UCLA Engineering Professor Eli Yablonovitch
Engineering’s Father of Photonic
Crystals Eli Yablonovitch Honored as UCLA’s 99th Faculty
Research Lecturer
"We're all here as observers
of what's around us and trying to anticipate what's ahead,"
said UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
professor Eli Yablonovitch as he opened the 99th Faculty Research
Lecture on “The End of the Semiconductor Roadmap: The
Collision of Physics, Economics, and Sociology,” on October
25 in the Schoenberg Auditorium. "This lecture is about
trying to anticipate the future of the electronics industry."
The fall Faculty Lecture, which
honors the university’s most distinguished scholars in
science, the arts, humanities, and social disciplines, was attended
by a wide cross-section of faculty and colleagues.
Yablonovitch addressed the history
of the transistor and shared his prediction that "the next
ten years will see more change in transistor physics than has
occurred over the past 40 years."
Among the changes Yablonovitch
sees are the functions of a laptop shrinking into a cell phone,
the wireless revolution - or wireless everywhere, and the emergence
of radio frequency identification tags on everything over the
cost of $1. In addition, the professor foresees the computer
hard disk being replaced by semiconductor flash memory, and
the rise of efficient speech recognition which ultimately will
make the computer keyboard obsolete.
That's not to say the future is
without challenges. As one of the few industries to enjoy a
50-year period of prosperity, it's unclear whether it can continue
such sustained growth into the future.
Known among his peers as the “father
of photonic crystals,” Yablonovitch is credited with having
established that entirely new field of optics, making lasting
contributions with major implications for the development of
opto-electronic chips, and quantum optics. He made the first
photonic crystal with a 3D forbidden band gap, often called
Yablonovite, the electromagnetic analog of an electronic semiconductor.
Photonic crystals — artificial
structures that manipulate beams of light in the same way that
silicon and other semiconductors control electric currents —
function as “semiconductors of light.” It has recently
been discovered that peacocks and parrots derive their brilliant
colors from naturally occurring photonic crystals.
Yablonovitch’s impact in
the research community goes well beyond the introduction of
photonic crystals, including seminal work introducing statistical
light trapping for high-efficiency solar cells and the discovery
that a common form of Silicon is coated with hydrogen that is
stable in air. He invented an improvement to semiconductor lasers
that is universally employed in all telecommunications lasers,
red laser pointers, and DVD players.
Graduating with a Ph.D. in applied
physics from Harvard University in 1972, Yablonovitch has worked
in both academia and industry. He spent two years at Bell Telephone
Laboratories, taught applied physics at Harvard for five years,
then joined Exxon to undertake research on photovoltaic solar
energy. In 1984, he became a staff member at Bell Communications
Research, where he began his work in photonic crystals. He joined
UCLA’s electrical engineering faculty in 1992.
In addition to his other responsibilities
at UCLA, Yablonovitch is director of the Center for Nanoscience
Innovation for Defense, a $20 million, multi-campus project
sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, designed
facilitate the rapid transition of research innovations in the
nanosciences into applications for the defense sector. He is
co-director of the National Science Foundation-sponsored Center
for Scalable and Integrated Nano-Manufacturing, an $18 million
venture that will focus on developing cost-effective nanomanufacturing
technologies by working closely with industry. He also is an
active member of the California NanoSystems Institute.
Yablonovitch has been elected to
both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy
of Science for his extensive contributions in nonlinear optics,
photonic crystals, and photonic bandgap materials.
For more information on the Faculty
Research Lecture program, please visit: http://www.senate.ucla.edu/Awards/FRLProgramDescription.htm.
For additional information on Yablonovitch,
visit: http://www.ee.ucla.edu/faculty/bios/yablonovitch.htm.
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