The Lester Eastman Conference on High Performance Devices is a biennial conference. It was officially renamed in 2002 from the IEEE-Cornell Conference on High Performance Devices to honor Professor Lester Eastman, a pioneer in the field of high performance devices based on compound semiconductors. In 1967, Professor Eastman originated the biennial IEEE-Cornell Conference in Microwave Semiconductors shortly after he started GaAs research at Cornell in 1965. The conference was later renamed the IEEE-Cornell Conference on High Performance Devices. Professor Eastman graduated 125 Ph.D. students, more than 40 M.S. students, and hosted more than 80 postdocs and visiting scientists between 1958 and 2010. Some of the legendary contributions from the Eastman group include high quality GaAs epitaxy, delta-doping, the first lattice-matched InGaAs channel HEMT, T-gate, ballistic devices and polarization effects in GaN.

Conference covers the physics and performance of devices and circuits for high speed/frequency, high or low power devices, and optoelectronics. Technical thrust areas include: wide bandgap materials and devices; narrow bandgap, low power materials and devices; and heterogeneous integration of dissimilar materials and devices. The conference also emphasizes innovative device concepts and physical phenomena leading to new devices.