UC Santa Barbara professor Shuji Nakamura shows off a blue LED, the innovation that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics this month. The blue light was the missing ingredient in a quest for energy-efficient LED lighting.
A tiny blue light might change the world.
So says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which this month awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of a blue LED – a light-emitting diode. The winners were a trio of Japanese researchers who perfected the technology in the 1990s.
It's a deceptively simple technology that may someday overtake the conventional, incandescent light bulb with an energy-efficient alternative.
The Nobel committee says a quarter of all the world's electricity consumption is used for light, so a more efficient alternative could make power more accessible – and dramatically reduce the burden that power generation places on the environment.
And yet one of Oregon's top tech executives says the Nobel committee made a serious mistake. It's not the invention they got wrong, but the individuals – he says they awarded the prize to the team that perfected the blue LED rather than the researchers who invented it.
"It (the Nobel Prize) almost always goes to the person who has the idea and shows the first demonstration of the product," said Wally Rhines, chief executive of Wilsonville-based Mentor Graphics Corp., Oregon's largest pure technology company.
And Rhines says he's in a position to know: His name is listed on the
patent for the blue LED.
The scientific Nobels often spark controversy, in large measure because it's not always clear who originated an invention. Research often takes decades, with scientists advancing ideas conceived by others, many years earlier.
That's what happened in this case, everyone agrees.
Start by going back to 1972, when Rhines was a graduate student at Stanford University sharing an office with an RCA engineer named Herb Maruska. Maruska was on leave from RCA, which hoped LCD screens might enable large, flat-panel TVs and replace bulky cathode-ray tubes. (That did eventually happen, of course, but it took decades.)
While researchers had invented green and red LEDs, they needed a blue one to produce white light. And every effort had failed.
When Maruska came to Stanford on an RCA fellowship, he brought along his research work and even some of his equipment. He was among a group of RCA researchers tasked with inventing that blue LED. But materials they tried failed to produce that distinctive hue.
Initial efforts focused on gallium nitride, whose position on the periodic table suggested they might produce blue light. Looking left on the periodic table, Maruska tried zinc and cadmium without getting the results he wanted. So Rhines looked a few spaces in the other direction on the periodic table and suggested magnesium might be worth a try.
An LED is light produced from a semiconductor, which is made from a crystal grown at high temperatures and infused with specific properties. Maruska's first effort to grow a crystal at very high temperatures melted the crucible, but after a couple weeks Maruska had a transparent film. Shine a light through it, peer through a microscope and there was a distinctive blue hue.
"It was right on the edge between blue and violet," Rhines recalls, "but of course so are all the LEDs today."
The original light was faint, recalls Maruska, now 70, retired and living in Orlando. But within a month they had a version plainly visible in a lit room. After 42 years, an RCA museum in New Jersey turned it on this week to demonstrate that it still works.
The resulting patent lists Maruska and Rhines as inventors along with a third researcher, David Stevenson. (Here's
on their work.)
RCA ran into financial trouble, though, and failed to capitalize on his invention.
"He was very close to having the more efficient version when RCA shut down the program," Rhines said. "He was actually laid off."
Meanwhile, Rhines, now 67, went on to become an executive at Texas Instruments and, since 1993, CEO of Mentor, which employs around 1,000 in Wilsonville and reported nearly $1.2 billion in revenue last year.
That original blue-LED patent expired in 1991 and Rhines said, to his knowledge, no one ever made any money off it. Rhines never forgot, though, and kept his role on his official corporate biography.
The Nobel Prize winners -- their names are Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura – readily credit the Stanford and RCA research. Nakamura, now a professor at U.C. Santa Barbara, highlights Maruska's work when recounting the history of the blue LED.
"There are no doubts that his contribution is great!" Nakamura wrote in an e-mail Thursday.
Both Maruska and Rhines are delighted to see the results of their work in the news this month. But they feel differently about the Nobel.
In Rhines view, Maruska was overlooked. He wrote an opinion piece for EE Times arguing that, by excluding Maruska from the list of recipients the Nobel committee was favoring optimization over scientific inspiration.
To Maruska, though, the Japanese researchers who won the Nobel rescued his work from oblivion and turned it from an academic concept into something with broad, practical applications.
"My invention wouldn't be worth anything if they hadn't continued with it," Maruska said. "That's the only good way to look at it."