This last week I had my last two public appearances as the IEEE Past President. My term ends at the end of December, although I still have a few on-line meetings before December 31. This last weekend I participated in the IEEE New Era AI World Leaders Summit in Seattle and starting on Monday I was at the 2025 International Electron Devices Meeting, IEDM, in San Francisco.
On Monday morning, December 8 I presented two IEEE technical field awards at a morning event with probably close to 2,000 people attending. The first of these awards was for IEEE Fellow Sayeef Salahuddin from UC Berkeley for pioneering contributions to the physics of ferroelectrics and integrated ferroelectric devices, who received the Andrew S. Grove Award sponsored by the Electron Devices Society, EDS, which put on the 2025 IEDM.
The Fredrick Phillips Award, sponsored by the IEEE Frederik Phillips Award Fund, recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the management of research and development resulting in effective innovation in the electrical and electronics industry. Deirdre Hanford received this award for visionary leadership in electronic design automation for secure and energy-efficient microelectronics.
The 2025 IEDM celebrated the 100th anniversary of the invention of the field effect transistor, or FET. In 1925, Polish-American physicist Julius Lilienfeld, who was an experimental pioneer in field electron emission, filed a patent in Canada for what we would now call a field effect transistor device and later filed a US patent on that invention. This was a three terminal device to control current using a gate electrode.
The US patent image of the device is shown below.
The term, transistor, was later coined by technologists at Bell Labs in the late 1940’s to describe the devices developed there after the invention of the point contact transistor by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley in 1947.
Lilienfeld later invented a metal oxide semiconductor transistor, what would now be called a MOSFET. Unfortunately, the materials Lilienfeld worked with, copper sulfide semiconductors were not the best materials for this application and the high purity semiconductor germanium and silicon was not available until the 1940’s. In addition, it was not until the 1940’s and 1950’s that the role of surface states was well enough understood to make such FET’s commercially viable.
John Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs developed the first working MOSFET in 1959-1960 using thermally grown silicon dioxide as the insulator on a silicon semiconductor.
At the 2025 IEDM the Electron Devices Society, EDS, had a set of posters near their exhibit that presented the history of semiconductor technology, shown below.
IEDM organizers also put on an invited lunch that focused on the history of transistor technology and future prospects for this technology featuring talks by Hiroshi Iwai, NYCU/Inst. Sci. Tokyo and Bob Johnson from Gartner. An evening session titled, FETs at 100: Yesterday’s Sarks, Tomorrow’s Arc—Human Wisdom Meeting AI Insights that featured a presentation generated by ChatGPT as well as human speakers, Serge Beisemans from imec, Chenming Hu from UC Berkeley, John Wuu from AMD, Daewon Ha from Samsung Electronics and H. S. Philip Wong from TSMC and Stanford.
In my last official physical meetings as IEEE Past President I attended an AI conference in Seattle and participated in the 2025 IEDM and its celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Field Effect Transistor.