Military phased-array radar gallium arsenide chip packaging (1980s)

Military application that finally made GaAs production economic ~30 years in.

So he came to MIT and he worked on gallium arsenide. At the time everybody thought it was an impossible task to solve the gallium arsenide production problem. They knew it had the right electrical properties, but they didn't know how to make it with controlled defects. There are a huge number of possibilities when you go from a pure silicon single crystal and intentionally dope it to gallium arsenide, where now you can have different layers of gallium and arsenic, different clustering and everything else. Harry became the father of gallium arsenide. I remember as a student, in the Journal of Applied Physics half the journal was about gallium arsenide or gallium aluminum arsenide. Millions and millions of dollars going into it, no one could make it reliably enough. Then about thirty years ago the military, the gallium arsenide production after thirty years of research was getting better, and the military could make $500 chips out of gallium arsenide for phased array radar — and that was a big thing of how do you package this stuff, and I worked on some of that thirty years ago.