Dawon Kahng

Dawon Kahng (May 4, 1931 – May 13, 1992) was a Korean-American electrical engineer known for his work at Solid-State Electronics.

Dawon was born on May 4, 1931 in Seoul, South Korea. He studied Physics at Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, and emigrated to the United States in 1955 to attend Ohio State University, where he received a doctorate in physics.

He was a researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey and he invented MOSFET (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor), which is the basic element in most of today's electronic equipment, with Martin M Atalla in 1959. Along with his colleague Simon Sze, he also invented the floating gate memory cell, the foundation for many forms of semiconductor memory devices. He also conducted research on high frequency Schottky diodes, ferro-electric semiconductors, and luminous materials, and made important contributions to the field of electroluminescence. He also invented Floating Gate non-volatile semiconductor memory in 1967.

After retiring from Bell Laboratories, he became the founding president of the NEC Research Institute in New Jersey. He was a fellow of the IEEE and a fellow of the Bell Laboratories. He was also a recipient of the Stuart Ballantine Medal of the Franklin Institute and the Distinguished Alummus Award of the Ohio State University College of Engineering. He died of complications following emergency surgery for a ruptured aortic aneurysm in 1992.