Standing on the shoulders of giants.

I write *a lot* of papers. It's my job.
I was asked today what my favorite paper was. My favorite paper will never get any citations and is On the temperature dependence of subthreshold currents in MOS electron inversion layers, revisited. This paper is revisiting the methods data from a 1979 paper entitled On the temperature dependence of subthreshold currents in MOS electron inversion layers by Card and Ulmer.

One might say "it's been done", so why revisit it? Well, because Tsividis cited this work on his seminal paper on CMOS bandgaps and I had never seen similar results. I revisited the data and tested an IC on a modern process, and found that "self aligned" CMOS processes remove the issue they reported.

I tried to contact Card and Ulmer. I found that Card had died, but Ulmer was still alive and was very helpful. I met him in Phoenix after I presented at RFID 2017. We are all building on the work of the people before us. I hope that when I'm 75, some younger mind will take me out for coffee.