Shuji Nakamura: The Man Who Gave Us The Blue LED Despite All Odds

With the invention of the first LED featuring a red color, it seemed only a matter of time before LEDs would appear with other colors. Indeed, soon green and other colors joined the LED revolution, but not blue. Although some dim prototypes existed, none of them were practical enough to be considered for commercialization. The subject of a recent [Veritasium] video, the core of the problem was that finding a material with the right bandgap and other desirable properties remained elusive. It was in this situation that at the tail end of the 1980s a young engineer at Nichia in Japan found himself pursuing a solution to this conundrum.

Although Nichia was struggling at the time due to the competition in the semiconductor market, its president was not afraid to take a gamble on a promise, which is why this young engineer – [Shuji Nakamura] – got permission to try his wits at the problem. This included a year long study trip to Florida to learn the ins and outs of a new technology called metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD, also metalorganic vapor-phase epitaxy). Once back in Japan, he got access to a new MOCVD machine at Nichia, which he quickly got around to heavily modifying into the now well-known two-flow reactor version which improves the yield.

By the time that [Shuji] had returned to Japan, however, the old president had retired and his son had taken over, who was far less interested in risky ventures. When [Shuji] also sought to investigate gallium nitride crystal-based blue LEDs rather than the much more promising zinc-selenium, he got messages and calls from management to cease his research and focus on something more productive. Yet he knew that he was closing in on something, and worked tirelessly through solving the remaining issues with adapting the MOCVD machine, the interface layer to grow the GaN on, and so on.

Ultimately through an annealing process and the use of an indium gallium nitride-based electron well (with aluminium gallium nitride ‘hill’ as barrier) he managed to boost the brightness of the LED from an early 42 µW to 1,500 µW when the LED was presented to the public in 1992. Despite this success and the immense boost it gave Nichia’s fortunes, [Shuji] never got the acknowledgement from his employer, nor shared in the revenue.

Although [Shuji] is now clearly happily working in the US on semiconductor research and even started his own nuclear fusion undertaking, it remains a bitter note that the inventor of blue LEDs and thus LED lighting had to go through such an ordeal. The recognition from [Veritasium]’s interview and documentary is definitely welcome to somewhat right a historic wrong.

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• Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/14/shuji-nakamura-the-man-who-gave-us-the-blue-led-despite-all-odds/