Notable microsystems achievements over the last 25 years include a contrast sensitive silicon retina, the first CMOS polarization sensitive imager, silicon rods in standard foundry CMOS for single photon detection, and a large scale mixed analog/digital associative processor for character recognition. Significant algorithmic research contributions in pattern analysis and machine intelligence include the vocal tract normalization technique for speech recognition and heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis, a derivation and generalization of Fisher discriminants in the maximum likelihood framework.