William Crawford Dunlap

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William Crawford Dunlap (born July 21, 1918 in Denver , † January 25, 2011 ) was an American physicist who dealt with solid-state physics and semiconductors.

Dunlap graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor's degree in 1938 and received a PhD in physics from the University of California in 1943 . From 1942 to 1945 he did research at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and from 1945 in the research laboratory of General Electric . In 1955/56 he was a consultant for semiconductors there . From 1956 to 1958 he headed solid-state electronics research at the Bendix research laboratories, and from 1958 to 1964 he was head of research in solid-state electronics and semiconductors at Raytheon . From 1964 he was at the research center for electronic components of NASA , from 1968 to 1970 as head of research. From 1970 to 1974 he was an advisor to the Transport Systems Center of the United States Department of Transportation in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and from 1974 to 1995 he was president of the company WC Dunlap, which he founded.

In 1950 at General Electric and RN Hall, he developed a process for doping semiconductors (then germanium ) via diffusion. The investigations were related to the pnp transistor developed at General Electric with pn junctions made from an alloy of indium (p-type) on germanium (n-type) by John Saby . According to Dunlap and Hall, p-type regions were created by thermal diffusion of the indium into the germanium. Dunlap then examined the different diffusion rates of p- and n-type doping in germanium. John Bardeen (1952) took up this following Dunlap and suggested that pnp transistors could be made by differential diffusion. Independently, however, there were already developments in 1951 at Bell Laboratories by the chemist Calvin Souther Fuller . The first germanium transistors with the production of pn junctions by diffusion come from Charles A. Lee (1954), for silicon from Nick Holonyak (pnp, 1954/55) and Morris Tanenbaum (npn, 1955).

In 1957 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . From 1959 to 1993 he was the editor of Solid State Electronics.

He had been married since 1940 and had a daughter. He last lived in West Newton , Massachusetts .

Fonts

Original work on the production of pn junctions with diffusion:

  • with Hall Pn junctions prepared by impurity diffusion. In: Physical Review. 80, 1950, pp. 467-468.
  • American Physical Society bulletin. 27, No. 1, 1952, p. 40.
  • Diffusion of Impurities in Germanium. In: Physical Review. Volume 94, 1954, pp. 1531-1540.

Books:

  • Solid state electronics. Pergamon Press, 1960.
  • Introduction to semiconductors. Wiley, 1957.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to Lawrence Badash ( Memento from February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Career data based on American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  3. ↑ Kirpal Chronicle of Electrical Engineering: Semiconductors, Transistors and Microelectronics , VDE ( Memento from February 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Mark Burgess Diffusion Technologies at Bell Laboratories , 2010
personal data
SURNAME Dunlap, William Crawford
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Denver
DATE OF DEATH January 25, 2011