Spearheaded of tools and techniques for modern integrated circuit design, Mead is a prominent U.S. computer scientist. Born in Bakersfield, California, he has held the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years. He studied electrical engineering at Caltech, earning his B.S. in 1956, his M.S. in 1957, and his Ph.D. degree in 1960.
He co-wrote the landmark text Introduction to VLSI Systems with Lynn Conway in 1980, an important spearhead of the Mead & Conway revolution. A pioneering and well-written textbook, it has been used in VLSI integrated circuit education all over the world for decades. Mead is credited by Intel's (at that time Fairchild Semiconductor's) Gordon Moore with coining the term Moore's Law, denoting the observation and prediction Moore made in 1965 about the growth rate of the transistor amount fitting on a single integrated circuit.
He also pioneered the use of floating-gate transistors as a means of non-volatile storage for neuromorphic and other analog circuits. Mead developed an approach he called Collective Electrodynamics, in which electromagnetic effects, including quantized energy transfer, were derived from the interactions of the wavefunctions of electrons behaving collectively. In this formulation, the photon is a non-entity, and Planck's energy–frequency relationship comes from the interactions of electron eigenstates.
This approach was related to John Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, to the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and to Gilbert N. Lewis's early description of electromagnetic energy exchange at zero interval in spacetime.
