Free Republic

Here comes a digital-camera chip that could change everything "It's easy to have a complicated idea," Carver Mead used to tell his students at Caltech. "It's very, very hard to have a simple idea." The genius of Carver Mead is that over the past 40 years, he has had many simple ideas. More than 50 of them have been granted patents, and many involved him in the start-up of at least 20 companies, including Intel. Without the special transistors he invented, cell phones, fiber-optic networks, and satellite communications would not be ubiquitous. Last year, high-tech high priest George Gilder called...

The Cat & The Camera by George Gilder As I walked out with Dick Merrill on a cool February day through the Foveon Corporation parking lot in Sunnyvale to drive to the Lion & Compass restaurant, my hands were sweating. Merrill is an analog-chip designer, and analog people are different from digital people, who author microprocessors and software suites and work in teams and earnestly entertain journalists. Creators of devices without the assurance of simple numerical inputs and outputs-none of those tidy ones and zeros—analog people are loners, full of black arts and trade secrets, volatile resentments and spiky prejudices....