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Walter H. Schottky

Walter Hermann Schottky (July 23, 1886, Zürich, Switzerland – March 4, 1976, Pretzfeld, West Germany) was a German physicist who invented the screen-grid vacuum tube in 1915 and the tetrode in 1919 while working at Siemens. In 1938, Schottky formulated a theory predicting the Schottky effect, now used in Schottky diodes.

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He was awarded the Royal Society's Hughes medal in 1936 for his discovery of the Schrot effect (spontaneous current variations in high-vacuum discharge tubes, called by him the "Schrot effect": literally, the "small shot effect") in thermionic emission and his invention of the screen-grid tetrode and a superheterodyne method of receiving wireless signals.

In 1964 he received the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring honoring his ground-breaking work on the physical understanding of many phenomenon that led to many important technical appliances, among them tube amplifiers and semiconductors.

Note: The invention of superheterodyne is usually attributed to Edwin Armstrong. However, Schottky published an article in Proc. IRE that he had also invented something similar.