Who developed the first diode?
31036#5
De Forest's Audion did not see much use until its ability to amplify was recognized around 1912 by several researchers, who used it to build the first successful amplifying radio receivers and electronic oscillators. The many uses for amplification motivated its rapid development. By 1913 improved versions with higher vacuum were developed by Harold Arnold at American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which had purchased the rights to the Audion from De Forest, and Irving Langmuir at General Electric, who named his tube the "Pliotron", These were the first vacuum tube triodes. The name "triode" appeared later, when it became necessary to distinguish it from other kinds of vacuum tubes with more or fewer elements (e.g. diodes, tetrodes, pentodes, etc.). There were lengthy lawsuits between De Forest and von Lieben, and De Forest and the Marconi Company, who represented John Ambrose Fleming, the inventor of the diode.
Triode
8254#8
About 20 years later, John Ambrose Fleming (scientific adviser to the Marconi Company
and former Edison employee) realized that the Edison effect could be used as a radio detector. Fleming patented the first true thermionic diode, the Fleming valve, in Britain on November 16, 1904 (followed by in November 1905).
Diode
8254#10
In 1874, German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun discovered the "unilateral conduction" across a contact between a metal and a mineral. Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose was the first to use a crystal for detecting radio waves in 1894. The crystal detector was developed into a practical device for wireless telegraphy by Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, who invented a silicon crystal detector in 1903 and received a patent for it on November 20, 1906. Other experimenters tried a variety of other minerals as detectors. Semiconductor principles were unknown to the developers of these early rectifiers. During the 1930s understanding of physics advanced and in the mid 1930s researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories recognized the potential of the crystal detector for application in microwave technology. Researchers at Bell Labs, Western Electric, MIT, Purdue and in the UK intensively developed point-contact diodes ("crystal rectifiers" or "crystal diodes") during World War II for application in radar. After World War II, AT&T used these in their microwave towers that criss-crossed the United States, and many radar sets use them even in the 21st century. In 1946, Sylvania began offering the 1N34 crystal diode. During the early 1950s, junction diodes were developed.
Diode
27022640#1
The superluminescent diode was reported for the first time by Kurbatov et al. (1971) and Lee, Burrus, and Miller (1973). By 1986 Dr. Gerard A. Alphonse at RCA Laboratories (now SRI International), invented a novel design enabling high power superluminescent diodes. This light source was developed as a key component in the next generations of fibre optic gyroscopes, low coherence tomography for medical imaging, and external cavity tunable lasers with applications to fiber-optic communications. In 1989 the technology was transferred to GE-RCA in Canada, which became a division of EG&G. 
Superluminescent light emitting diodes are also called sometimes superluminescent diodes, superluminescence diodes or superluminescent LEDs.
Superluminescent diode
1049876#8
The first diode–transistor logic family of integrated circuits was introduced by Signetics in 1962. DTL was also made by Fairchild and Westinghouse. A family of diode logic and diode–transistor logic integrated circuits was developed by Texas Instruments for the D-37C Minuteman II Guidance Computer in 1962, but these devices were not available to the public.
Logic family
142258#54
Following theoretical treatments of M.G. Bernard, G. Duraffourg and William P. Dumke in the early 1960s coherent light emission from a gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductor diode (a laser diode) was demonstrated in 1962 by two US groups led by Robert N. Hall at the General Electric research center and by Marshall Nathan at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. There has been ongoing debate as to whether IBM or GE invented the first laser diode which was largely based on theoretical work by William P. Dumke at IBM Labs in Yonkers, NY. The priority is given to General Electric group who have obtained and submitted their results earlier; they also went further and made a resonant cavity for their diode. It was initially speculated, by MIT's Ben Lax among other leading physicists, that silicon or germanium could be used to create a lasing effect, but theoretical analyses convinced William P. Dumke that these materials would not work. Instead, he suggested Gallium Arsenide as a good candidate. The first visible wavelength GaAs laser diode was demonstrated by Nick Holonyak, Jr. later in 1962.
Other teams at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Texas Instruments, and RCA Laboratories were also involved in and received credit for their historic initial demonstrations of efficient light emission and lasing in semiconductor diodes in 1962 and thereafter. GaAs lasers were also produced in early 1963 in the Soviet Union by the team led by Nikolay Basov.
Laser diode
502133#2
Such an effect was first observed in a copper–cuprous-oxide interface by Chauncey Starr in the 1930s. Beginning in 2002, theoretical models were proposed to explain this effect. In 2006 the first microscopic solid-state thermal diodes were built. In April 2015 Italian researchers at CNR announced development of a working thermal diode, publishing results in Nature Nanotechnology.
Thermal diode
45057474#1
In 1948, Torrey et al. stated that "It should be possible to make metal-insulator-metal rectifiers with much smaller spreading resistances than metal-semiconductor rectifiers have, consequently giving greater rectification efficiency at high frequencies". But due to fabrication difficulties, two decades passed before the first device could be successfully created. Some of the very first MIM diodes to be fabricated came from Bell Labs in the late 1960s and early 1970s Brinkman et al. demonstrated the first zero-bias MIM tunneling diode with significant responsivity. When they are using tunneling transport, the MIM diode can be very fast. As soon as 1974, this diode was reportedly used as a mixer at 88 THz in a setup of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Thanks to recent researches the zero-bias responsivity of the MIM diode (15 A/W) is now very close to the one of Schottky diode (19.4 A/W).
Metal-insulator-metal
9693900#1
The first room-temperature, continuous-wave diode lasers were successfully invented, developed, and almost simultaneously demonstrated at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, Russia by a team including Garbuzov and Zhores Alferov (winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics), and by the competing team of I. Hayashi and M. Panish at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Both teams attained this accomplishment in 1970. Garbuzov was also responsible for the development of practical high-power, high-efficiency, diode lasers at a variety of wavelength bands from visible to mid-infrared wavelengths.
Dmitri Z. Garbuzov
530655#0
A tunnel diode or Esaki diode is a type of semiconductor diode that has negative resistance due to the quantum mechanical effect called tunneling. It was invented in August 1957 by Leo Esaki, Yuriko Kurose, and Takashi Suzuki when they were working at Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, now known as Sony. In 1973, Esaki received the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Brian Josephson, for discovering the electron tunneling effect used in these diodes. Robert Noyce independently devised the idea of a tunnel diode while working for William Shockley, but was discouraged from pursuing it. Tunnel diodes were first manufactured by Sony in 1957, followed by General Electric and other companies from about 1960, and are still made in low volume today.
Tunnel diode
237770#64
The first widely used solid-state negative resistance device was the tunnel diode, invented in 1957 by Japanese physicist Leo Esaki. Because they have lower parasitic capacitance than vacuum tubes due to their small junction size, diodes can function at higher frequencies, and tunnel diode oscillators proved able to produce power at microwave frequencies, above the range of ordinary vacuum tube oscillators. Its invention set off a search for other negative resistance semiconductor devices for use as microwave oscillators, resulting in the discovery of the IMPATT diode, Gunn diode, TRAPATT diode, and others. In 1969 Kurokawa derived conditions for stability in negative resistance circuits. Currently negative differential resistance diode oscillators are the most widely used sources of microwave energy, and many new negative resistance devices have been discovered in recent decades.
Negative resistance