Dawon Kahng
Dawon Kahng (; May 4, 1931 – May 13, 1992) was a Korean-American electrical engineer and inventor, known for his work in solid-state electronics. He is best known for inventing the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor), along with his colleague Mohamed Atalla, in 1959. Kahng and Atalla developed both the PMOS and NMOS processes for MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The MOSFET is the most widely used type of transistor, and the basic element in most modern electronic equipment. Kahng and Atalla later proposed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit, and they did  pioneering work on Schottky diodes and nanolayer-base transistors in the early 1960s. Kahng then invented the floating-gate MOSFET (FGMOS) with Simon Min Sze in 1967. Kahng and Sze proposed that FGMOS could be used as floating-gate memory cells for non-volatile memory (NVM) and reprogrammable read-only memory (ROM), which became the basis for EPROM (erasable programmable ROM), EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable ROM) and flash memory technologies. Kahng was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2009. Biography. Dawon Kahng was born on May 4, 1931, in Keijō, Chōsen (today Seoul, South Korea). He studied  Physics at Seoul National University in South Korea, and immigrated to the United States in 1955 to attend Ohio State University, where he received a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1959. He was a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and he invented MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor), which is the basic element in most of today's electronic equipment, with Mohamed Atalla in 1959. They fabricated both PMOS and NMOS devices with a 20µm process. Dawon Kahng in 1961 proposed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit, noting that the MOS transistor 's ease of fabrication made it useful for integrated circuits. However, Bell Labs initially ignored MOS technology, as the company was not interested in integrated circuits at the time. Extending their work on MOS technology, Kahng and Atalla next did pioneering work on hot carrier devices, which used what would later be called a Schottky barrier. The Schottky diode, also known as the Schottky-barrier diode, was theorized for years, but was first practically realized as a result of the work of Kahng and Atalla during 19601961. They published their results in 1962 and called their device the "hot electron