Proceedings of the IEEE

In this paper, an account is presented of the semiconductor, because of the energy gap bipolar with electron (e) and hole (h) conductivity, becoming ingeniously with little or no technology (Bardeen and Brattain, Dec. 1947) the transistor, a triode (at first just a germanium “base” crystal and a point contact “emitter” and “collector”), a low impedance &#x... View full abstract»

The demonstration of direct bandgap alloy semiconductor (GaAsP) visible (red) emitters by Nick Holonyak at General Electric in 1962 began the evolution of high-brightness LED technology. Today, high-brightness LEDs are a growing $12 billion business with applications which include traffic signals, automobiles, camera flash, display backlighting, and general illumination. This paper will discuss th... View full abstract»

Semiconductor revolution of the 20th century determined not only technological, but also social development of the modern society. The precursors of modern semiconductor electronics were Oleg Losev's discoveries of “crystadine” and “light-emitting diode (LED)” nearly 100 years ago. Creation of the transistor and semiconductor laser and LED based on the homo p-n structur... View full abstract»

The double-heterostructure (DH) concept for lasers and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) grew out of the prelaser context of increasing the speed of the early bipolar junction transistors. The 1954 idea was to change the energy gap itself, with a graded-gap base, or a wide-gap emitter. This led to the 1957 more general concept of quasi-electric fields and potentials in structures with a position-depend... View full abstract»

The metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technology for the growth of III-V compound semiconductors has been developed over the past 40+ years to become the dominant epitaxial materials technology for both research and production of light-emitting devices as well as many other optoelectronic devices. Because of the flexibility and control offered by this process, and the material quality... View full abstract»

Drastic improvements in the crystal quality of GaN enabled the conductivity control of both p- and n-type nitride semiconductors. This led the production of the high-brightness GaN-based p-n junction blue-light-emitting diode (LED) and the high-performance violet/blue laser diode (LD). The development of blue LEDs has allowed us to complete the set of three primary light colors with semiconductors... View full abstract»

The history of development for gallium-nitride-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is reviewed. We identify two broad developments in GaN-based LED technology: first, the key breakthroughs that enabled the development of GaN-based devices on foreign substrates like sapphire (first-generation LEDs), and, second, a new wave of devices benefiting from developments in GaN substrate manufacturing, which... View full abstract»

Large GaN single-crystal substrates with low dislocation density are the key materials for the commercial production of GaN-based laser diodes. We developed a new method to reduce the dislocations, named dislocation elimination by the epitaxial-growth with inverse-pyramidal pits (DEEP). A thick GaN film is epitaxially grown on a GaAs substrate with hydride vapor-phase epitaxy and then is separated... View full abstract»

The vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) is becoming a key device in high-speed optical local area networks (LANs) and even wide-area networks (WANs). This device is also enabling ultraparallel data transfer in equipment and computer systems, including storage area networks (SANs) and wide optoelectronics fields. In this paper, we will review its physics and the progress of technology co... View full abstract»

Since the discovery of III-V oxidation by Dallesasse and Holonyak in 1989, significant progress has been made, both technically and commercially, on the use of oxides in compound semiconductor devices. The process-induced modification of refractive index and conductivity allows control of the two carriers of information in optoelectronic systems, the photon and the electron, enabling wide-ranging ... View full abstract»

Twenty years after Dr. Holonyak's invention, a compact disc (CD) was introduced to the market in 1982. A laser diode is always in the heart of optical storage systems and a variety of other industrial applications. Innovations in laser diode technologies have brought optical storage evolutions from CD to digital versatile disc (DVD) and then Blu-ray disc (BD) every ten years. Since the most import... View full abstract»

The discovery of the visible light-emitting diode (LED) 50 years ago by Holonyak and Bevacqua and the associated demonstration of the viability of the III-V semiconductor alloy created a foundational basis for the field of optoelectronics. Key advances which enabled the progression from the first visible LED to today's III-V photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are described. Furthermore, the curre... View full abstract»

The quantum-well (QW) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) laser [the transistor laser (TL)], inherently a fast switching device, operates by transporting small minority base charge densities ~1016 cm-3 over nanoscale base thickness ( 900 A) in picoseconds. The base QW acts as an optical “collector,” in addition to the usual electrical collector, that selects... View full abstract»

This month we continue a series of reprints from the IEEE Global History Network's STARS articles.1 STARS is an online compendium of invited, peer-reviewed articles on the history of major developments in electrical and computer science and technology. Some light editing has been done, along with the addition of a few illustrations, to make the article more suitable for a journal publication. View full abstract»