Your golden age of device research

Twenty-five years ago I had the honor of serving as technical program chair for the 50^th Device Research Conference. For the plenary session we invited grey beards: Chapin Cutler, Makoto Kikuchi, Jim Early, and Herb Kroemer. I enjoyed the talks and after the session a young attendee remarked how great it must have been to be involved in the device research the plenary speakers recounted. I agreed that the grey beards had done great work, but noted that if I had been doing device research then I might have been too witless to see BJTs through the lens of the point contact transistor, too lazy to bring the junction laser to practical utility, too slow to see heterojunctions everywhere. After all, there were a lot of old device researchers not giving plenary talks and many companies had come and gone. I also noted that I had had a lot of fun working on devices in more recent times, and that I greatly preferred the parameter analyzer and electron microscopes I used to the curve tracers and worse of my predecessors. I've had the pleasure of participating in every DRC but one since 1979 (the one due to the birth of my younger son), with, if I have counted correctly, 44 talks from myself or my students, including some firsts or bests such as ultra-short-gate-length self-aligned GaAs MESFETs, superconducting JFETs, Ge MOSFETs, high mobility organic (pentacene) TFTs, flexible electronics demos, fast oxide semiconductor devices, and more.