1. Nick Holonyak is noted particularly for his 1962 invention and first demonstration of a semiconductor laser diode that emitted visible light.
10 Facts About Nick Holonyak
1. 2.
Nick Holonyak was then working at a General Electric research laboratory near Syracuse, New York.
3.
Nick Holonyak left General Electric in 1963 and returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he later became John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics.
4.
Nick Holonyak once worked 30 straight hours on the Illinois Central Railroad before realizing that a life of hard labor was not what he wanted and he would prefer to go to school instead.
5.
Nick Holonyak earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
6.
In 1954, Nick Holonyak went to Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on silicon-based electronic devices.
7.
Nick Holonyak grew crystals of the alloy GaAs0.60P0.40; a GaAs laser diode that worked in the infrared had recently been demonstrated by his General Electric colleague Robert N Hall.
8.
In 1963, Nick Holonyak became a professor at the University of Illinois.
9.
Nick Holonyak predicted that his LEDs would replace the incandescent light bulb of Thomas Edison in the February 1963 issue of Reader's Digest, and as LEDs improve in quality and efficiency they are gradually replacing incandescents as the bulb of choice.
10.
Nick Holonyak died on September 18,2022, in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 93.