Lincoln Lab gallium arsenide development under NASA funding

NASA-funded studies at Lincoln Lab; took 30 years to make reliably. Harry Gatos as "father of gallium arsenide."

They could only do that because of this gallium arsenide stuff. If you went back sixty years ago — actually, if you walk through the Delta terminal at Logan Airport, you'll hear John Kennedy talking about we're going to send a man to the moon not because it's easy but because it's hard, which is a nice way of phrasing it. But it points out that one of the things that came out of the space program — they don't say it's gallium arsenide, but they say LEDs. It turns out NASA funded, at Lincoln Lab initially and a few other places, studies of gallium arsenide. People who were studying all these semiconductors looked at the compound semiconductors and said boy, this 3-5 compound, gallium arsenide, knocks the socks off silicon, let's make it. Silicon came around in the 1950s. Well, no one knew how to make gallium arsenide.