PVSC 44 William R. Cherry Awardee
Prof. Eli Yablonovitch, Director of the NSF Center for Energy Efficiency Electronics Science headquartered at Berkeley, will receive the William Cherry Award in recognition of his many contributions to solar cell device physics and technology.
Although Yablonovitch has worked in a variety of pure and applied fields, his first love has always been Photovoltaics, which he regards as part of the same double-heterostructure family as LED’s and semiconductor lasers. In his photovoltaic research, he introduced the 4(n squared) (“Yablonovitch Limit”) light-trapping factor that is in worldwide use for almost all commercial solar panels. He also published research on the fundamental efficiency limits in solar cells and developed novel surface passivations for silicon and GaAs.
His mantra that “a great solar cell also needs to be a great LED”, is the basis of the world record solar cells: single-junction 28.8% efficiency; dual-junction 31.5% at Alta Devices Inc.; & quadruple-junction 38.8% efficiency in NREL; all at 1 sun.
Eli Yablonovitch introduced the idea that strained semiconductor lasers could have superior performance due to reduced valence band (hole) effective mass. With almost every human interaction with the internet, optical telecommunication occurs by strained semiconductor lasers.
He is regarded as a Father of the Photonic BandGap concept, and he coined the term "Photonic Crystal". The geometrical structure of the first experimentally realized Photonic bandgap, is sometimes called “Yablonovite”.
Eli has founded or cofounded several companies, including Ethertronics, Inc. (cellphone antennas) and Luxtera (originator of Silicon Photonics).
Prof. Yablonovitch is elected as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, and has received numerous other prestigious awards.
He received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1972, worked for two years at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then became a professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. In 1979 he joined Exxon to do research on photovoltaic solar energy. Then in 1984, he joined Bell Communications Research, where he was Director of Solid-State Physics Research. In 1992 he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, prior to joining U. C. Berkeley as Professor of E.E. and Computer Sciences, where he holds the James & Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering.