Classic Toyota’s AAPI Heritage Month Celebration: Highlighting Dawon Kahng and the Invention of MOSFET

May 6, 2024

Throughout May, we’re covering notable contributions, inventions, and innovations of Asians and Asian Americans in the automotive industry as part of our month-long celebration of AAPI Heritage month!

Today, we’re highlighting the brilliant work of Dawon Kahng who, along with his partner Mohamed Atalla of Egyptian-American descent, invented the “MOSFET” or metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (say that one 5x fast, we dare you.)

Asian American, Pacific Islanders Heritage month – celebration in USA. Vector banner with abstract shapes and lines in traditional Asian colors. Greeting card, banner.

What is a MOSFET?

In the automotive industry, the MOSFET is a basic switch element in electronics, and is used to drive motors in a variety of applications such as power steering systems, power brakes, pumps, ventilation, fans, airbags, seat adjustments, and even sunroofs. It’s an integral part of modern automotive design! Automakers use a system called “MOSFET” redundancy by employing multiple MOSFETs in parallel in order to increase reliability and safety. MOSFETs excel in low-voltage and high-voltage frequency applications. SiC MOSFETs are used in EV designs to help the EV inverters deliver higher performance and efficiency. In fact, it’s such a vital invention that this innovative MOS technology accounts for nearly 99% of today’s microchips.

How was the MOSFET invented?

Let’s learn a little more about one of the innovative scientists behind this ubiquitous technology!

Dawon Kahng was born in South Korea in 1931, and emigrated to the US in 1955. He graduated from Ohio State University with a doctorate in physics in 1959. Soon after, he secured a position at Bell Telephone Laboratories and connected with Mohammed Atalla on the MOSFET. Although it had been theorized, Dawon Kahng and Mohammed “Martin” Atalla’s collaborative efforts led them to become the first team to build a working version of the field-effect transistor and bring it to physical fruition. The practical field-effect transistor is a device that controls electronic signals by switching them either on or off, or amplifying them.

Kahng and his colleague created the first working version in 1959 by coating a silicon wafer with an insulating layer of silicon oxide, allowing electricity to reliably penetrate to the conducting silicon below through a process called surface passivation. Kahng and Atalla were both working for Bell Telephone Laboratories at the time, and although their invention was not widely embraced at first, the technology, now known as MOSFET, is one of the most widely used types of integrated circuits in both the computer and electronics industries! Kahng and Atalla were awarded the Stuart Ballantine Medal at the 1975 Franklin Institute Awards for their work in creating the MOSFET.

The pair continued their work through the 1960s, as well as Kahng also working together with Simon Sze, pioneering further advancements such as “a Schottky-barrier diode”, early versions of a metal nanolayer-base transistor, a floating-gate MOSFET and floating-gate memory cell, and more!

After retiring from 29 years of work at Bell Laboratories, Dawon Kahng went on to become the founding president of the NEC Research Institute in NJ from 1988 until his death. He unfortunately passed away in 1992 of surgery complications, but his work left a lasting legacy of innovation. Kahng was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of fame in 2009, as well as in 2014, the MOSFET was included on the IEEE list of Milestones in Electronics. The Korean Semiconductor Conference unveiled their “Dawon Kahng Award” in his honor in 2017.