Nick Holonyak

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Nick Holonyak

Nick Holonyak Jr. ( Ukrainian Нік Голоняк , born November 3, 1928 in Zeigler , Illinois ) is an American who is considered the inventor of the visible LED .

His parents were Ukrainian emigrants and his father worked in a coal mine. After working for the Illinois Central Railroad , Nick preferred to go back to school. He received his Ph.D. in 1954. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with John Bardeen . From 1954 to 1955 he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories , then did his military service and was a scientist at General Electric (GE) from 1957 to 1963 .

At Bell Laboratories he was one of the pioneers in silicon semiconductor technologies for transistors and thyristors (called SCR), continued at GE from 1957. He invented the shorted emitter in thyristors and triacs . From his time in the military in Japan, he was also familiar with Leo Esaki's work on the tunnel diode and was the first to manufacture it in silicon.

At GE he developed the red light emitting diode until February 1962 . In 1962 he led one of the teams that almost simultaneously (first was Robert N. Hall of GE's Schenectady Laboratory) got the first laser diodes (semiconductor lasers) working (his was the first in the visible wavelength range).

In 1963 he went back to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a professor . There he demonstrated lasing in numerous alloys (such as InGaP , AlGaAsP or InGaPAs) in the 1970s , developed the first quantum well laser with his students in 1977 and the transistor laser in 2004 with Milton Feng and others . He has been retired since 2013.

He holds around 30 other patents and has received numerous awards.

Awards (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the story of Nick Holonyak: The origin of diffused silicon technology at Bell Labs 1954–55, in: The Electrochemical Society Interface, Fall 2007, PDF.
  2. ^ Robert N. Hall , "IEEE Oral History" interview
  3. ↑ Nick Holonyak's biography. (pdf) 2002, archived from the original on May 5, 2004 (English).;
  4. ↑ Nick Holonyak Jr., Milton Feng: The Transistor Laser. In: IEEE SPECTRUM, pp. 50-55. February 1, 2006, accessed October 16, 2018 .
  5. ↑ a b Famed UI professor still lighting the way. In: The News-Gazette. November 23, 2017, accessed October 16, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Holonyak, Nick
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holonyak, Nick Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Zeigler , Illinois