DAVID A. HODGES (1937-2022)

BY ASAD A. ABIDI, DAVID J. ALLSTOT, AND
PAUL R. GRAY

DAVID ALBERT HODGES, a microelectronics innovator, academic leader, teacher, and mentor to countless students and colleagues, passed away on Nov. 13, 2022, at 85, after a battle with ampullary cancer. He was born Aug. 25, 1937, in New Jersey to Katherine and Albert Hodges. Albert was an electrical engineer and patent attorney, who instilled in Dave a love of engineering from an early age. His family moved frequently due to his father’s work, living in New Jersey, New York, and Indiana. After attending high school in Westchester County, New York, he enrolled at Cornell University in 1955.

Dave earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1960, just as the integrated circuit was being invented. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate school, working under Donald Pederson (NAE 1974, NAS 1982) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS). During this time, Don, Dave, and colleagues established the first university laboratory capable of fabricating monolithic integrated circuits. By 1964, Dave fabricated what was, at the time, only the second integrated circuit ever built in a university setting — just months after a Berkeley colleague had built the first. This pioneering work helped inspire the rapid expansion of university research in integrated circuits, leading other major universities to establish fabrication facilities in the subsequent years.

During his Ph.D. studies, he met Susan Spongberg, a UC Berkeley graduate student in history who occasionally illustrated his research papers with circuit drawings. They married in 1965 and had two children, Jennifer and Alan, born in 1968 and 1974, respectively.

After earning his Ph.D. in 1967, Dave joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, where he worked on MOS technology for telecommunications and memory applications. By 1969, he was head of the System Elements Research Department. In 1970, he returned to Berkeley as a faculty member in EECS, beginning a long and impactful career in academic research and leadership.

His pioneering research had a lasting impact on integrated circuit technology. Early on, he recognized that MOS technology would dominate future scaled-technology nodes and saw the importance of implementing analog functions in scaled MOS technologies, enabling the development of highly integrated mixed-signal functions. Today, these functions are ubiquitous in smartphones, electric vehicles, satellites, and countless other electronic systems, and circuit techniques developed by Dave and his colleagues remain widely used.

In the 1980s, he turned his focus to domestic semiconductor manufacturing, addressing key challenges in the industry. His work strongly influenced the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, published by SEMATECH in 1997, an important milestone in shaping the future of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

After nearly two decades as a Berkeley faculty member, Dave was drawn into campus leadership. He served as EECS department chair in 1989, before becoming dean of the College of Engineering in 1990, a position he held for six years. In his quiet, diplomatic manner he drove profound change, laying the groundwork for the Department of Bioengineering, Berkeley’s first new department in decades. During his tenure as dean, he oversaw the hiring of 10 women faculty members, more than doubling the number of tenure-track women faculty in engineering — a major achievement at the time.

Dave also provided strong leadership beyond academia, serving on technology company boards and holding key leadership roles within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was responsible for relocating the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the leading international conference on integrated circuits, from Philadelphia to San Francisco in 1978, first on an alternating basis, then permanently. This seemingly obvious change was a major accomplishment at the time. Serving as IEEE’s vice president of publications, he also helped IEEE enter the era of open-source publishing and chaired the IEEE Awards Board. He also led the establishment of IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, creating a platform for academic research in the field, and later serving as its founding editor, having previously been the editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

As an incredibly supportive mentor and advisor, Dave was highly regarded by both students and colleagues. They consistently recognized his profound impact, describing him as a wise mentor with an uncanny ability to perceive dimensions of a problem and solution opportunities that others overlooked. He shared his insights generously, shaping the careers of many. Among the large community of students he supervised, 27 earned their doctoral degrees under his guidance, with many going on to influential positions in industry and academia worldwide. The collective impact of his mentorship is phenomenal.

His contributions to research and education have been widely recognized. He received numerous awards and honors, including the IEEE Morris N. Liebman Memorial Award (1983), the IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal (1997) for “innovative teaching of microelectronics, and pioneering education in semiconductor manufacturing,” induction into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame (2013), and the IEEE Richard M. Emberson Award (2017). He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1983.

He is survived by his wife, Susan Hodges, and son, Alan Hodges, both of Berkeley; his daughter, Jennifer Hodges, of Los Angeles; his sisters, Caroline Persell of Sleepy Hollow, New York, and Nancy Walbek of Woods Hole, Massachusetts; and two granddaughters.

Dave’s legacy lives on not only through the profound impact of his groundbreaking contributions to microelectronics and education, but, more importantly, through the mentorship and wisdom he shared so generously with those who had the good fortune to work with him.