He currently holds 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.
"[3][4][5] Most recently, he has called for the reconceptualization of modern physics, revisiting the theoretical debates of Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and others in light of later experiments and developments in instrumentation.
[6] Mead's contributions as a teacher include the classic textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980), which he coauthored with Lynn Conway.
His father worked in a power plant at the Big Creek Hydroelectric Project, owned by Southern California Edison Company.
[13] In 1960, he was the first person to describe and demonstrate a three-terminal solid-state device based on the operating principles of electron tunneling and hot-electron transport.
[15] His studies of III-V compounds (with W. G. Spitzer) established the importance of interface states, laying the groundwork for band-gap engineering and the development of heterojunction devices.
[27][28] Also in 1976, Mead co-authored a DARPA report with Ivan Sutherland and Thomas Eugene Everhart, assessing the limitations of current microelectronics fabrication and recommending research into the system design implications of "very-large-scale integrated circuits".
[38] Building on the ideas of VLSI design, Mead and his PhD student David L. Johannsen created the first silicon compiler, capable of taking a user's specifications and automatically generating an integrated circuit.
[40][41] Mead and Conway laid the groundwork for the development of the MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service) and the fabrication of the first CMOS chip.
[43] Observing graded synaptic transmission in the retina, Mead became interested in the potential to treat transistors as analog devices rather than digital switches.
[3][5][46] Mead was then successful in finding venture capital funding to support the start of a number of companies, in part due to an early connection with Arnold Beckman, chairman of the Caltech Board of Trustees.
[47] In 1986, Mead and Federico Faggin founded Synaptics Inc. to develop analog circuits based in neural networking theories, suitable for use in vision and speech recognition.
[24] In 1988, Richard F. Lyon and Carver Mead described the creation of an analog cochlea, modelling the fluid-dynamic traveling-wave system of the auditory portion of the inner ear.
Their work has inspired ongoing research attempting to create a silicon analog that can emulate the signal processing capacities of a biological cochlea.
[55] Mahowald's 1992 thesis received Caltech's Milton and Francis Clauser Doctoral Prize for its originality and "potential for opening up new avenues of human thought and endeavor".
[58] Around 1999, Mead and others established Foveon, Inc. in Santa Clara, California to develop new digital camera technology based on neurally-inspired CMOS image sensor/processing chips.
[60] Mead's work underlies the development of computer processors whose electronic components are connected in ways that resemble biological synapses.
[46] In 1995 and 1996 Mead, Hasler, Diorio, and Minch presented single-transistor silicon synapses capable of analog learning applications[61] and long-term memory storage.
The approach is 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[clarification needed] in spacetime.