Herbert Kroemer

Herbert Kroemer (born August 25, 1928) is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Gottingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot-electron effects in the then-new transistor, setting the stage for a career in research on the physics of semiconductor devices.

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He worked in a number of research laboratories in Germany and the United States and taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado from 1968 to 1976. He joined the UCSB faculty in 1976, focusing its semiconductor research program on the emerging compound semiconductor technology rather than on mainstream silicon technology.

Kroemer, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, has always preferred to work on problems that are ahead of mainstream technology. In the 1950s, he invented the drift transistor and was the first to point out that advantages could be gained in various semiconductor devices by incorporating heterojunctions into the devices. Most notably, in 1963 he proposed the concept of the double-heterostructure laser, the central concept in the field of semiconductor lasers. Kroemer became an early pioneer in molecular beam epitaxy, concentrating on applying the technology to untried new materials.

In 2000, he and Zhores I. Alferov were each awarded a quarter of the Nobel Prize in Physics "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics".