EW News 11/02/2004 - Blue LED creator gets £103m
Blue LED creator gets £103m Richard Ball
Blue LED and laser diode inventor Shuji Nakamura has been awarded
£103m by a Japanese court, recognising his work at Nichia.
Nakamura sued Nichia in 2001, claiming he should benefit from his
work and patents on blue LEDs.
Last year he lost part of the lawsuit, with Nichia maintaining
ownership of the patents. Nichia has already filed an appeal
against the compensation ruling.
Nakamura is now a professor at the University of California in
Santa Barbara. His major achievement at Nichia was to produce InGaN
devices using metal organic chemical vapour deposition, despite
extremely high defect densities.
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