2017 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering presented to Nick Holonyak, Jr., Ph.D.

摘要

Professor Nick Holonyak, Jr. has made many contributions to the field of electrical engineering. In 1960 he created the first binary III-V alloy compound semiconductor employing a "closed-tube" form of vapor-phase epitaxy (VPE). Realizing the flexibility and utility of combining different binary semiconductors to create entirely new ternary materials with properties that the binary compounds could not have, the first "bandgap engineering" was performed. This resulted in the demonstration of the first practical and efficient visible (red) laser diode and LED in 1962, thus laying the groundwork to produce (white) solid state lighting. This was a historic feat given that in 2015 a quarter of the world's energy was consumed by lighting.Based on these techniques, Holonyak and his students demonstrated the first laser diode using ultra-thin active layers-the first "quantum-well (QW) lasers-in 1977. This technology underpins essentially all of the photonic sources-both LEDs and lasers-employed today. In fact, the compact lasers used in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), as well as the high-speed infrared lasers which are currently used in optical communications as the back-bone of the Internet and optical storage technologies, rely upon many of these innovations. This has affected fiber-optic communications and the Internet, CDs, DVDs, medical diagnosis, surgery, ophthalmology, printing, materials processing, instrumentation, spectroscopy, and many other applications.