Honorary Professor Hideo Hosono and Professor Toshio Kamiya of MDX Research Center for Element Strategy, International Research Frontiers Initiative, Tokyo Institute of Technology, along with Associate Professor Kenji Nomura (Ph.D., former Specially Appointed Associate Professor at the former Materials Research Center for Element Strategy) of the University of California San Diego, USA, received the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize from The Society for Information Displays (SID), the world’s largest academic society in the field of displays.
The award ceremony was held on May 22 at Display Week 2023, SID’s annual convention in Los Angeles, California. The Braun Prize is awarded annually for outstanding technical achievement that has had a substantial impact on the display industry and ranks as SID’s most prestigious individual award.
The awarded achievements are “pioneering research, sustained scientific and technological contributions, and industry leadership in high-mobility amorphous oxide semiconductors, especially IGZO-TFTs, which are becoming today’s global standard.”
IGZO-TFTs were first reported in Science in 2003 using crystalline thin films and in Nature in 2004 for amorphous thin films, and these papers have already been cited more than 10,000 times. In addition, a family of several dozen patents on these TFTs and the devices to which they are applied, such as displays and memories, has been granted worldwide. The TFT is the key element that drives the pixels in a display and governs the performance of the display. Amorphous IGZO-TFTs are widely used today because of their advantages over the previously exclusively used amorphous silicon: electrons move about one order of magnitude more easily, power consumption is lower, and homogeneous thin films can be easily fabricated at low temperatures.
The technology was completed with Professor Hosono in charge of material design and general leadership, Professor Kamiya in charge of electronic structure analysis, and Associate Professor Nomura primarily responsible for the fabrication of the TFTs.
Comment from Honorary Professor Hideo Hosono
Honorary Professor Hideo Hosono
In 2011, I received the Jan Rajchman Prize for academia from SID, and this time we were recognized for our contribution to industry. It is rare for basic research at a university to lead to major industrial applications, so I thank our lucky stars. This award would not have been possible without our team of three. I am grateful for your recognition of this.
