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MAY 23, 2005
The Bright Light Behind LEDs Nick Holonyak Jr. believed in 1962 that he had created "the ultimate lamp." And now "we know for sure that incandescent light is really doomed" Because of Nick Holonyak Jr., the metaphor for a bright idea needs to be updated, writes Evan I. Schwartz in his book Juice: The Creative Fuel that Drives World-Class Inventors (2004, Harvard Business School Press). The notion of a light bulb as a symbol of invention and creativity is outdated since the bulb itself is outmoded compared to the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) pioneered by Holonyak. BusinessWeek Senior Writer Otis Port talked with Holonyak, who's currently an electrical engineering professor at the University of Illinois, about his many accomplishments. Edited excerpts follow: Q: You've gotten a couple of new patents in the past year. How many does that make? A: I'm up to 34 now -- and well over 500 papers. But only a few patents are recognized as benchmark patents. Q: Those are the ones that actually earn money? A: Some have -- and I'm happy to say it's quite a bit of money, in fact. But I don't get a big part of it. After the university pays all the expenses and fees, the rest is split, with three-quarters going to the university and one-quarter to the inventor. Q: What about your early patents at General Electric (GE )? A: At GE, the inventor got just a token share of stock, plus a little cash to pay the tax on the stock. My patent on the [semiconductor] alloy for LED crystals was quickly superseded by chemists who knew more about growing crystals and had more advanced equipment than I did. So that patent didn't pay off for GE. But another GE patent did pay. It was for the shorted emitter in thyristors -- the device that's used in all wall dimmer switches. Q: Speaking of being superseded, how could you be so sure in 1962 that LEDs would replace incandescent lights? A: I remember worrying about that -- how could I justify to my boss at GE that this was more than just a nice, interesting area of research? So I was able to show, through a fundamental physics argument, that the LED was the ultimate lamp. Nothing could exceed its performance. Of course, there was a lot of work that had to be done to get to the point where LEDs would replace incandescent lamps. But I knew it would happen, as I predicted in Reader's Digest in 1963. I just wasn't sure on what time frame. Now, yeah, we know for sure that incandescent light is really doomed. Q: But GE didn't stick with LEDs, did they? A: No. They were ahead of everybody in the 1960s, but that all went bye-bye. Here's a company with a big lamp division in Cleveland, and they let it get away. Now GE has to play catch-up in a field that they pioneered. They have to get back in because Philips [Electronics] is a big player in LEDs. Q: What happened? A: Look, [former GE CEO Jack] Welch was very good at some things, but he wasn't worth a damn at high tech and new ventures. He didn't know how to make that next step in business evolution. Dave Packard [co-founder of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ )] knew how to do this: Spin off the new technology to younger, technologically capable managers. But Welch's ego was too big for him to do that. Q: You said a little bit ago that making LEDs competitive with ordinary light bulbs would take lots of work. Most of that was done by your former students, right? A: There's a Moore's Law kind of thing [Moore's Law relates to the steady progression in the power of computer chips], but we tend to call it the Craford Curve. It's named for George Craford. He's now at Lumileds Lighting, a creation of Agilent Technologies [an HP spinoff] and Philips. Lumileds is a main source of new high-tech development in LEDs. Counting Craford [who is chief technology officer], they have eight of my former PhD students. Craford has chased this technology all the way from where I began to where it is today. In 40 years, he has helped push the performance of LEDs up three orders of magnitude. The Craford Curve may go on for another 40 years, but nothing is going to stop it now.  Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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