| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JUNE 14, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| INTERNATIONAL -- ASIAN COVER STORY
'Since 1991 I Have Made Some Kind of a Breakthrough Every Few Months' (int'l edition) Shuji Nakamura has been attracting attention -- and competition -- worldwide because of his advances in blue diodes and lasers. Until this decade, red and orange light-emitting diodes (LEDs, the little dots of light on stereo systems and car dashboards) were common, but no one had managed to make a blue one. Nakamura succeeded, and they are now used to make giant outdoor TV screens. He then produced a prototype blue laser, and he's now trying to make one that can be used commercially. They could one day be used in CD (compact disk) and DVD (digital video disk) players. Because of the shorter wavelength of blue light, a blue laser could read digital codes written with smaller on/off dots than current red lasers. That would make possible more digital information on a single disk, meaning longer or higher-quality video on a DVD. Nakamura is an unlikely high-tech star. He is a senior researcher at Nichia Chemical, whose main business has nothing to do with semiconductors. Nichia's phosphorus products -- used to coat the inside of TV screens and florescent lamps -- constitute about half the company's revenues. Also, Nichia is a small company based in a corner of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands and off the beaten track for industry. Q: Most Japanese gravitate to big cities. Why did you decide to join a small company like Nichia so far away from the center of things? A: I was born in Ozu in Ehime, and went to Tokushima University, both on Shikoku. Then I got married and had a child while I was still at university, and decided I wanted to stay in Shikoku and raise my daughter in a small town rather than a city. That's the thinking of [Nichia] President Ogawa too. He was born here and wanted to hire young people from around here to create a local technology base. So I entered the company in 1979 and joined the R&D department. There were only 200 people in the company then. Q: What were your first research projects? A: In the first three years I developed a green LED using gallium phosphide crystals. I was a new employee and didn't know about the market, and it didn't sell, as bigger companies had already come out with these. Over the next three years I developed gallium arsenide crystals for red LEDs. The product was fine -- the quality and price was the same as other companies. But Nichia was unknown in the semiconductor world, as we were a phosphorus company. Then, over four years I developed gallium arsenide epitaxial wafers. So I did these things for 10 years all by myself with very little money. I had 5 million to 10 million yen ($50,000 to $100,000) a year to work with at first and for the wafers about 50 million yen ($500,000). I had to make the crystal reactors myself, buying the bricks and heaters, and built them. I didn't have a crystal evaluation device, so I made this myself, too. I was working alone for 10 years in my own room. But they didn't sell. It was very frustrating. Q: Didn't anyone mind you just working away like this not making any money? A: Ogawa, the president, thought the company should live through technology. He put all the money the company earned into technology rather than investing in stocks and other projects like other companies did. Also, the company had spare money in those days, because florescent lamps and color TVs were selling well. But my colleagues complained. In 1987 or '88, I was staying in an Osaka hotel in the same room as the boss of the Osaka sales office. We were drinking beer, and he said: "No one in the company wants to use money for your R&D. Only Ogawa wants to do it. None of the other employees wants to use money on you." I was angry and told him one day I would produce something big. My position was not good though, and in 1988 I became desperate. Q: Was that the start of your blue laser reserach? A: Before this I had said to my boss [in the R&D department], "Why don't we do research into blue lasers?" He replied that lots of huge companies were trying this already and it was impossible. But I became desperate, so I went over my boss's head and talked to Ogawa directly. I asked, "Why don't you allow me to do it?" He said, "No problem". Q: Why did he support you? A: Because I had always managed to come up with products before. Q: He thought you'd just been unlucky in the marketplace? A: Exactly. So he gave me $4 million a year to work with. I went to the University of Florida for a year in 1988-89 to learn how to use crystal reactors -- a MOCVD [metal organic chemical vapor deposition] reactor and an MBE [molecular beam epitaxy] reactor. The MOCVD is good for mass production; the MBE is better for research. While I was in Florida, I went to conferences and found out about the metals being used to try to make blue LEDs. There was ZnSe [zinc selenide] and GaN [gallium nitride]. The other scientists had all selected ZnSe, because it was easy to make. Crystals for conventional semiconductor diodes have to have a defect density of less than 1,000 per square centimeter, and it was easy to make ZnSe crystals of this quality. But the best quality gallium nitride crystals had a defect density of over 10 power 10. That's seven orders of magnitude difference, an amazing difference. So scientists said it was impossible to make LEDs with this. Q: So what did you do? A: I disliked competition with big companies from my past experiences of this, so I decided to be different and work with gallium nitride. That was all [the only reason I chose to work with this]. I was desperate -- I had spent 10 years working with conventional materials only to find that bigger companies were always doing the same thing as me already. Q: Wasn't this a risk? A: Yes, but when I was at the University of Florida, I had no PhD and had written no scientific papers. People there asked me about these. When I said I had none, they ignored me and wouldn't let me join in their discussions. They treated me like I was just a lowly engineer. I thought that even if it's not a commercial success, I can at least make progress in gallium nitride research. So when I came back to Japan I wrote a paper on this. Q: How did you set about trying to create blue diodes? A: Over the first 10 years [when working on the first three diodes], I had always read many papers and tried to follow others' techniques. This time I decided not to read papers, because that would push me in their [other peoples'] direction. The important thing was to experiment. I used the MOCVD reactor in 1989, but the result was terrible -- no growth of gallium nitride on the sapphire substrate. So I had to modify the reactor. In the first 10 years, I had concentrated totally on research and had to build my own reactors. I had learned a lot back then, and this experience helped me. After lots of attempts, I produced gallium nitride of the highest ever reported. But the light it produced was very dim at first. Q: Were your competitors doing similar things? A: No. Around 1992 there were only two groups pursuing gallium nitride: Nichia and Professor Akasaki at Nagoya University. There were more than a thousand groups using zinc selinide. In 1991 a company called 3M announced it had made a green laser diode. We were very shocked at this. We thought we had failed in our selection of material. But I had spent a lot of money, so I couldn't abandon gallium nitride. In 1992 there was the first nitride conference in the U.S., and when I set off I was depressed. There 3M said the lifetime of their green laser and LED was three seconds. But our LED lasted for 1,000 hours, and when I talked about this, there was great applause. People said our technology was better -- even without a laser -- because the lifetime was so much longer. When I came back I was happy. Since 1991 I have made some kind of a breakthrough [in increasing the crystal quality] every few months. Q: Are people using your LEDs? A: They're used in things like LED screens for outdoor video displays. And traffic lights, because they last longer than light bulbs. Q: What about the blue laser? A: From 1995 we started to develop a laser diode. These could be used in DVDs to provide 4.6 times the memory capacity of a red laser diode DVD. It is not yet bright enough to use in a DVD. The one we are sampling is 5 milli-watts, and a DVD needs a 30 milliwatt laser. We hope to have one of these this year or next. Q: Do you still work alone? A: There are now 30 people working with me -- 15 researchers and 15 making the lasers for sample shipment. Q: What kind of hours do you work? A: I work from seven to seven, seven days a week. I take several days holiday a year, say about 10 days in 1998. It's my personality: If I start something in my work, I want to finish it as soon as possible. I am always thinking about my work even when I am at home. So it's better for me to come to work. Q: Doesn't your family mind? A: My wife works as a kindergarten teacher so she's busy herself during the week. My three children are daughters, so they want to play with their mother. Q: Don't you have any hobbies? What do you do in the little free time you do have? A: I don't like reading. I like thinking -- thinking deeply about things like space and physics. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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 RELATED ITEMS The Stars of Asia Shuji Nakamura, Senior Researcher, Nichia Chemical, Japan (int'l edition) ONLINE ORIGINAL: ``Since 1991 I Have Made Some Kind of a Breakthrough Every Few Months'' (int'l e INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
