In 1959, with a green card in his pocket, a newly graduated German physicist was looking for an old fruit barn in the town of Mountain View in the Santa Clara Valley in California.
In it, the inventor of the transistor and Nobel Prize winner William Shockley worked with a small group on electronic semiconductor components.
The young physicist was Hans-Joachim Queisser, who was able to witness the beginning of the silicon age in California.
Because at that time nobody suspected: The small hut in Mountain View was to become the nucleus of the legendary Silicon Valley.
Manfred Lindinger
Editor in the “Nature and Science” section.
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But the "Shockley Semiconductor Corporation" was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Important employees had left the company, which was not making big profits.
The renegades, including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, wanted to build silicon-based transistors rather than diodes, as Shockley favored.
They founded their own companies, including Intel, and became successful.
The "Shockley Semiconductor Corporation" went bankrupt and was sold twice.
“Despite the difficulties, it was an exciting time,” Queisser said later. From Shockley he learned everything that was already known about semiconductor physics at the time. In the wake of the Sputnik shock, Shockley's small company received a government contract to develop silicon solar cells for space travel. Together with his boss, Queisser developed a theory that is still valid today, thanks to which the maximum possible efficiency of a solar cell can be calculated.
Before Shockley's company was finally shut down, Queisser moved to the famous Bell Laboratories in 1964, where he expanded his knowledge. In 1966, the Berlin-born man had a chance to return to Germany. With valuable experience in his luggage, he wanted to establish semiconductor research here as well - if possible in symbiosis with industry, which he only partially succeeded in doing. In 1969, Queisser was commissioned to found the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, of which he was director until 1998. Thanks to his commitment, the institute became a forge of important semiconductor technologies and talented scientists.
Queisser cultivated contacts abroad early on, especially in Japan and there with the Sony company, which earned him the ridicule of many colleagues. But he was not deterred. In the 1980s, science and economics ministers increasingly sought his advice on how to catch up on the American and Japanese lead in the field of memory and computer chips. But all efforts were of no avail and his advice faded away. Politics and business were already too sluggish to disappoint him.
Even if Queisser has long been retired, the pioneering spirit of yesteryear still glows in him. The lively physicist can still be met every now and then at lectures or in his old institute. Then he likes to take the visitor on a trip to the old hut in Silicon Valley. Today Hans-Joachim Queisser celebrates his 90th birthday.