Robert Noyce and the tunnel diode

This paper claims that Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Intel Corp., was the inventor of the tunnel diode even as Leo Esaki received the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics for the achievement. When Esaki, then a 49-year old semiconductor research scientist at IBM Corp., won his Nobel Prize, neither he nor th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE spectrum 2005-05, Vol.42 (5), p.49-53
Main Authors: Berlin, L., Casey, C.
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
Cities and towns
Diodes
Electric potential
Electronics
Electrons
History
Insulation
Inventors
Nobel prizes
Noyce, Robert
Personal profiles
Physics
Proving
Quantum mechanics
R&D
Research & development
Scientists
Semiconductor diodes
Semiconductors
Solids
Speech
Switches
Tunnel diodes
Tunneling
Voltage
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Summary:This paper claims that Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Intel Corp., was the inventor of the tunnel diode even as Leo Esaki received the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics for the achievement. When Esaki, then a 49-year old semiconductor research scientist at IBM Corp., won his Nobel Prize, neither he nor the Nobel committee had any idea about Noyce's work. Esaki had made a tunnel diode and measured its current versus voltage behavior 16 years earlier. The Nobel committee, in fact, dated Esaki's discovery from 1957, roughly contemporaneous with Noyce's recollected work in the same field. Noyce offers a notebook from 1956 which contains a complete description of the tunnel diode as proof.
ISSN:0018-9235
1939-9340
DOI:10.1109/MSPEC.2005.1426971