Herbert Kroemer was born on August 25, 1928, inWeimar, Germany. His father was a civil servant, while his mother was a housewife; neither of them had a high school education. Kroemer excelled in physics at school, letting him advance faster than his peers in the subject.[3]
Kroemer worked in a number of research laboratories in Germany and the United States, and taughtelectrical engineering at theUniversity of Colorado from 1968 to 1976. He joined theUCSB faculty in 1976, focusing its semiconductor research program on the emerging compound semiconductor technology rather than on mainstreamsilicon technology.Charles Kittel had published the successfulThermal Physics in 1969, and enlisted Kroemer to edit it for a second edition, which appeared in 1980.
He is also the author of the textbookQuantum Mechanics for Engineering, Materials Science and Applied Physics.[6]
Kroemer always preferred to work on problems that are ahead of mainstreamtechnology, inventing thedrift transistor in the 1950s and being the first to point out that advantages could be gained in various semiconductor devices by incorporatingheterojunctions. Most notably, though, in 1963 he proposed the concept of the double-heterostructurelaser, which is now a central concept in the field of semiconductor lasers. Kroemer became an early pioneer inmolecular beam epitaxy, concentrating on applying the technology to untried new materials.
"For contributions to high-frequency transistors and hot-electron devices, especially heterostructure devices from heterostructure bipolar transistors to lasers, and their molecular beam epitaxy technology"
^H. Kroemer, Quantum Mechanics, Prentice Hall (1994)
^Kroemer, Herbert. "Herbert Kroemer – Science Video Interview". Interviewer: "You have no belief in a afterlife?" Kroemer: "That's correct." Interviewer: "...You don't see the evidence of a designer?" Kroemer: "No, I don't." Interviewer: "Could you say more about it?" Kroemer: "I think it's just wishful thinking."
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