IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine - Fall 2016 - 27

the midpoint in the age distribution
of all citations to a given journal. As
of 2014, the citation half-life for JSSC
was about 7.4 years, similar to that
for all the journals listed in Table 2.
Averaged over the recent seven years,
JSSC papers received about 7,000 citations per year. The annual average
number of downloads, 1.4 million, is
200 times the number of citations.
As shown in Table 2, over a fiveyear period following publication, on
average, each JSSC article has received
about 3.5 citations. However, the variation is huge. The all-time most highly
cited JSSC article [3] had received
2,206 citations as of June 2016. (Robert Dennard, lead author for that article, received the IEEE Medal of Honor
in 2009, in recognition of his invention of the one-transistor DRAM.)
Using Google Scholar, a list was
compiled of the ten most highly
cited papers for each decade since
1966. See "Top-Cited IEEE Journal

tABLE 1. rEgionAL AffiLiAtion of IEEE Journal of SolId-StatE cIrcuItS
Authors, 2009-2013.
rEgion of Author AffiLiAtion

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

Regions 1-6 (United States)

41.7%

41.1%

41.4%

37%

49%

Region 7 (Canada)

1.7%

1.9%

1.8%

3.7

5.1%

Region 8 (Europe/Africa, Middle East)

15.7%

14.9%

20.7%

20.4

16.6%

Region 9 (Central/South America)

0.9%

0.6%

Region 10 (Asia/Pacific)

40%%

42.1%

36%

38.9%

28.7%

tABLE 2. compEting puBLicAtions.
pEriodicAL

fivE-yEAr
impAct fActor

International Journal of Electronics (Taylor & Francis Ltd.)

0.460

IEE Electronics Letters (Institution of Engineering and Technology)

0.966

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-Part I: Regular Papers

2.118

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-Part II: Express Briefs

1.519

IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems

1.252

IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits

3.548

rEcoLLEctions of thE ErA BEforE soLid-stAtE circuits
About 1947, when I was ten years old, my dad got me interested in
radio. He was a Cornell electrical engineering graduate and lifelong
member of the IRE, a radio hobbyist who became a patent attorney.
He moonlighted writing small books for international correspondence
schools on radio principles and radio receiver design.
Following books of the time, I made a crystal radio receiver, first with
a cat-whisker and galena crystal and then (more successfully) with a
glass-sealed point contact germanium diode. We then lived near the 50kW broadcast tower of WHAM in Rochester, New York, so there was
no problem with signal strength. But broadcast content was no more
appealing than it is today.
A couple of years later, my dad gave me full access to his vintage
collection of electronic devices. His prized tool was a briefcasesized Weston volt-ohm-milliamp meter that cost about US$80 in
1950. His stash included some old 199 vacuum tubes. They had a
dc powered filament (cathode) grid and plate (anode) as the four
external connections. I managed to construct a simple tuned radiofrequency receiver based on those devices. I got to be very good
at soldering.
A couple of years later, I built a super-heterodyne AM receiver using 1R5 and 1S5 miniature vacuum tubes, together with coils and a
two-gang variable capacitor. My high school friends and I built superregenerative transceivers using 6C4 tubes. We could communicate over
a range of a mile or two. Lots of fun! I built audio amplifiers for what we

then called HiFi, before stereo became available. I had summer jobs in
radio and TV service.
As a Cornell undergraduate in electrical engineering from 1955 to 1960,
I earned a five-year B.E.E. degree that included more nontechnical content
than four-year B.S.E.E. degrees. My first course on transistors was with
Prof. Paul Ankrum, using the classic textbook by David DeWitt of IBM.
(The SEEC series of books came later.) Prof. Ankrum obtained some rejected silicon grown-junction bipolar transistors for use by the class. They had
beta around eight. We learned a lot in the process of characterizing them.
For my fifth-year project, I designed and built a germanium transistorized miniature FM transmitter for use by lecturers in large classes. By
then, it became clear to me that the future lay in solid-state electronics.
I went on to graduate study at the University of California at Berkeley
(1960-1965) and subsequent employment at Bell Telephone Laboratories. I joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1970 and have remained in
Berkeley since retiring.
Fifty years ago, all radio and TV broadcasting were analog. All audio
and video recording was analog, on vinyl disks or tape. All local-loop
telephony was analog. Facsimile transmission was analog. Data transmission was analog, using expensive modems capable of just 300 b/s.
Today, we have legacy radio broadcasting that still is analog. All the other services have migrated to digital technology, with vast performance
improvements and cost reductions. All of these advances never could
have occurred without solid-state ICs.

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