In 2023, Professor Larry Coldren, a member of the National Academy of Inventors and a member of the Academy of Engineering, and a giant in the field of laser technology, was honored with the prestigious ISCS Heinrich Welker Award.
The ISCS Heinrich Welker Award was established in 1976. The recipient is selected by the ISCS Awards Committee for outstanding research in the field of III-V compound semiconductors. The award was established by Siemens AG, Munich, in honor of Heinrich Welker, one of the most important pioneers in the development of III-V compound semiconductors, and is currently sponsored by OSRAM GmbH.
Nobel Prize winner Herbert Kroemer and current Dean of the Faculty of Engineering Umesh Mishra are among the former recipients of this award.
Who is this professor?
According to sources, Prof. Larry Coldren received his B.S. in electrical engineering and his B.S. in physics from Bucknell University.
He then joined Bell Labs in 1968. With strong support from Bell Labs, he then attended Stanford University, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1969 and 1972, respectively.
After 13 years at Bell Labs in the field of optical communications research, he joined the ECE Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1984 and was a founding member of the Materials Department in 1986. Since then, Larry Coldren has been a professor in the Department of Materials, Electrical and Computer Engineering for 37 years.
He also served as director of the DARPA/industry-funded multi-campus Photonics Technology Center from 1991 until the 2000s. He became the Fred Kavli Chair in 1999.
He served as interim dean of the College of Engineering from 2009 to 2011 and became Kavli Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor in 2017.
Career accomplishments along the way
Professor Larry Coldren has authored or co-authored more than 1,000 journal and conference papers, eight monograph chapters, a widely used textbook, and 63 issued patents, which have been cited more than 39,000 times.
He has also received awards from John Tyndall, Aaron Kressel, David Sarnoff, IPRM and Nick Holonyak.
In 1990, Dr. Larry Coldren co-founded Optical Concepts (later acquired as Gore Photonics) to develop novel VCSEL technology.
In 1998, he co-founded Agility Communications (later acquired by JDSU (now Lumentum)) to develop widely tunable integrated transmitters and transponders.
At the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), he led research efforts in multi-bandwidth tunable lasers, high-efficiency vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), and InP-based photonic ICs.
In terms of career awards, almost all of Prof. Larry Coldren's previous awards have been for devices.
The Heinrich Welker Award is different in that it focuses more on materials, the expertise required to make materials and build devices, and recognizes outstanding achievements in materials technology and pioneering contributions to tunable lasers, vertical cavity lasers, and photonic integrated circuits.
Two Breakthrough Inventions
Professor Larry Coldren is a recognized leader in the field of photonics, with accomplishments in both laser photonics and the development of materials, with two breakthrough inventions standing out for their importance and far-reaching impact.
The first was the new design of the Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL), which was invented in Japan in the late 1970s and had followed an edge-emitting laser design scheme with performance limitations.
In 1987, Professor Larry Coldren realized the need to set the gain only at the peak of the standing wave rather than distributing it uniformly, and subsequently demonstrated the feasibility of this approach, which nearly doubled the modal gain for a given amount of gain material, making the VCSEL performance more efficient.
Today, VCSELs are widely used around the world for fiber optic data communications, computer mice, bar code readers, laser pointers, and facial recognition in cell phones and computers.
The second breakthrough invention is the Sampled Grating Distributed Bragg Reflector (SG-DBR) laser, a new broadly tunable, single-frequency laser diode that employs a multi-element mirror to achieve very broad tunability and provides the technology for Indium Phosphide (InP) photonic integrated circuits. Over the past two decades, the SG-DBR has become the primary laser light source for many wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) fiber optic communication systems.
