Simon Sze


Simon Min Sze is a Chinese-American electrical engineer. He is best known for inventing the floating-gate MOSFET with Dawon Kahng in 1967.

Biography

Sze was born in Nanjing, China, and grew up in Taiwan. After graduating from the National Taiwan University in 1957, he received a master's degree from the University of Washington in 1960 and a doctorate from Stanford University in 1963. He worked for Bell Labs until 1990, after which he returned to Taiwan and joined the faculty of National Chiao Tung University. He is well known for his work in semiconductor physics and technology, including his 1967 discovery of the floating-gate transistor, now widely used in non-volatile semiconductor memory devices. He has written and edited many books, including Physics of Semiconductor Devices, one of the most-cited texts in its field. Sze received the J J Ebers Award in 1991 for his work in electron devices.