James M. Early (July 25, 1922 – January 12, 2004) was an American
electrical engineer
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
, best known for his work on
transistor
upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink).
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch ...
s and
charge-coupled device
A charge-coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to a neighboring capacitor. CCD sensors are a ...
imagers. He was also known as Jim Early.
Biography
He was born on July 25, 1922, in
Syracuse, New York
Syracuse ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Onondaga County, New York, United States. It is the fifth-most populous city in the state of New York following New York City, Buffalo, Yonkers, and Rochester.
At the 2020 census, the city' ...
. He received an MSE degree (1948) and his Ph.D. (1951) all from
Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pub ...
.
The
Early effect
The Early effect, named after its discoverer James M. Early, is the variation in the effective width of the base in a bipolar junction transistor (BJT) due to a variation in the applied base-to-collector voltage. A greater reverse bias across ...
in
bipolar junction transistor
A bipolar junction transistor (BJT) is a type of transistor that uses both electrons and electron holes as charge carriers. In contrast, a unipolar transistor, such as a field-effect transistor, uses only one kind of charge carrier. A bipola ...
s is named after Jim Early, who first characterized it and published a paper on it in 1952. The Early effect in bipolar junction transistors is due to an effective decrease in the base width because of the widening of the base-collector depletion region, resulting in an increase in the collector current with an increase in the collector voltage. The same type of length modulation in
MOSFET
The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET, MOS-FET, or MOS FET) is a type of field-effect transistor (FET), most commonly fabricated by the controlled oxidation of silicon. It has an insulated gate, the voltage of which d ...
s is also commonly referred to as Early effect.
Early was the first to make a transistor that would oscillate faster than "a thousand megacycles" (1 GHz), circa 1952, for which feat he won a bottle of
Scotch whisky
Scotch whisky (; sco, Scots whisky/whiskie, whusk(e)y; often simply called whisky or Scotch) is malt whisky or grain whisky (or a blend of the two), made in Scotland.
All Scotch whisky was originally made from malted barley. Commercial disti ...
from
John Robinson Pierce.
He also developed the transistors for America's first commercial communications satellite, the
Telstar I.
He was elevated to IEEE Fellow.
In the early 1970s, Early led research for
Fairchild Semiconductor
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of int ...
, where he invented the vertical anti-blooming drain for
CCD image sensors.
He died on January 12, 2004, at the
VA Palo Alto Health Care System
VA, Va and variants may refer to:
Places
* Vä, Sweden, a village
* Vatican City (ISO 3166-1 country code VA)
* Virginia, United States postal abbreviation
Businesses and organizations Businesses
* VA Software (also known as "VA Research" and "V ...
in
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was es ...
.
References
External links
Memorial pageat Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation
1922 births
2004 deaths
American electrical engineers
20th-century American engineers
20th-century American inventors
Ohio State University alumni
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