Shuji Nakamura to consult for Seoul Semi in HB LEDs

In the world of LEDs, Shuji Nakamura is a superstar. There are other luminaries (so to speak) — John Edmond at Cree and Roland Haitz of Agilent/HP come to mind– but Nakamura’s single-handed and ultimately successful quest to develop a viable blue LED is a truly impressive accomplishment that enabled the subsequent field of solid-state illumination.

Nakamura ended up leaving the company he worked for while he pursued the blue LED, Nichia, and went to work as a materials professor at UC Santa Barbara. Today, Seoul Semiconductor, the fourth-largest LED manufacturer, announced that Nakamura will work as a scientific advisor to the company.

The book Brilliant!: Shuji Nakamura and the Revolution in Lighting Technology details the difficulties Nakamura faced at Nichia in pursuing the blue LED development, at times actually hindered by the company’s management. In 1999, when Nakamura decided to leave Nichia – a step that’s highly out of character for most engineers in Japan – he decided to go to a university rather than corporate position partly in the hopes that Nichia would not pursue him legally for theft of company IP. It didn’t work: Nichia still filed suit claiming theft of trade secrets. In addition, Nichia refused to pay him the retirement money they owed him. So Nakamura took the unusual-in-Japan step of counter-filing against Nichia for about $16.5M as his fair share of the $1.4B in sales that Nichia had earned from the blue LED technology. Long story short: In 2005 a settlement was reached that Nichia would pay Nakamura about $8M, the largest amount ever paid to a Japanese corporate researcher.

Brilliant! is a fine book – give it a read if you’re interested in how one person can have a significant impact in the development of a new technology.