'PIONEER' AND 'VISIONARY' are often overused today, but both of these terms are accurately applied to Professor Nick Holonyak, Jr. This groundbreaking academic - fondly called just 'Nick' by his friends, colleagues and sixty PhD graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) - was not only a very innovative and hard-working scientist and engineer, but also a role model for his students for his perseverance, his ability to create new and exciting results from a modest laboratory not stocked with a lot of advanced equipment, and his making sure that the graduate students got adequate credit for their work. Holonyak's pioneering work in semiconductor materials and devices underpins much of the internet, lighting, telecom, visual displays, as well as the face-recognition systems, e.g., 'Face ID', and high-efficiency power device technologies being developed today. His many innovations include the first ternary compound semiconductor epitaxial layers, the first Ⅲ-Ⅴ heterojunctions, the first ternary LED and laser diode, and the first Ⅲ-Ⅴ quaternary and quaternary laser diodes. In addition, he is to thank for creating the first processes for producing: a stable Ⅲ-Ⅴ semiconductor native oxide, impurity-induced layer disordering, quantum-well laser diodes, the transistor laser and various silicon-based technologies.
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