Microwave Hall of Fame
Part III

Updated January 18, 2008

In the second half of the twentieth century, microwave innovators kept busy inventing. If you've been involved in microwaves for a few years, you might have had lunch with some of these people!

Go back to the first page of the Microwave Hall of Fame.

Go back to the second page of the Microwave Hall of Fame.

Go to our main microwave history page.

In 1939 Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a business in Dave's garage using $538. After fooling with inventions such as a bowling alley foul-line-roll indicator, their first successful product was an audio oscillator. Another California entrepreneur, Walt Disney, was one of their first big contracts when his company ordered a few oscillators for use in creating the film "Fantasia". Now known as Agilent, HP products have been used by generations of microwave engineers and have always presented a problem during capital equipment requests, because this is equipment that never dies, so why would you ever need to replace it? HP alumni (and alumnae) have put together an excellent web site with history of the company and other reminiscences, check it out!

Packard Hewlett

Coming soon!

I'd like to nominate Edward Mills Purcell ("Eddie P") Aside from winning the Nobel price for discovering Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, he worked on the development of radar at the MIT Rad Lab during WWII, and was the first to detect the 21cm Hydrogen line in radio astronomy. Check out the stylish picture at: http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/hist_ewenpurcell.shtml In the third picture on that page, Eddie P is on the left... with the bow tie & suspenders. Also -- the horn antenna used to detect the Hydrogen line -- he built that on his weekends, with a grant of $500.

Leo Esaki (born in 1925), researched heavily doped silicon and germanium while working for Sony Corporation in Japan, and invented the Esaki tunnel diode during the 1950s. This device constitutes the first quantum electron device, and today it is used in many microwave detectors and oscillators (due to its negative resistance region). Later as an IBM employee, Esaki pioneered other semiconductor quantum structures such as man-made superlattices. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973. Read the fascinating history of the Sony company here. Did you know that the word "Sony" is a mixture of "sonic" and "sunny"?

Need picture

Bernard Schiffman's 1958 paper titled A New Class of Broadband Microwave 90 Degree Phase Shifters described a simple device that bears his name today. Schiffman's idea was that the phase difference between a quarterwave coupled section, compared to a 3/4 wave straight section, would provide a nearly flat 90 degree phase differential. Schiffman went on to publish a second article extending the analysis to multi-section coupled lines. Check out our page on Schiffman's phase shifter!

Jack Kilby (born in 1923), working for Texas Instruments, is credited with the invention of the integrated circuit, which ranks up there with "fire" and "wheel" as an invention that changed the world. The first public announcement of a "solid circuit" was made at the IRE conference in 1959. Not three months later, Robert Noyce independently came up with the same idea at Fairchild, and the patent feud brought corporate lawyers for all the way to the supreme court. Jack's insistence that he was a "co-inventor" with Noyce speaks volumes about the man, and later the two shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in year 2000. An engineer's engineer, Jack Kilby stayed technical throughout his long career (60 patents!) , never got rich from his invention, and was by all accounts a humble man. Jack died on June 20, 2005, at 81 years young.

Frederick W. Kulicke and Albert Soffa form an equipment manufacturing corporation in 1951 with $500 and an old Plymouth. Shown to the right they stand next to an early K&S offering, a machine that cleans returnable beer cases. Soon the semiconductor industry was getting off the ground, and here is where K&S focussed their company. Known for innovative solutions to a variety of semiconductor manufacturing problems, perhaps their greatest contribution to the industry is the commercialization of the wirebonder. Soffa passed away on April 10, 2005, here's a link to his obit.

Ernest J. Wilkinson's paper in the 1960 IRE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques entitled simply "An N-way Hybrid Power Divider" sealed his fate of entering the microwave Hall of Fame, for who hasn't heard of a Wilkinson power divider? Mr. Wilkinson's demonstration of the technique consisted of a circular 8-way coaxial divider with center frequency of about 500 MHz. For this development he was awarded U. S. patent number 3,091,743. He was born in Fall River MA (home of Lizzy Borden!) in 1927, and was employed at Sylvania's Missile Systems Laboratory. You might find artifacts from this building if you excavated under Waltham's charming Home Depot. New flash January 2006! EJW is alive and well and living in retirement and has seen his mug on this page and we hope that he feels we are worthy enough to send us a high-resolution picture soon!

John Rollett's 1962 IRE paper entitled "Stability and Power-Gain Invariants of Linear Twoports" forever links his name with the stability factor K, and puts him into our Hall of Fame. Dr. Rollett (rhymes with wallet) was working for Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company when he performed this work. His derivation built upon previous work by Sam Mason of MIT. Update March, 2006! We have been in contact with Mr. Rollett, and he's provided us with some historical perspective on his work! He modestly admits that K-factor was purely a theoretical exercise, and he has been pleasantly surprised that it has had such widespread practical application all these years! Here's the photo he sent us - this was taken in the early 1960s. Thanks, Mr. Rollett!

In 1962 a paper by Walter Rotman showed a new type of beamformer... more to come!

Dr. John Battiscombe Gunn preferred to be called Ian; he was known to his associates & friends as Ian Gunn. He is best-known for inventing the Gunn diode in 1963; the effect he proved had been predicted by the theoretical work of Watkins and Hillsum. The negative-resistance Gunn diode has been used to build cheap oscillators up to 100 GHz. Next time you get a speeding ticket because of a radar speed trap, remember to thank Dr. Gunn! In recognition of his distinguished career at IBM, Gunn was made an IBM Fellow in 1990 and retired in 2007. In addition to his scientific expertise, Ian Gunn had a great interest in mechanical things; it seems that Gunn liked to own and operate earthmoving equipment, backhoes and bulldozers.

Dr. Ian Gunn Nominated by Murat from MITEQ, with additional info from Kerry from Down Under!

Picture coming!

In 1964, George Matthaei, Leo Young, and EMT Jones published a little book called "Microwave Filters, Impedance-Matching Networks, and Coupling Structures". Most often referred to as simply "Matthaei, Young and Jones" or even "MYJ", the best filter designers still refer to this masterpiece, four full decades later. Look for it in our book page! These three researchers worked together at Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park California, when the book was written and published by McGraw Hill. Leo Young was born in Austria but came to America to get his PhD at JHU. Matthaei and Jones were both born in the USA. Thanks to Richard the lawyer and former microwave guy! We are sad to report that Leo Young died September 14, 2006, click here to view his obit. By the way, Matthaei rhymes with paté, in case you were wondering about the correct pronunciation! Coming soon... what does EMT Jones' initials stand for???

Dr. Kaneyuki Kurokawa was born in Japan in 1928. While on leave of absence from from his position at University of Tokyo, he worked during the early 1960s at Bell Labs in New Jersey. His March 1965 IEEE paper entitled Power Waves and the Scattering Matrix, makes Kurokawa the first to popularize the concept of S-parameters. This profound yet simple idea is one of the concepts sets microwave engineers apart from other "normal" electrical engineers. Note: we have found references to S-parameters in microwave engineering as far back as 1957, by Collin, Bolinder and others, but these earlier authors casually mentioned the scattering matrix and did not follow up with the analysis and depth of understanding that Kurokawa provided. Thanks for the tip, Ingemar!

Julius Lange invented the microstrip interdigitated quadrature coupler at Texas Instruments in 1969. The name "Lange" is probably second only to "Smith" in terms of its widespread usage in the microwave community. Please visit our page on Lange couplers, which is just getting started! He got the idea for the famous coupler from the interdigitated emitter/base junction of a power transistor, thus making the proverbial lemon into lemonade. He holds ten patents on microwave components and subsystems. Dr. Lange turned 72 on December 14, 2006, and we wish him many happy more!

Cheng P. Wen is the inventor of coplanar waveguide. Working at RCA's Sarnoff Laboratories in Princeton NJ, his 1969 IEEE paper titled "Coplanar waveguide: a surface strip transmission line suitable for nonreciprocal gyromagnetic device applications" is proof enough to us that the concept belongs to him alone. After publishing this paper he continued to develop all the bits and piece for CPW circuits, such as lumped element inductors and bumped flip-chip interfaces. One thing we've always wanted to ask Dr. Wen... did he make up the name "coplanar waveguide" so that the acronym CPW is the same as his initials? Here's a note from the handsome doctor himself, from June 9, 2005: "I have been keeping active, helping young engineers since my retirement seven years ago. Currently, I am with the Peking University in Beijing, China, sharing with the students some of my experience. Attached please find a picture taken while I was at the RCA Laboratories, where the Coplanar Waveguide was invented. As to the origin of (the name) CPW, it was suggested by Lou Napoli, who pioneered the development of power microwave MESFET at RCA in the late 1960s." C.P. later told us that he originally wanted to call the structure "planar strip line".

Robert (Bob) Eugene Munson is regarded as the father of practical microwave patch antennas. Ubiquitous today (entire books are published on this subject!), the patch antenna was first theorized by G. A. Deschamps in 1953, but it was not put to use for many years (by Munson), first on a datalink for Sidewinder missile, then on Sprint missile's semi-active seeker. Munson's success could be partially chalked up to being in the right place at the right time. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed (1) the move to higher frequencies and solid state devices, (2) the move away from chassis and terminal wiring to printed circuits, and (3) a demanding need for conformal arrays (the Sprint missile array was on the curved surface of the nose cone). Being a defense worker at Ball Aerospace probably provided a pretty healthy charge number for this Cold War research! But let's remember that there was little analytic capability at the time, so Munson must have also (1) been an innovative genius and (2) spent considerable time in the lab to find designs that worked. Munson's name appears on many U.S patents, we counted 29 of them limiting the seach to just antennas! Today he's retired and living on a 160 acre vegetable farm outside Boulder. Munson was nominated to the Microwave Hall of Fame by Chris from LockMart!

Sprint missile

Les Besser started the microwave computer-aided design industry in 1973 when he created COMPACT software (Computerized Optimization of Microwave Passive and Active CircuiTs). Amazingly, his original submission to the IEEE of a paper describing COMPACT was turned down. Today Besser is a familiar name to all in the microwave industry, not only because Les co-wrote some great textbooks and a ton of technical articles, but because of Besser Associates, a company he founded in 1985 that offers continuing education courses in all microwave topics, way beyond the scope of Microwaves101. Les is Hungarian-Canadian-American, and we thank the American Hungarian Federation for permission to use their logo for the flag above. You can learn more about Les and the history of microwave CAD on our Microwaves101 History of CAD page!

In 1975, a paper published by Ray Pengelly and James Turner entitled "Monolithic Broadband GaAs F.E.T. Amplifiers" sealed their fate as the inventors of the MMIC. Working at Plessey, their little single-stage amplifier provided 5 dB of gain at X-band using 1 micron optically-written gates. They used computer optimization to design their lumped element matching structures, which included capacitors and inductors, but no DC blocking on the input/output. Backside processing had not yet been worked out, so the FET's source was grounded externally. Nice effort, guys! Ray P. now works at Cree, James passed on to the great clean room in the sky a few years ago.

Ray Pengelly

Eric W. Strid and K. Reed Gleason were Tektronix employees when they began fooling around with methods of RF probing circuits. By 1983 they'd invented the RF probe and started a new company, Cascade Microtech, which now employs almost 300 people and does close to $100M in business each year. This single innovation changed the industry forever, helping pave the way for cheap wireless products that we can't live without today. Before 1983, MMIC devices could not be delivered to assembly as known-good parts, the true electrical performance of these tiny microwave circuits was impossible to measure at the wafer level.

U.S. Patent 4,827,320 on May 2, 1989 is titled "Semiconductor with Strained InGaAs Layer". Five names from the University of Illinois appear on the patent, Hadis Morkoc, John Klem, William T. Masselink, Timothy S. Henderson, and Andrew A. Ketterson all share the distinction of inventing the pHEMT transistor. In the patent they discuss their method to improve the "MODFET" transistor, the name pHEMT didn't come about until later. This technology was just what the doctor ordered to extend the performance of MMICs in gain, bandwidth, noise and power.

In the late 1980s Michael Ury and colleagues experiment with new ways to create light. By 1989 Ury's sulfur lamp earns US patent 4,859,906, and represents an illumination revolution. (Try to say that fast five times...) It uses a magnetron to excite sulfur atoms in a small bulb. It's more efficient and environmentally friendly that other industrial light sources, contains an eye-pleasing full color spectrum, lasts longer than fluorescent bulbs, and contains less harmful UV rays than sunlight; seemingly the perfect light bulb. However, issues with interference with other users in the ISM band (in particular, satellite radio) have stymied the adoption of this cool technology at least for now. Welcome to the Microwave Hall of Fame, Mike! We're working on a page on RF lighting to discuss this topic further.

Herb Kroemer's semiconductor work from the 1950s proposed what are now called hetero-structures, but it took several decades to realize the technology to build them. He was one of the pioneers of molecular beam epitaxy, in part, to realize some of his invented structures. One outcome of his work known to all microwave engineers is the hetero-junction bipolar transistor (HBT), which has given the microwave field-effect transistor a run for its money in recent years. Dr. Kroemer won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work, and currently is a professor at UCSB. His picture appears to the right, in which the King of Sweden is awarding the Nobel prize. We can't resist, any reference to the "K of S" always reminds us of Cab Calloway's Minnie the Moocher: "She had a dream about the King of Sweden he gave her things that she was needin' gave her a home built of gold and steel a diamond car, with the pulatinum wheels! Hidey hidey hidey hi!!!" (Herb K. was nominated by Prof. X. of U of A!)

Want more microwave history? Return to our main history page!

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