Lots of awesome radio stuff happened in the 1990s. (UWB, RFID/NFC, etc.), and optics/optoelectronics.

Low power high performance seems to be the focus of mainstream chip design right now. Display tech is finally getting awesome again (IZGO, IPS-on-reasonable-devices, etc.)

CCD/CMOS, very proper. I mean, cheap 30MP cameras?

Lots of great stuff in virtualization (sw and hw features), cloud, and SDN. Arista alone makes up for approximtely 2000-2008.

HSMs, smartcards, tamper resistance, etc. have kind of stagnated :(

How much of that is "New and Improved!" with the emphasis on improved, as in, better/cheaper ways to do the same thing, vs. just plain new? I cite the FPGA because while it was the end of a long line of innovation like PALs, it was qualitatively different. E.g. allowing telecom vendors to support new or improved ^_^ protocols with new firmware (vs. an inflexible ASIC or the like or very very fast general purpose CPUs).

The cloud, yes (and a classic disruptive innovation). SDN and virtualization, I'm not so sure. Or at least the latter was just applying old concepts (it's been a long time since IBM's main OS could boot on raw hardware) to a different platform. Radio I don't follow at that level. Low power/high performance eventually equals a qualitative difference which I gather we've reached, so yes, but I quibble that was semi-inevitable, driven by demand and specifically enabled by Moore's Law and the savvy of ARM Holdings et. al. Camera sensors even more of that, plus also enabled by low power infrastructure.

ADDED: no breakthroughs in batteries, but some incremental improvement?

I think there's something qualitatively different now that ~everything can have 3G/4G, wifi, bluetooth, zigbee, or NFC in it.

I'll grant you that that's qualitatively different, although what it means we'll just have to wait and find out (aside from those involved in inventing that future---I'm very much not a part of that, owning a feature phone that's turned off almost all the time, in part because my lifestyle is not very mobile).

SSD technology? Companies like FusionIO and such seem to have been/are VC backed.

Interesting thought.

SSDs are in part a classic disruptive technology, a repackaging of something new and at least originally not quite ready for prime time that's eating away at various disk drive niches, some lower end.

On the other hand they're at least a bit of a sustaining technology, just another mass storage technology (well, at least until people start using them as other than drop in replacements for disk drives and use them with their advantages and limitations). Funding them as a class of technology is not a hard decision for VCs, they're not as much a new thing as FPGAs, and there's e.g. Intel validating the concept.