Nick Holonyak


Nick Holonyak Jr. was an American electronics engineer. He is noted particularly for his 1962 invention and first demonstration of a semiconductor laser diode that emitted visible light. This device was the forerunner of the first generation of commercial light-emitting diodes. He was then working at a General Electric research laboratory near Syracuse, New York. He left General Electric in 1963 and returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he later became John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics.

Early life and career

Nick Holonyak Jr. was born on November 3, 1928, in Zeigler, Illinois, to Rusyn immigrants. His 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 would prefer to go to school instead. According to a Chicago Tribune article in 2003, "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 earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois. Holonyak was John Bardeen's first doctoral student there. In 1954, Holonyak went to Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on silicon-based electronic devices. From 1955 to 1957, he served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
From 1957 to 1963, Holonyak was a scientist at General Electric's Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory near Syracuse, New York. Here he invented, fabricated, and demonstrated the first visible light laser diode on October 9, 1962. He grew crystals of the alloy GaAs0.60P0.40; a GaAs laser diode that worked in the infrared had recently been demonstrated by his General Electric colleague Robert N. Hall. The GaAs0.60P0.40 laser diode worked at low temperatures, but the device still functioned as a light-emitting diode at room temperature. The demonstration of red light emission from the diode inspired the article "Light of Hope – or Terror" in Reader's Digest. GaAsP was the material used for the first generation of commercial LEDs that came to market a few years later.
In 1963, Holonyak became a professor at the University of Illinois. In 1993, he was named the John Bardeen Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics. He investigated methods for manufacturing quantum dot lasers. He and Dr. Milton Feng ran a transistor laser research center at the university funded by $6.5 million from the United States Department of Defense through DARPA. Holonyak retired from Illinois in 2013.
Ten of his 60 former doctoral students have developed new uses for LED technology at Philips Lumileds Lighting Company in Silicon Valley.

Inventions

In addition to introducing the III-V alloy LED, Holonyak held 41 patents. His other inventions include the red-light semiconductor laser, usually called the laser diode and the shorted emitter p-n-p-n switch.
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, co-authored with S. F. Bevacqua in 1962, announced the creation of the first visible-light laser diode. 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.

Personal life

Holonyak and his wife, Katherine, were married for over 60 years. He died on September 18, 2022, in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 93.

Recognition

Awards

Many colleagues expressed their belief that Holonyak deserved the Nobel Prize for his invention of the GaAsP laser and LED. On this subject, he said: "It's ridiculous to think that somebody owes you something. We're lucky to be alive, when it comes down to it." In October 2014, Holonyak reversed his stance by stating "I find this one insulting" in reaction to news that the inventors of the blue LED were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, instead of his fellow LED researchers.

Commemoration