Milestone-Proposal talk:Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser, 1977
Advocates and reviewers will post their comments below. In addition, any IEEE member can sign in with their ETHW login (different from IEEE Single Sign On) and comment on the milestone proposal's accuracy or completeness as a form of public review.
-- Administrator4 (talk) 13:21, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
Advocates’ Checklist
- Is the proposal for an achievement rather than for a person? If the citation includes a person's name, have the proposers provided the required justification for inclusion of the person's name?
- Was the proposed achievement a significant advance rather than an incremental improvement to an existing technology?
- Were there prior or contemporary achievements of a similar nature? If so, have they been properly considered in the background information and in the citation?
- Has the achievement truly led to a functioning, useful, or marketable technology?
- Is the proposal adequately supported by significant references (minimum of five) such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or citations to pages in scholarly books? At least one of the references should be from a peer-reviewed scholarly book or journal article. The full text of the material, not just the references, shall be present. If the supporting texts are copyright-encumbered and cannot be posted on the ETHW for intellectual property reasons, the proposers shall email a copy to the History Center so that it can be forwarded to the Advocate. If the Advocate does not consider the supporting references sufficient, the Advocate may ask the proposer(s) for additional ones.
- Are the scholarly references sufficiently recent?
- Does the proposed citation explain why the achievement was successful and impactful?
- Does the proposed citation include important technical aspects of the achievement?
- Is the proposed citation readable and understandable by the general public?
- Will the citation be read correctly in the future by only using past tense? Does the citation wording avoid statements that read accurately only at the time that the proposal is written?
- Does the proposed plaque site fulfill the requirements?
- Is the proposal quality comparable to that of IEEE publications?
- Are any scientific and technical units correct (e.g., km, mm, hertz, etc.)? Are acronyms correct and properly upper-cased or lower-cased? Are the letters in any acronym explained in the title or the citation?
- Are date formats correct as specified in Section 6 of Milestones Program Guidelines? Helpful Hints on Citations, plaque locations
- Do the year(s) appearing in the citation fall within the range of the year(s) included at the end of the title?
- Note that it is the Advocate's responsibility to confirm that the independent reviewers have no conflict of interest (e.g., that they do not work for a company or a team involved in the achievement being proposed, that they have not published with the proposer(s), and have not worked on a project related to the funding of the achievement). An example of a way to check for this would be to search reviewers' publications on IEEE Xplore.
Reviewers’ Checklist
- Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?
- Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?
- Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?
- Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?
In answering the questions above, the History Committee asks that reviewers apply a similar level of rigor to that used to peer-review an article, or evaluate a research proposal. Some elaboration is desirable. Of course the Committee would welcome any additional observations that you may have regarding this proposal.
Submission and Approval Log
Submitted date: 16 August 2024
Advocate approval date:
History Committee approval date:
Board of Directors approval date:
Original Citation Title and Text as submitted -- Administrator4 (talk) 19:52, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser, 1977-1992
Kenichi Iga of Tokyo Institute of Technology conceived the vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) in 1977. The device was specified for single-mode operation, monolithic manufacturability, and frequency tunability. He and his team made breakthroughs with the first current-driven VCSEL in 1979, room-temperature continuous operation in 1988, and mechanical continuous frequency tuning in 1992. Today, VCSELs are widely used in LANs, datacenters, 3D face-recognition, printers, and LiDARs, all integral to modern life.
Independent review by Prof. Dieter Bimberg -- Juan Carlos (talk) 13:24, 29 September 2024 (UTC)
Answers to 4 questions from Prof. Dr. Dieter Biemberg
1) Is the suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate? yes, I fully agree
2) Is the evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Citation?
yes, the proposal shows in very much detail the substance supporting the citation
3) Does the proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?
yes, At the time of the first proposal of VCSELs by Ken Iga, edge emitting lasers, EELs, where already making their way and soon where applied e.g. for optical cables connecting continents and enabling our present optical communication systems, e-mails, google search, wikipedia,... . EELs are expensive, cannot be tested on-wafer, have a large volume, cannot be integrated easily on drivers. Iga's proposal of surface emitting lasers opened an alternative road. It was the final step of technological developments after the demonstration of EELs and LEDs, which are also surface emitters, but low power and no stimulated emission. Iga's idea and research results in the next 2 decades stimulated a Tsunami of developments worldwide and lead to a 5 digit number of follow-up publications and lead to the creation of many new companies. The economic impact of applications of VCSELs in systems is judged today to go beyond 9 digit numbers of $. Today VCSELs are called the next generation LEDs, with many more applications, than LEDs ever had or are going to have. VCSELs can be easily combined to arrays and find applications in i-phones (face recognition), bar code scanners, as well as automobile systems (distance monitoring), to mention just a few different of many present life applications. High end devices present the basis for ultra high bit-rate optical computer interconnects for 100+ Gbit/s in data centers (block chain, AI, movie downloads, whats app,....). All compound direct-gap semiconductor materials, like GaAs, InP, GaN,..can be used to grow and manufacture VCSELs and novel applications appear almost on daily basis.
4) Do you think the name of Kenichi Iga deserves to be included in the word-count constrained Citation? Yes, definitely, without "his swimming against the stream" imagination we would not have the technologies on which our life is based on --
-- Prof.Dr.Dr.h.c.mult.D. Bimberg
Excecutive Director "Bimberg Chinese-German Center for Green Photonics" Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences bimberg@ciomp.ac.cn Tel. +49 1702454615
Founding Director Center of NanoPhotonics Institut fuer Festkoerperphysik Sekr. EW 5-2 TU Berlin Hardenbergstr. 36, Eugene P. Wigner Building D-10623 Berlin Germany bimberg@physik.tu-berlin.de Tel. +49 1702454615
Review by Dr Dupuis -- Juan Carlos (talk) 14:03, 2 October 2024 (UTC)
File:IEEE History Plaque VCSEL Dupuis 241001.pdf