LED, OLED, DISPLAYS & OPTO NEWS ON ELECTRONICS WEEKLY
50 year history of the LED
Back in 1960 Electronics Weekly was born into a ferment of III-V semiconductor research that within two years would produce the first practical LED.
In 1960 Dr Nick Holonyak of General Electric was developing an unusual material, GaAsP, as a route to wide bandgap tunnel diodes.
When an infra-red GaAs semiconductor laser was demonstrated in 1962, Holonyak with his wider bandwidth GaAsP was in the perfect position to have a go at making a visible version.
With advice from GaAs laser pioneer and fellow GE employee Dr Robert Hall, Holonyak made his visible laser later in 1962.
It this October 1962 paper on the GaAsP laser for which Holonyak became known as the father of the LED – where LEDs are defined as visible light emitters based upon minority carrier injection and radiative recombination of excess carriers.
The same material is still used to produce deep red LEDs today.
Holonyak had another connection with early light emitters.
He had been John Bardeen’s first graduate student, the same Bardeen that invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 with Walter Brattain and William Shockley.
Shockley, along with Howard Briggs and James Haynes, applied for a patent on infrared LEDs in both silicon (1.1µm) and germanium (800nm) as early as 1951.
The silicon device only appears to have worked at liquid nitrogen temperatures, but the germanium LED worked cryogenically and at room temperature.
1951 is an early year for LEDs, but it is not the first...
Read the full article - 50 year history of the LED