Shuji Nakamura
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Shuji Nakamura is a Japanese-born American electronic engineer that specializes in the field of semiconductor technology. His most notable accomplishment is the invention of the blue LED light which won him a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014.
Early Years and Career
Shuji Nakamura was born on May 22, 1954 in Ehime, Japan. He recieved all four of his degrees in Electrical Enginnering from the University of Tokushima, Japan. He recieved B.E. in 1977, an M.S in 1979., and finally his Ph.D in 1994. He joined Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd in 1979. In 1988, he spent a year at the University of Florida as a visiting research associate. For his research was awarded a D.Eng. degree from the University of Tokushima in 1994. He left Nichia Corporation in 1999 and became a professor of engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Research
While working for Nichia, Nakamura invented the first high brightness gallium nitride (GaN) LED. Its brilliant blue light, when partially converted to yellow by a phosphor coating, became the key to white LED lighting, which went into production in 1993. In 1989 he started the research of blue LEDs using group-III nitride materials. In 1990, he developed a novel MOCVD system for GaN growth, which was named Two-Flow MOCVD. Using this system, he was able to grow the highest crystal quality GaN-based materials. In his own opinion, the invention of Two-Flow MOCVD was the biggest breakthrough in his life and his GaN-based research. In 1991, he obtained p-type GaN films by thermal annealing for the first time which allowed him to clarify the Hydrogen passivation as a hole compensation mechanism for the first time. In 1992, he grew the first InGaN single crystal layers which showed the first band to band emission in PL and EL at room temperature. These InGaN layers have been used for an emitting layer of all of the blue/green/white LEDs and all of the violet/blue/green semiconductor lasers. His invention of InGaN layers was extremely important because without it, there would have been no blue/green/white LEDs or violet/blue/green semiconductor laser diodes. In 1993 and 1995 he developed the first group-III nitride-based high-brightness blue/green LEDs. He also developed the first group-III nitride-based violet laser diodes (LDs) in 1995. In 1996, his former company, Nichia, started selling white LEDs by using his invention of blue LEDs. These white LEDs have been used for all kinds of lighting applications in order to save energy consumptions. The electric consumption of white LEDs is about one tenth in comparison with that of conventional incandescent bulb lamp nowadays. In 1999, Nichia started selling the violet laser diodes for the application of blue-ray DVDs. Without his invention of violet laser diodes, the blue ray DVD would not have been created.
Notable Awards
Over the years, Professor Nakamura has become very decorated with awards. He won the Nishina Memorial Award in 1996, the Materials Research Society Medal Award in 1997, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Jack A. Morton Award and the British Rank Prize in 1998, the Benjamin Franklin Medal Award in 2002, the Millennium Technology Prize in 2006, the Czochralski Award in 2007, the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical Scientific Research in 2008, The Harvey Award in 2009, and the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award in 2012 awarded by The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS). With his many accomplishments, he was elected as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2014, he won the Nobel Prize of Physics for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015. Most recently, he has received the 2015 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering and the 2015 Global Energy Prize in Russia. He holds more than 200 US patents, over 300 Japanese patents and he has published over 550 papers in his field