Dec. 26, 2001 – The IEEE has announced two award recipients for 2002 – Herbert Kroemer of UCAL-Santa Barbara and Dr. Yoshio Nishi of Texas Instruments.
Kroemer, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been named 2002 recipient of the IEEE Medal of Honor. Yoshio Nishi, senior vice president and director of TI’s research and development, was named the 2002 IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal recipient.
Kroemer is being honored for his pioneering work in heterostructure-based transistors and light-emitting devices. The transistor portion of Kroemer’s heterostructure research played a key role in the development of the cell phone and other wireless communications technologies.
Kroemer also applied the heterostructure principle to light-emitting devices, which allowed them to operate continuously at room temperature. This advance paved the way for the development of the semiconductor lasers used in CD players, fiber optics, and other applications. It is also central to non-laser light-emitting diodes (LEDs). His Nobel Prize-winning work was published in a 1963 paper, “A Proposed Class of Heterojunction Injection Lasers,” in the Proceedings of the IEEE.
Nishi joined TI in 1995 as VP and director of R&D, and was named senior VP in 1996. He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University since 1986. In that role, he co- founded a Fellow-Mentor-Advisory Program for Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems, which has been viewed as a model for strong industry-university research collaboration.
Established in 2000, the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal is awarded to individuals demonstrating commitment in areas such as technology and business development, industry leadership, and development of technology policy and standards. Nominations are initiated by IEEE members and the public, and then are reviewed by a panel of peers. The panel’s recommendations are submitted to the organization’s awards board, prior to ultimate approval by the IEEE board of directors.
Kroemer, a fellow of the IEEE and the American Physical Society, also has received honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, the University of Lund, Sweden, and. the University of Colorado. He is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Electrical Engineering and the recipient of numerous awards and honors. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Gottingen, Germany.
Nishi is also a fellow of the IEEE, and has served on the Boards of International SEMATECH, Semiconductor Research Consortium (SRC), MARCO and the Semiconductor Industry Association’s (SIA) Technology Strategy Committee. In addition to holding more than 50 patents, Dr. Nishi has published more the 120 papers and conference presentations and 10 books. He is also a recipient of numerous awards, including IR 100 awards in 1982 and 1986 for nonvolatile memory productization, and the IECE Japan Award in 1972. In addition, Dr. Nishi was the 1995 recipient of the Jack A. Morton Award, given for contributions to the development of MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) device technology. Dr. Nishi received a bachelor’s of science degree in metallurgy from Waseda University and a Ph.D. in electronics engineering from the University of Tokyo.