SPIE Fellow James Coleman, a leader in the development and application of semiconductor lasers and photonic devices and recipient of the 2011 SPIE Technology Achievement Award, has joined the University of Texas at Dallas (USA) to lead its electrical engineering department.
Previously an endowed professor of electrical engineering and materials science and engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Coleman was a pioneer in metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) for complex semiconductor structures used in photonics manufacturing.
His work has led to wider applications of semiconductor lasers and the manufacturing and production of computer chips on a more economical and feasible scale.
The university said Coleman was appointed the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science Distinguished Chair at UT Dallas this fall and will continue his research on strained layer lasers, self-assembled and patterned quantum dots, and low-threshold and high-power, single-mode, index-guided lasers and arrays.
Coleman received the SPIE Technology Achievement Award in 2011 in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the methods, designs, and demonstrations of selectively grown, discrete, and monolithically integrated compound-semiconductor lasers and photonic devices.
He and his students have been at the forefront of an approach involving selective area growth (SAG) of materials on which the fundamental properties of materials can be adjusted in local areas of a wafer by masking epitaxial deposition in specific regions to enhance deposition in other regions.
The technique is now widely used for integration of various optoelectronics components onto a single chip. Virtually all lasers used in today's printers as well as CD and DVD players/recorders make use of strained layers in the active region.
