In a ceremony in Nagoya, Japan on 8 August, Gerald Stringfellow, who is a Distinguished Professor in the University of Utah's departments of materials science & engineering and electrical & computer engineering (and dean of the College of Engineering from 1998 to 2003), will receive the International Organization for Crystal Growth's Frank Prize, in honor of his career-long work in developing processes for making light-emitting diodes.
The Frank Prize is an international award given once every three years to a researcher who has made "outstanding contributions to the field of crystal growth through technical achievements, publications and presentations and through their impact worldwide on science and technology."
Stringfellow was a group manager with HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA, in the 1970s when he began developing a new process to create LEDs with multiple colors that require much less power. He proposed organometallic vapor-phase epitaxy (OMVPE) for the deposition of semiconductor alloys incorporating aluminum, gallium, indium and phosphorous on a substrate to create red, orange, yellow and green LED crystals. This led to better HP handheld calculators that used red LEDs for the display.
Stringfellow took his research to the University of Utah, where he was hired as a professor in 1980. He made conceptual advances in the field and would later publish a book on the process that has since become the standard reference for the science of growing LED crystals.
With Stringfellow's work, along with the later development of blue LEDs by Japanese researchers, this technology led to the advancement of LED-backlit flat-screen LCD televisions, cell-phone screens, high-efficiency solar cells and LED light bulbs that are far more efficient than incandescent bulbs (as well as being used in automobile tail-lights as well as traffic and pedestrian lights).
"While professor Stringfellow's invention of organometallic vapor-phase epitaxy facilitated the commercialization of light-emitting diodes and improved the TV and computer displays we all use, its greatest benefit to society is in the energy savings that these devices brought about," comments Richard B. Brown, dean of the College of Engineering.
Other awards received by Stringfellow for his research include the Rosenblatt Prize from the University of Utah and the John Bardeen Award from The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. He also is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
Stringfellow's contributions to semiconductor crystal growth "paved the way for pioneering advances in light-emitting diodes, solar cells and fiber-optic communications," comments Gianluca Lazzi, chair of the University of Utah's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
