Jean Hoerni

Jean Amédée Hoerni (born September 26, 1924 in Geneva , † January 12, 1997 ) was a physicist and mathematician . As an employee of William B. Shockley and a member of Traitorous Eight , he was one of the pioneers of microelectronics in the 1960s . In addition, the development of the planar process is attributed to him. This manufacturing method still forms the basis of microelectronic circuits today. Jean Hoerni is also a co-founder of the Central Asia Institute .

Life

After studying mathematics in Geneva, which he completed in 1947 as a Bachelor of Science (BS), he did a dissertation in the field of physics, completing a Ph.D. 1950. He then went to England, where he received a second Ph. D. in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1952 .

In 1952 he accepted a postdoctoral position ( English Post Doctoral Research Fellow ) in the chemistry department at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (California) . Some time later (1956) he took a position in William B. Shockley's newly formed research group at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory , a division of Beckman Instruments in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California . But this working group did not last long. As early as 1957, eight key employees left the research laboratory in a dispute with Shockley. These eight, including Hoerni, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, are referred to as the Traitorous Eight and founded the Fairchild Semiconductor company after they left . At Fairchild, Hoerni developed, among other things, the so-called planar transistor and the planar process (1958) which allowed the manufacture of transistors with significantly improved electrical properties. It also paved the way for the commercial use of integrated circuits (ICs, “microchips”), in which complex transistor circuits are manufactured on a single-crystal substrate ( wafers ).

In 1961 he (then head of the physics department and diode development ) left Fairchild together with the two Traitorous Eight alumni Jay Last and Sheldon Roberts to jointly found Amelco Semiconductor , a division of Teledyne . He later worked as a consultant for Hughes Aircraft and Union Carbide Electronics (1964 and 1966, respectively) and founded Intersil (1967). At Intersil he developed CMOS circuits with a particularly low operating voltage for quartz wristwatches.

For his (outstanding) achievements, Hoerni received the IEEE Fellow Award in 1970 "for the invention of the planar transistor and other contributions to the theory and technology of semiconductor components" (" For the invention of the planar transistor, and for other contributions to the theory and technology of semiconductor devices ”). In 1972 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin: Three Cups of Tea . Penguin Books, 2006, ISBN 978-0-14-303825-2 , pp. 146 .
2. ^ Jean A. Hoerni - 1972 W. Wallace McDowell Award Recipient. (No longer available online.) IEEE, 2009, archived from the original on June 6, 2012 ; Retrieved January 18, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Patent US3025589 : Method of Manufacturing Semiconductor Devices. Registered on May 1, 1959 , inventor: JA Hoerni. ‌
4. ↑ Patent US3064167 : Semiconductor device. Registered on May 15, 1960 , inventor: JA Hoerni. ‌
5. ^ Gordon E. Moore: The Accidental Entrepreneur . In: NoblePrize.org. December 3, 2001, accessed January 18, 2010.
6. ^ Peter Robin Morris: A history of the world semiconductor industry . IET, 1990, ISBN 0-86341-227-0 , pp. 37 ff .
7. ↑ Lucien Trueb: The electrification of the wristwatch. Ebner Verlag, Ulm 2011, ISBN 978-3-87188-236-4