Japanese-American engineer
Shuji Nakamura is a Japanese-born American electronic engineer and prolific inventor specializing in the field of semiconductor technology, professor
Nakamura received bachelor’s (1977) and master’s (1979) degrees in electronic engineering from the University of Tokushima. In 1979 he went to work for a small company called Nichia Chemical in Tokushima. He initially worked on growing gallium phosphide and gallium arsenide crystals for LEDs. In absence of a good market for them, Nichia decided to produce complete LEDs in the mid-1980s. Nakamura taught himself the necessary techniques to produce high-quality red and infrared LEDs, but those also were not commercially successful.
Nakamura concluded that Nichia had to develop a product that would not be competing with those of other, larger companies. That product would be the blue LED. Other Scientists were unsuccessful to develop blue LEDs. If developed, the blue LED could be combined with red and green LEDs to produce white light for a fraction of the cost of incandescent and fluorescent lighting. In 1988 Nakamura went straight to Nichia’s CEO, Ogawa Nobuo, demanding more than $3 million (U.S. dollars) and convinced for funding and a year at the University of Florida, Gainesville, to learn metalorganic chemical vapour deposition to produce the semiconductors for the blue LED. After his return from Florida in 1989, Nakamura decided on gallium nitride (GaN) as the material he would use for the blue LED. High-quality GaN crystals were very difficult to grow. Also, in an LED, light is emitted when current flows across a p-n junction, . Nakamura solved the first problem in 1990 by growing a GaN crystal layer at low temperatures and then additional GaN layers on top of that at higher temperatures. In 1992 he successfully grew p-type GaN. Nakumura received a doctorate in engineering from the University of Tokushima. He then worked on producing a blue laser diode using GaN. In 1995 he was successful, and four years later Nichia began selling blue laser diodes.
Nakamura left Nichia due to the blue LED and laser—in 1999 and become a professor in the materials department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2000. Nichia asked that Nakamura sign a confidentiality agreement, but he filed a suit and won in 2004,the suit was a landmark in Japanese intellectual property law