BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON

2001 NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY LAUREATES

ANNOUNCED ON MAY 9, 2002, BY THE WHITE HOUSE

John A. Ewen, President, Catalyst Research Corporation, Houston, Texas

 

Arun N. Netravali, Chief Scientist, Lucent Technology and Past President of Bell Lab

            Lucent Technologies--Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey

 

Sidney Petska, M.D., University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey;

Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey

 

Jerry M. Woodall, Yale University, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut;

The Dow Chemical Company, Midland, Michigan

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Jerry M. Woodall
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Field: A pioneer in the research and development of compound semiconductor materials and devices

Citation: "for the invention and development of technologically and commercially important compound semiconductor heterojunction materials, processes, and related devices, such as light-emitting diodes, lasers, ultra-fast transistors, and solar cells."

Brief Biography: Jerry M. Woodall, the C. Baldwin Sawyer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Yale University, has conducted pioneering research in compound semiconductor materials and devices over a career spanning four decades. Fully half of the entire world's annual sales of compound semiconductor components are made possible by his research legacy. He invented electronic and optoelectronic devices seen ubiquitously in modern life, including the red LEDs used in indicators and stoplights, the infrared LED used in CD players, TV remote controls and computer networks, the high speed transistors used in cell phones and satellites, and the weight-efficient solar cell.

Prof. Woodall spent most of the early and mid parts of his career at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he rose to the rank of IBM Fellow.  He built the first high purity single crystals of gallium arsenide there, enabling the first definitive measurements of carrier velocity  versus electric field relationships, as well as GaAs crystals used for the first non-supercooled injection laser. He and Hans Ruprecht pioneered the liquid-phase epitaxial growth of both Si doped GaAs used for high efficiency IR LEDs, and gallium aluminum arsenide (GaAlAs), which led to his most important research contribution so far: the first working heterojunction. They built it from gallium aluminum arsenide mated to gallium arsenide (GaAlAs/GaAs), and it remains the world's most important compound semiconductor heterojunction.

He then invented and patented many important commercial high-speed electronic and photonic devices which depend on the heterojunction, including bright red LEDs and the two classes of ultra-fast transistors, called the heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) and pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (pHEMT).  Many new areas of solid-state physics have evolved and been realized as a result of his work, including the semiconductor superlattice, low-dimensional systems, mesoscopics, and resonant tunneling.

Woodall was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 and is a fellow of the APS, IEEE, ECS, and AVS. He has served as president of the ECS and AVS, and on the board and executive committee of the AIP. He has published 315 publications in the open literature and been issued 67 U.S. patents. He received five major IBM Research Division Awards, 30 IBM Invention Achievement Awards, and an IBM Corporate Award in 1992 for the invention of the GaAlAs/GaAs heterojunction. Other recognition includes a 1975 Industrial Research 100 Award; the 1980 Electronics Division Award of the Electrochemical Society (ECS); the 1984 IEEE Jack A. Morton Award; the 1985 ECS Solid State Science and Technology Award; the 1988 Heinrich Welker Gold Medal and International GaAs Symposium Award; the 1990 American Vacuum Society's (AVS) Medard Welch Award, its highest honor; the 1997 Eta Kappa Nu Vladimir Karapetoff Eminent Members' Award; the 1998 American Society for Engineering Education's General Electric Senior Research Award; and the 1998 ECS Edward Goodrich Acheson Award, its highest honor.

Woodall co-founded LightSpin Technologies, Inc., a high technology startup company, and serves as its Chief Science Officer. From 1993 through 1999, he held the Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professorship of Microelectronics at Purdue University. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell University and a B.S. in metallurgy from MIT.

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