chips, 81

206, 266, 267, 268, 281, 293-94

complementary, 55-56

Reilly,

with Foveon chip, 216, 217-18, 225, 236, 254, 256-57, 264, 271 Piatt,

John, 103, 104-5, 140, 149

at Synaptics, 143, 148, 152,

214 resolution, 152, 190 retina chips, 103, 122, 130, 175-76, 177,

154

(positive/negative) junctions, in

retinas, 26, 29, 122, 164, 179, 217, 229,

281-82,294

semiconductors, 178-79, 204 Poggio, Tomaso, 26 Polaroid,

249

180,

analog, 180-81

plexiform layers, 122

P/N

Margaret Wong, 177

Reproduction of Color (Hunt), 210, 213,

artificial,

26-27, 128, 149, 204

camera from, 155

215

Foveon point-and-shoot and, 265—67,

Mahowald's project on, 120-22,

269

125-31, 140, 143, 149, 175-76,

Polaroid x530, 267 polysilicon, 73, 78,

186,

294

Mead's

198,249,281

"toy,"

125, 128-29, 186

motion detection and, 128-29

Porter, Mildred, 18

Portland, Me., 52

108

silicon,

Post Office, U.S., 151, 154, 155, 165

Rockwell, 59, 60

power, 235

rods, 179,

Company, 33 Princeton University, 32-33

ROM

prisms, 204

Rosenblatt, Frank,

Prediction

colors in,

214-15

Pritchard, Orion, 205,

Samsung, 269, 271 Sanquini, Dick, 187, 190-91, 254

213

280-8

Santa Clara, University of California

Sanyo, 255-56, 265

voltage, 58, 59

scarcity,

Qualcomm,

CDMA 2000

EV-DO

broad-

theory, 15, 24, 106,

Artificial Intelligence

Lab,

42, 102, 105, 143

294

Schrodinger equation, 135 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 219

tunneling, 213

QWERTY keyboards,

abundance and, 235—36

Schlumberger

band technology, 248

quantum quantum

at,

252

pull voltage, 58

push

89-90

Rush, Allen, 255, 257

214

solid-state,

privacy,

read only memory),

131-32, 170

cameras, 213-22, 224, 225, 227

in

294

(digital

241

Scientific

American, 180, 181,249

see-hear chip, 130, 140 radio frequency tag, analog, Rattazzi, Gianlucca,

read only real

274

252

memory (ROM), 131-32, 170 window (RAW), 263-66,

accurate

267, 271

Seitz,

Chuck, 89

semiconductors, 70, 97, 202, 270, 294 analog, 55

camera chips and, 222 patents and, 73, 188

1

1

4

1

Ind ex

3 i6

SMOP

semiconductors (continued)

274

self-adaptive,

(simply a matter of program-

ming), 91

technological advances

7-Eleven convenience

of,

stores,

15, 1

273

sodium

ions,

179

295

solid state,

5

Shannon, Claude, 106, 182

Foveon camera

Sharp, 242

prisms,

Shima, Masatoshi, 79, 81-82, 84, 253 Sigma, Foveon chip used

by, 17,

227-28,

Sonic Innovations, 275

Sony Corporation,

CCDs

271

204

294

74, 75, 94,

192,215,217,246,294

181, 188,

pixel size at,

234, 269, 270, 271,

Foveon camera,

28-29, 44

256

solid-state division of,

60

2-megapixel camera

of,

1

silicon, 28, 52, 74, 75, 79, 88, 133, 178,

as artificial retina in

of,

272

Sigma 10 camera, 261, 265, 267

silica,

and, 234, 242, 269

market share

Sigma SD9 camera, 244-45 signal processing, 41,

19, 60, 163, 183, 188,

242, 244, 265

236, 254-55, 258, 262, 267-68,

Sigma Photo Pro software, 262-63

spectrum, 21

speech recognizers, 264, 274-75 Spielberg, Steven, 47, 50

282

spin glass, 94, 125

silicon chips, 70,

140

Steppenwolf (Hesse),

71-75, 78-79, 82, 294-95

memory,

silicon physics,

Stone, Sharon, 219

5

222 camera chips,

77,78,81,82,85,

102, 108, 136,

141, 155, 160, 187, 202, 251,

253,254 IPOs in, 252

149

of,

Support Vector Machine, 149

264-65, 280-81, 282

Foveon chips and, 246-47 sustaining technologies, 241, 243

64

silver halide, 42,

single-chip imagers, 217-18,

synapses, triad, 122

221-22

X3, see X3

synaptic lines, 177 Synaptics, 19, 66, 95, 147-56, 216, 221,

single-lens reflex (SLR), 233, 236, 245,

295

252,254, 264, 274, 281 board of directors

265

Caere

16-megapixel imaging, 218-22

SLR,

Sparc 2 servers

superconductivity, 15

surveillance,

"Silicon Visions," 134

Grace,

subconscious, collective, 196

Sun Microsystems, 33

222 Silicon Valley, 29, 33, 50, 52, 59, 63, 66,

Slick,

235

storage,

silicon semiconductors, for

digital,

1 1

stereo matching chips, 131

Stevenson, Larry, 219-20

see also floating gates silicon

267

Sony DSC-F828 Cybershot, 234

photosensitive,

silicon gates,

229

as,

214-15

1

12

see single-lens reflex

OCR

Carverland alumni

187

at,

103, 141-44,

147-50 Foveon as spinoff

Smith, Barbara, 17-18, 194

haptics

Smith, George, 58, 59

imagers

Smithsonian Institution, 90

of,

project of, 151, 154, 155

at, at,

205

of,

190-92

175, 273

163-64, 182, 187-92, 204,

Index

Logitech's partnership with,

touch pad project

at,

160-63

160-72, 175,

MICR

project

for,

148-54,

165, 189

54-55

digital,

180

physics

of,

wires

177

systolic array,

CMOS,

densities of, 188

224-25, 273 Verifone

3i7

in,

121

71-73

Trans Pecos Science

41

Fair,

"Trash 80" personal computer, 83, 142 T-l line, 295

Tredennick, Nick, 270 Tredennick's Law, 270

Taiwan, 149, 164

Tandy Radio Shack,

Tucker, Tom, 102, 118, 143, 147, 197

83, 142

Turing, Alan, 90

technologies:

239-43

disruptive,

Turner, Rich, 205, 219-21, 227,

236-37

241-42, 272

inferior,

243

sustaining, 241,

technology, crash

in,

275

ultraviolet light,

UMC,

Tektronics, 42

53-54

149-50

Telcordia, 57

Uniden, 266

telecosm, 272-73

United Parcel Service (UPS), 151, 155,

teleology,

165

185

teleputers,

242

Universal Turing Machines, 90—91

Telstar satellite, 41

The

Territorial Imperative,

(Ardrey),

1

16

Texas Instruments, 60, 73, 74, 270 Texas Junior

Academy

Unix, 33, 295

UPS

(United Parcel Service), 151, 155,

USB

(universal serial bus),

165

of Sciences, 41

Texas-Pacific Corporation, 253

THC

262

universal serial bus (USB),

262

(tetra-hydro-cannabinol), 133, 194

Vadasz, Les, 78-79

thermodynamics, 106

Thornburn, Jim, 254

Vegas Convention Center, 264

three-shot color, 43

Venture

timing dynamics, in computing,

Verifone, 189

MICR

104-5 Tobermory, 89-90, 91 Tolkien,

J.

Law Group,

191

reading project

of,

148-54,

165

Vermont, University

R.R., 114

of,

49

VLSI

Tomaselli, Giovanni, 265

very large scale integration, see

touch, computer, 96

VGA

(video graphics array), 190, 265,

VHS

videocassettes, 241

touch pads, 160-72, 175, 224-25 trackballs, 159, track-sticks,

169

IBM, 159-60

transducer physiology, 26, 127-28, 130,

282

Foveon chips and, 246, 282

VLSI

transistors, 37, 50,

bipolar, 178, 188, 14,

206-7, 224

24

295-96

(very large scale integration), 26,

57-58, 60, 70, 72, 78,

79,88,97, 111, 150, 295 by Mead,

video teleconferencing, 242

visible light,

transducers, 295

built

267

97, 121, 153, 213,

296

analog, 97, 108, 118, 175, 180 volatile

voltage,

memory, 296

296

Index

3 .8

von Neumann, John, 87-88, 90

wireless "hot spots,"

Neumann von Neumann

Word, 83

von

177,

bottleneck,

88-89

machines, 87-89, 176,

296

wafer fabs, 52-54, 80, 188, 190, 197,

248

World War II, 35, 90 World Wide Licenses Limited (WWLL), 265-66, 269 World Wide Web,

see Internet

226, 242, 253, 273, 297 at National,

206, 216, 218, 229, 256,

X3, 29, 103, 224-30, 236-37, 243-47,

255-56, 262, 266

274 wafers, 53-54, 60, 80, 226,

297

as disruptive technology,

Watts, Lloyd, 143, 274

225-26 X19, 255-56

wave dynamics, 106

Xerox, 42

Waters, John, 221

wavelength division multiplexing

(WDM),

239-43

retina in,

PARC

214, 283-84

weather modeling, 88

(Palo Alto Research Center) of,

41-42, 102

X rays, 279

wetware, 93, 211

WGBH,

Yamaki, Michihiro, 227-28

134

yoga, 134, 194

"White Rabbit," 112 Whitney, Telle, 103, 111 Widlar, Robert, 202

Z-8,

Wiesner, Jerome, 75

Z-80, 82-83, 141-42, 253

WiFi, 248

Zapacosta, Per Luigi, 160, 162

Windows,

83,

238

Zarakov, Eric, 219-20, 263

Wired, 265 wireless bandwidth,

253

Zilog Corporation, 81-82, 141, 253

247-48

Zurich, 185-86, 193

GEORGE GILDER, the best-selling author

of

several

books— including Telecosm,

Microcosm, and The

Spirit of

Enterprise— is the

publisher of the influential Gilder Technology Report.

He

lives in

Tyringham, Massachusetts.

JACKET DESIGN BY BASE ART

CO.

JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY VARIE / ALT

/

CORBIS

AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAN SOLOMON PRINTED

IN

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

THE SILICON EYE "George Gilder lauds Carver Mead's

'intuitive

his special feel for the timing of the crests

opportunity

in

life

and

describes well Gilder's

meaning

of the

fashion, he

trends

combines

electricity,

of

phase,

and troughs

science and

own discerning eye in

sense

history.'

of

This

for the underlying

science and society.

In

usual Gilder

a compelling narrative that reads like a

brilliant detective story with

deep insights

into the

concept

of

designing our technology to emulate biology, one of the most

important scientific ideas

-RAY KURZWEIL,

of

our time."

author

of

The Age of Intelligent Machines

and The Age of Spiritual Machines

NORTON NEW YORK L

W. W.

•