Karl Seiler (physicist)

Karl Seiler (born May 30, 1910 in Schorndorf , Württemberg ; † September 8, 1991 in Freiburg ) was a German physicist and industrial manager . He was a pioneer of both semiconductor research in Germany and the beginning German semiconductor industry in the 1950s.

education

After attending school in Stuttgart and reaching the GCSE Seiler initially began an apprenticeship as a mechanic at the Robert Bosch GmbH , but soon dropped out to the he High School catch up and in 1929 at the Technical Stuttgart University physics and mathematics with the intended career school teacher to study.

His teachers in Stuttgart included Paul Peter Ewald , later in Tübingen Hans Bethe and at the Technical University of Hanover , today's University of Hanover, Erwin Fues - all three students of Arnold Sommerfeld . After the state examination in Hanover, he followed Fues to the University of Breslau , where in 1936 he submitted his dissertation "On the atomic dispersion and absorption of X-rays according to Dirac's relativistic wave mechanics ". In 1937 Seiler joined the NSDAP . That same year he became an assistant to Rudolf Suhr man in Wroclaw, where he in 1940 with research on cryogenic habilitated after after the start of World War II for a short time as a soldier in the West had served.

Professional activities

Following his habilitation, Seiler became a senior engineer and lecturer in chemical physics in Breslau, although he was drafted to the Eastern Front in November 1941 . After a recall campaign for scientists who were supposed to work on research essential to the war effort, he returned to Germany in August 1943 and worked at Telefunken in Leubus near Breslau as head of the laboratory for high-frequency special tubes and semiconductors on the development of detectors for centimeter waves in radar technology . The result was silicon- based detectors with synthetically manufactured layers. From the end of 1943, they were used in aircraft and submarines as components of warning devices for detecting enemy radar signals. At the end of 1944 the laboratory evaded the approaching Red Army to Thuringia, where there was no further production worth mentioning until the end of the war.

After the American military administration closed the laboratory in 1945, Seiler moved to Mönchberg in Swabia, where his wife worked as a teacher. Seiler himself was unemployed because Telefunken was paralyzed due to the consequences of the war and a university was out of the question because of its membership in Nazi organizations. In 1945, in a former garage of around 16 square meters, Seiler set up a production facility for semiconductor components; again Seiler concentrated on silicon as a semiconductor material instead of the germanium preferred by most of the other research groups . Ring modulators were produced by Seiler and an employee , made up of rectifiers made of silicon that they had prepared themselves, initially as detectors with metal tip contacts. The products were bought by the Mix & Genest telephone company . In his laboratory in 1948, Seiler developed technically usable flat diodes with silicon-metal transition without the failure-prone tip contact of the previously known detectors - at that time a world first, for which he applied for a patent.

In the same year 1948 Seiler got a job at the Technical University of Stuttgart and built a semiconductor laboratory for his doctoral supervisor Erwin Fues, who had moved there from Breslau. At the end of the year, Seiler became laboratory manager at the Süddeutsche Apparate-Fabrik (SAF) in Nuremberg, which, like its customer Mix & Genest, belonged to the ITT group . It was Seiler's task to develop semiconductor components. At SAF, Seiler worked with germanium, which is easier to process than silicon. A germanium diode with welded point contact was produced by SAF from 1949, a germanium transistor with point contact from 1953; In the following year, SAF was the first in Germany to bring out a germanium surface rectifier - with a germanium- indium junction. At the TH Stuttgart, in parallel to his work at SAF, Seiler became a lecturer in 1949 and honorary professor for semiconductor research in 1953 and organized a collaboration between the laboratories he had set up at the university and at SAF.

In March 1956, Seiler changed to become managing director of Intermetall in Düsseldorf , which was currently in a phase of upheaval. In the meantime, due to its advantages at higher operating temperatures, silicon began to assert itself against germanium as a semiconductor material. Under Seiler's direction, Intermetall brought out the first silicon transistor in Germany. Seiler led the innovative, but up to then not lucrative company with niche products like the Zener diode to economic success. When the company was about to expand at the end of the 1950s, Seiler initiated the move of Intermetall to Freiburg , at that time a low-wage area. In 1965, when Intermetall was sold to the ITT Group, Seiler switched to Heraeus , where he stayed until his retirement in 1973, most recently as head of Schott-Glassmelt.

Works

Seiler wrote a textbook on semiconductors, which was based on his lectures and exercises at the TH Stuttgart; it was considered a standard work:

• Physics and technology of semiconductors , Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1964.

Committee work

• Chairman of the Physical Society in Baden-Württemberg, 1962–1963
• Member of the advisory committee of industrial physicists in the German Physical Society , 1968–1973

literature

• Kai Handel : Beginnings of semiconductor research and development - illustrated by the biographies of four German semiconductor pioneers . Dissertation at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Faculty for Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, 1999
• Karl Seiler's 50th birthday . In: Frequency , Vol. 14, No. 6, 1960, p. 224 (with a picture of the honored)
• D. Sautter: Karl O. Seiler to commemorate In: Physikalische Blätter , Vol. 48, No. 1, 1992