Nick Holonyak, Jr. (born November 3, 1928, in Zeigler, Illinois) invented the first practically useful visible LED in 1962 while working as a consulting scientist at a General Electric Company laboratory in Syracuse, New York and has been called "the father of the light-emitting diode".
He is a John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer
Engineering and Physics and Professor of electrical and computer
engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he
has been since 1963.
Inventions
In addition to
introducing the III-V alloy LED, Holonyak holds 41 patents. His other
inventions include the red-light semiconductor laser, usually called the laser
diode (used in CD and DVD players and cell phones) and the shorted emitter
p-n-p-n switch (used in light dimmers and power tools). He helped create the
first light dimmer while at GE.
In 2006, the
American Institute of Physics decided on the five most important papers in each
of its journals since it was founded 75 years ago. Two of these five papers, in
the journal Applied Physics Letters, were co-authored by Holonyak. The first
one, coauthored with S. F. Bevacqua in 1962, announced the creation of the
first visible-light LED. The second, co-authored primarily with Milton Feng in 2005,
announced the creation of a transistor laser that can operate at room
temperatures. Holonyak predicted that his LEDs would replace the incandescent
light bulb of Thomas Edison in the February 1963 issue of Reader's Digest, and
as LEDs improve in quality and efficiency they are gradually replacing
incandescents as the bulb of choice.
Background
Holonyak's
parents were Ukrainian immigrants who settled in Southern Illinois; Holonyak's
father worked in a coal mine. Holonyak was the first member of his family to
receive any type of formal schooling. He once worked 30 straight hours on the
Illinois Central Railroad before realizing that a life of hard labor was not
what he wanted and he'd prefer to go to school instead. According to Knight
Ridder, "The cheap and reliable semiconductor lasers critical to DVD
players, bar code readers and scores of other devices owe their existence in
some small way to the demanding workload thrust upon Downstate railroad crews
decades ago."
Holonyak was John
Bardeen's first Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. He received his undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. (1954)
from the same university. He created the first visible semiconductor lasers in
1960. In 1963, he again joined Dr. Bardeen, the co-inventor of the transistor,
at the University of Illinois and worked on quantum wells and quantum-well
lasers.
University of
Illinois
As of 2007, he is
the John Bardeen Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign[3] and is
investigating methods for manufacturing quantum dot lasers. He has been married
to his wife Katherine for 51 years. He no longer teaches classes, but he
researches full-time. He and Dr. Milton Feng run a transistor laser research
center at the University funded by $6.5 million from the United States
Department of Defense through DARPA.
10 of his 60
former doctoral students develop new uses for LED technology at Philips
Lumileds Lighting Company in Silicon Valley.
Awards and honors
Holonyak has been
presented awards by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Emperor Akihito of Japan
and Vladimir Putin.
In 1989, Holonyak
received the IEEE Edison Medal for 'an outstanding career in the field of
electrical engineering with contributions to major advances in the field of
semiconductor materials and devices.' Holonyak's former student, Russell Dupuis
from the Georgia Institute of Technology, won this same award in 2007.
In 1995, he was
awarded the $500,000 Japan Prize for 'Outstanding contributions to research and
practical applications of light emitting diodes and lasers.
In 2003, he was
awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor.
He has also
received the Global Energy International Prize, the National Medal of
Technology, the Order of Lincoln Medallion, and the 2004 Lemelson-MIT Prize,
also worth $500,000.[4] He has also received the Frederic Ives Medal of the
Optical Society of America.
Many colleagues
have expressed their belief that he deserves the Nobel Prize for his invention
of the LED. On this subject, Holonyak says, "It's ridiculous to think that
somebody owes you something. We're lucky to be alive, when it comes down to
it."
On 9 November
2007, Holonyak was honored on the University of Illinois campus with a historical
marker recognizing his development of the quantum-well laser. It is located on
the Bardeen Engineering Quadrangle near where the old Electrical Engineering
Research Laboratory used to stand.
In 2008, he was
inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (Announced February 14, 2008)
(May 2–3, 2008 at Akron, Ohio
