Fernando Ponce and Dave Bour
Xerox PARC
A new family of materials has become available for the production of light emitting devices operating in the green to ultraviolet range of the visible spectrum. These semiconductors are based on GaN, and their properties are strikingly different from other semiconductors used in optoelectronics. Recent developments in the fabrication of these materials have quickly led to the commercial availability of green and blue emitters. Light-emitting diodes based on these materials are finding applications in full-color flat-panel displays, and blue and ultraviolet laser diodes promise high density data storage and high-resolution printing. Their use in every day lighting promise great savings in energy and maintenance costs. In this forum, Fernando Ponce will review the historical development of these materials, their properties, and their use in light emitting diodes. Dave Bour will describe the requirements for making blue semiconductors lasers and PARC's research towards these devices.
Fernando Ponce works at the Electronic Materials Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His main emphasis is in the determination of the atomic arrangement in solids using transmission electron microscopy. He was raised in Cuzco, Peru, and studied at the University of Engineering in Lima, and at Stanford University. He has worked on the study of defects and interfaces in crystalline semiconductors, and in the last three years has studied the properties of the nitride semiconductors. He has co-authored over 150 publications, and has edited 4 books.
David Bour grew up in Pittsburgh, PA. He received a B.S. degree in Physics from MIT in 1983, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1987, where he worked on red semiconductor lasers. From 1987-1991 he developed infrared laser diode materials as a member of research staff at the David Sarnoff Research Center (formerly RCA Laboratories, Princeton, NJ). Since 1991 he has been with the Electronic Materials Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, working first on red laser diodes, and more recently establishing an epitaxial growth capability for blue semiconductor lasers.