Zhores I. Alferov and Herbert Kroemer will share half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics “for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and opto-electronics.” Both are well known in the optoelectronics community. The third recipient is Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, “for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.” All three are IEEE members and Alferov is a LEOS member.
Zhores Alferov, is director of the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Herbert Kroemer is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Their work in the 1950s and 60s, on the design of heterostructures, led to semiconductor lasers that could operate continuously at room temperature and were the precursor of the lasers now used in CD players, bar code readers, and optical fiber data transmission networks, as well as to high speed transistors now used in wireless communications.