Charles A. Lee

Professor, Emeritus, Electrical Engineering

423 Phillips Hall, 607/255-4057; calsch@paxvax.ee.cornell.edu

B.S.E.E. 1944 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute); Ph.D. 1953 (Columbia)

Biography

After three years of military service, Lee did his graduate work in physics under I. I. Rabi at Columbia University. He remained at Columbia for a year of postdoctoral work on molecular-beam studies of nuclear hyperfine interactions and then joined the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey. While at Bell Laboratories, he received patents (together with W. Shockley) for the diffused base transistor, which first demonstrated the feasibility of microwave transistor operation. He also received patents for the first InSb p-n junctions, the first Read-IMPATT structure, and the first high-speed-junction photomultiplier. Since coming to Cornell in 1967, he directed research on avalanche phenomena such as the development of the Quasistatic Theory of avalanche multiplication and was involved in making the first Schottky barrier IMPATT diodes. With Cornell colleague Jeffrey Frey and students, he designed and constructed the first ion-implantation machine at the School of Electrical Engineering. He was a founder of the National Research and Resource Facility for Submicron Structures (now the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility), and originated research there on ion-beam lithography. In more recent years, he was the coinventor (with G. Dalman and J. Berenz) of the Opposed Gate-Source Transistor, a thin-film millimeter-wave field-effect transistor. The realization of this device required the development and patenting of new thin-film techniques (with K. C. Lee and J. Silcox), and dual-surface lithographic techniques (with K. Rauschenbach). Current research concerns the computer modeling of integrable high-speed optoelectronic devices and a distributed analysis of millimeter-wave MESFETs. He has been a consultant for several companies, including General Electric, the Rockwell Science Center, TRW, Varian, and Raytheon. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu.

Research Interests

I am currently involved in a study of the mutual locking properties of oscillator arrays. One patentable outgrowth of this study is the realization of a new pulse-time modulator for millimeter and optical sources. I am also writing a textbook on the semiconductor physics underlying the design of very small high-speed devices.

Selected Publications

  • Lee, C. A. 1956. A high-frequency diffused-beam germanium transistor. Bell System Technical Journal 35:23.
  • Lee, C. A., R. L. Batdorf, W. Wiegmann, and G. Kaminsky. 1965. The Read diode: An avalanching transit time negative resistance oscillator. Applied Physics Letters 6:89.
  • Kuvas, R., and C. A. Lee. 1970. The quasistatic approximation for semiconductor avalanches. Journal of Applied Physics 41:1-43.
  • Karapiperis, K., and C. A. Lee. 1970. 400 Å high aspect ratio lines produced in polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) by ion beam exposure. Applied Physics Letters 35:395.
  • Lee, K. C., J. Silcox, and C. A. Lee. 1989. A new self-limiting process for the production of thin submicron semiconductor films. Journal of Applied Physics 54:4035.
  • Rauschenbach, K., and C. A. Lee. 1992. Design and fabrication of the self-aligned opposed gate-source transistor. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices 39:219-25.
  • Lee, C. A., and G. C. Dalman. 1994. Microwave devices, circuits and their interaction. New York: Wiley.
  • Last revised: 3/24/95