Physics
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Physics - overview
IBM Research has been home to numerous physicists who have produced seminal advances in many disciplines and fields of study. Innovations discovered and developed here include: Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), field effect transistor scaling laws, semiconductor super lattice structures, specialized lasers and thin film magnetic recording heads, as well as advances in optical communications and electron microscopy.
Five IBM physicists have received the Nobel Prize for Physics: Leo Esaki in 1973 for his work in semiconductors; Gerd Bining and Heinrich Rohrer in 1986 for the scanning tunneling microscope; and Georg Bednorz and Alex Mueller in 1987 for research in superconductivity.
- 1947: Magnetic Core Memory
- 1957: Landauer Formalism - Conductance must come in Quantized Units
- 1958: Quantum Tunnelling
- 1960: Thin Film Heads
- 1966: Tunable Lasers
- 1966: Two-Dimensional Electron Gas (2DEG)
- 1967: Josephson Junctions
- 1968: DRAM - 1 Transistor RAM
- 1974: Dennard Scaling (aka Why Moore's Law also speeds up transistors in Lay Terms)
- 1978: Scanning Tunneling Microscope (1986 Nobel Prize Winner)
- 1982: Thermodynamics of Computation
- 1983: High Temperature Superconductors (1987 Nobel Prize Winner)
- 1990: Moving Atoms
- 1991: RFID
- 1993: Quantum Teleportation
- 1993: Seminal Contributions to the Theoretical Foundation of Quantum Information Processing
- 1994: High-Speed Silicon-Germanium Electronics
- 1997: GMR - Giant Magnetoresistive Heads
- 1998: Copper Interconnect
- 2002: SOI: Silicon on Insulator
- 2002: Theory of Nanoscale Material
- 2007: High-K Gate Dieletric
- 2008: Racetrack Memory
- 2008: Cooling 3D Chips
- 20??: Non-Planar Devices
- 2012: Holey Optochip - 1 Terabit per Second Optical Bus
- 2013: Millimeter Wave
List of prominent IBM physicists at the American Institute of Physicists.
Image credit: Scanning tunneling microscope IBM
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