Charles A. Lee (electrical engineer)

Charles A. Lee (* 1922 ) is an American electrical engineer and is considered the developer of the bipolar transistor design known today as mesa transistors .

Lee studied electrical engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a bachelor's degree (BEE) in 1943 and at Columbia University , where he received his doctorate in 1953. During World War II he was with the Army Signal Corps and researched German countermeasures to the Allied distance fuses . From 1953 he was at Bell Labs.

Lee built the first transistor with diffusion- generated pn junctions made of germanium (a mesa transistor ) at Bell Laboratories in July 1954 . Since more precise and thinner p- and n-layers could be produced with the method, these transistors could be operated up to much higher frequencies (in the case of Lee up to 500 MHz, i.e. the microwave range ). This was followed in March 1955 by a silicon transistor also manufactured using this method by Morris Tanenbaum at Bell Labs. The patent on the diffusion-based transistor ran to Lee, William Shockley and George C. Dacey (1955, Mesa Diffusion Transistor ). In early 1954, Shockley proposed to Lee, Dacey, and PW Foy to build transistors using the diffusion technique of Calvin Souther Fuller and others.

From 1967 he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University . Here, among other things, he dealt with field effect transistors made of the semiconductor material gallium arsenide , and designed a device for ion implantation with Jeffrey Frey and others .

Fonts

• A high-frequency diffused base germanium transistor. In: Bell System Technical Journal. Volume 35, No. 1, 1956, pp. 23-34 ( Archives ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles A. Lee. ( Memento of the original from February 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) 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. (pdf) In: Bell Syst. Techn. J. 35, 1956, p. 245 (short biography). 
2. ^ Riordan The lost history of the transistor , IEEE Spectrum 2004
3. ^ Mark Burgess: Diffusion technologies at Bell Laboratories. 2010.
4. ↑ Patent US3028655 : Semiconductive device. Applied March 23, 1955 , published April 10, 1962 , Applicant: Bell Telephone Labor Inc, Inventor: George C. Dacey, Charles A. Lee, William Shockley. ‌
5. ^ Bo Lojek: History of Semiconductor Engineering. Springer, 2006, p. 54 f.
6. ↑ Cornell Engineering: A Tradition of Leadership and Innovation (pdf) Cornell University, 2009, ISBN 978-0-918531-05-6 , p. 174.