Thus when Haitz spotted the shape of the slivovitz glass, he immediately knew that he was in trouble. In his broken English he did his best to explain to Shockley what the problem was. At all costs, he did not want to humiliate himself in front of the Nobel Prize winner. Shockley understood that his young companion was in a pickle and did not know what to do. Suddenly, Haitz saw a way out. He grabbed his glass of slivovitz and poured it straight into the beer. Shockley did the same. Haitz later learned that it was precisely this ability to take decisive action in order to solve a tricky problem that had caused Shockley to hire him. When a few weeks later he showed up for work at Shockley Transistor, the world’s first semiconductor startup, he would be hailed as “the man with the slivovitz!”
Haitz moved to Mountain View, where Shockley’s company was located, in May 1961, long before the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area became known as Silicon Valley. When he started work at Shockley the peninsula was still known mostly for growing fruit. Throughout the sixties its orchards continued to produce plums, pears, apricots, and cherries. In 1964, having got his PhD at Shockley, Haitz moved to Texas Instruments. But Dallas summers were too hot for his liking and after five years he moved back out to Palo Alto, to work for Hewlett Packard, in those days still primarily a maker of scientific instruments. Haitz found himself in what he described as “a nearly ideal job” at HP managing optoelectronics R&D. It was a role which allowed considerable scope for his creative abilities. “A large fraction of the early products in the components group of Hewlett Packard were things that I developed in my first three or four years there,” he told me. One product in particular, an opto-coupler (an LED-based device used to isolate electrical circuits from each other), proved so profitable that, as Haitz put it wryly, “it paid for all the other things I wasted money on.”
In 1984, Haitz was promoted to R&D manager of HP’s Semiconductor Products Group. In that position, he recalled, “I had no right to give orders to anybody, but I had the right to stick my nose into anything, helping to push R&D investments in the right direction, as well as making sure that the R&D budget was spent in the best interests of the company’s health.” Hewlett Packard was famous for its culture of managing by wandering around. “Roland was very often wandering around, checking up with the engineers and looking to see what they were working on,” Karen Owyeung remembered.
With his guttural growl and crusty, no-nonsense manner, Haitz could make his presence felt. “When Roland strolls through an area, you know he’s arrived,” recalled Bob Gardner, a Texan engineer Haitz hired. “Some people steered clear of him,” Gardner continued, “because he was like a barking dog on a porch— if you walked by the porch you were gonna get barked at.” But to those who could get past the gruff exterior Haitz was a generous mentor who was always willing to take the time to teach them useful lessons. And he could surprise people with his unexpectedly idiosyncratic sense of humor.
“Roland loved to challenge people on technical approaches or patent ideas, or even business approaches,” Owyeung said. “For someone whose background was R&D, he was very committed to the business.” Haitz was nothing if not pragmatic. In his last ten years at HP, he saw himself more as a financial analyst than a physicist. He would attempt to hammer basic business principles into the heads of the young engineers he supervised. To guide them on whether a project was worth investing in, he devised a four-item checklist. The first question was, Is it real? Meaning, are there actual customers out there willing to buy the proposed product? Second, Can we do it? Because not everything is doable with the current technology. Third, Can we win? In other words, how do we measure up to the competition? And crucially fourth, Is it worth it? No point in investing a million dollars if the market is worth only two million.
Doubtless in assessing the potential for LEDs in lighting, Haitz asked himself the same questions. There were certainly customers, otherwise Philips would not have been interested. Judging by the historical record and recent breakthroughs, the technology seemed doable. The big question was, could LEDs win against the entrenched technology of incandescent light bulbs? If they could, then the investment would be very much worth it. Replacing the world’s light bulbs would be a multibillion-dollar business. In 1999, however, nobody in the LED industry was thinking seriously about general lighting. Roland Haitz was way ahead of the curve.
How to convince the “sugar daddies” - Haitz’s term for funding agencies - in Washington that there was a big energy play in LEDs? Haitz devised a strategy for extracting funding from the federal government. Obviously, a compelling case would have to be made. The technology would have to be shown to be early-stage, hence requiring investment, but also susceptible to improvement. Support from powerful insiders would have to be solicited. Most notably, from the two senators representing New Mexico, one a Republican the other a Democrat, who between them ran the US Senate’s energy committee. Fortunately the Democrat, Jeff Bingaman, had a long track record of backing the domestic semiconductor industry, seeing it as a crucial pillar of the US industrial base.
As an unknown from Silicon Valley Haitz did not himself have the clout to approach the senators directly. He needed a proxy with the right connections. Who would serve that purpose? That part turned out to be relatively straightforward. New Mexico was home to two national laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia. Serendipitously, Sandia had a strong research program in compound semiconductors, the basic materials used to make LEDs. As Haitz well knew, because Sandia and Hewlett Packard had been collaborating on a research project in this field. Haitz had been part of the team that had initiated and helped negotiate the project. He had hit it off with Jeff Tsao, the young manager of compound semiconductor materials research at Sandia. If he could persuade Tsao to join forces with him, then that would give the pair the credibility they needed to access the corridors of power.
Sandia had historically been a nuclear weapons laboratory. Its origins dated back to World War II and the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for developing the atom bomb. Sandia started out as a support lab for Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, another national laboratory. Los Alamos and Livermore were responsible for what is euphemistically known as “the physics package;” that is, the part of the bomb that goes boom. Everything else - the electronics, the fusing and firing, the triggering - was Sandia’s domain. When energy became a big issue during the Jimmy Carter years there was a push to unleash Sandia’s scientific and technical capabilities on a larger set of problems. Sandia’s interest in compound semiconductors dated back to the late eighties. It derived from the fact that, unlike silicon, compounds like gallium arsenide are “radhard”; in other words, relatively immune from the effects of radiation, a significant advantage in any nuclear war scenario.
When the Cold War ended, emphasis shifted away from militaryonly technology toward what was known as “dual-use” applications. In the mid 1990s national labs like Sandia came under pressure to work collaboratively with industry, to try and move some of their exotic technologies out into the commercial world. This was the origin of the collaboration with HP. By the late nineties Jeff Tsao had started to consider semiconductor lighting. He recalled having discussions on this topic with Roland Haitz. Was the idea of LEDs as a lighting technology completely crazy? Though Sandia was part of the Department of Energy, Tsao had not thus far thought much about energy issues. Now, stimulated by Haitz, he came to the conclusion that energy saving was the most compelling rationale that could be made for LED lighting. Haitz asked Tsao to help him draft a white paper that would make the energy case for LED lighting. In this process the older man was and would remain, as Tsao readily admitted, the driving force.
To grab the attention of the politicians, they needed to tell their story in Washington. Fortunately an appropriate venue was available, in the shape of the annual forum of the Optoelectronic Industry Development Association. This group had been formed in 1991 based on a Japanese model. The idea was that US optoelectronic users and
suppliers - of optical fiber communications systems, for example - working in partnership with academia and the government could create a strong, internationally competitive industry. Haitz had been one of the main movers in getting the OIDA off the ground and also the group’s first treasurer. The association’s president was Arpad Bergh, a former Bell Labs researcher. Bergh had long been a proponent of light emitting diodes, having co-authored a book on the subject back in 1974. It was Bergh who suggested that the pair should substitute “solid-state” for “semiconductor” to describe LED lighting. The name stuck. Henceforth most people, especially in the US, would refer to LED lighting as solidstate lighting, or SSL for short. Bergh was supportive, suggesting that their paper should be presented at that year’s forum. “Arpad gave us a nudge,” Tsao recalled, “I give him quite a bit of credit for his early support of solidstate lighting.” Even more important, Bergh maintained regular contacts with key members of government funding agencies.
During the summer of 1999, together with two colleagues, the pair worked on their white paper. Entitled The Case for a National Research Program on Semiconductor Lighting, it was presented, by Haitz, in Washington DC on October 6 of that year to an invitation-only audience consisting of perhaps 150 people. In addition to members of OIDA, attendees included senate staffers and representatives of several government organisations, among them the Department of Energy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “Dramatic changes are unfolding in lighting technology,” Haitz began portentously. Light emitting diodes were already beginning to displace incandescent bulbs in many colored-light applications, such as traffic signals. Further major improvements in brightness were predicted. If progress in red LEDs were to be replicated in white devices, the result would ultimately be “the holy grail of lighting,” an ideal light source. Haitz defined this as a white LED with an output of 200 lumens per watt. That was ten times more energyefficient than incandescents and twice as efficient as fluorescents. The implications were profound. “This new light source would change the way we live, and the way we consume energy” [emphasis in the original]. Worldwide, the electricity consumed by lighting would drop by more than half. Total electricity consumption in the US would decrease by more than ten per cent.
In 1999, the best the industry could manage was a primitive onewatt LED lamp that was capable only of shining a measly ten lumens of blueish-white light. The lamp had an efficacy (ie, ratio of light output to power) that was hardly better than the incandescent lamps it was intended to replace. The efficacy would increase gradually, but how quickly would it be possible to reach the goal of 200 lumens per watt? “Bringing about such revolutionary improvements in performance will require a concerted national effort,” Haitz told his audience. Tackling a broad set of issues in semiconductor lighting technology would need funding on the order of $500 million over ten years. The effort would harness “the most advanced high-technology companies, the best national laboratory resources, and the most creative university researchers.”
What would be the bene fits of such an initiative? To answer this question Haitz offered a historical analogy. The revolution in lighting could be compared to the revolution in electronics. This had begun fifty years previously, with the invention of the transistor by Shockley et al, and was only now reaching maturity. As in electronics, glass bulbs and tubes would give way to semiconductors. New applications for LED lighting would inevitably appear. “Just as for electronics, the increased integrability, density, performance, and mass manufacturability of semiconductors may drive additional, not-yet-thought-of uses for lighting.” As an example, Haitz speculated that “information and illumination technologies [could] combine to create ultra-fast wireless local-area networks that are mediated through building lights!” (Time would prove him right.)
Beguiling though this vision was, in order to accomplish what Haitz called “the Wonder Bulb,” a set of “enormous technical problems” would have to be tackled. Prime among them were increasing the efficiency of LEDs and reducing the cost of their manufacture. Solutions would not be achieved without a concerted, co-ordinated national effort. The industry could not afford to pay for such an effort out of its own profits. That was why government support was necessary. But if the initiative were to succeed, the taxpayer would be well rewarded, by a substantial reduction in electricity bills for many years to come.
And there was more, much more than could be delivered in a single presentation. In its published form the paper ran to fifteen pages, augmented by seven pages of appendices containing economic modelling. The case Haitz made was nothing if not teutonic in its thoroughness. In particular, one appendix laid out in detail the important matter of how this expensive initiative was to be financed. “I had a serious prediction,” Haitz told me, “because I showed where we are, where we will be by when, and I tidied together how we are going to pay for all that stuff — I showed where the money had to come from.”
Haitz was unaware when he gave this paper that for the previous two years, the Department of Energy’s Office of Building Technology had been drawing up a roadmap for lighting technology. It was intended to guide the lighting industry over the next two decades. By coincidence this report, entitled Vision 2020, was published at around the same time Haitz made his presentation. Embarrassingly, this expensive, governmentsponsored study on the future of the industry had somehow managed to miss what was by far the most important new trend in lighting. It contained only a couple of passing references to LEDs. “Then out of left field,” Haitz recalled laughing, “here comes this unknown guy with a little technology like LEDs and says, We are going to kick your ass!” There were of course skeptics. For some the notion of puny LEDs replacing familiar bulbs and tubes was too hard to swallow. Others scoffed at the likelihood of squeezing $500 million out of Washington to fund LED research and development. On the whole, however, the reception was positive. “The argument we made was so convincing that they couldn’t oppose it,” Haitz insisted. “When they saw what the potential of LEDs was for energy savings they embraced it very quickly. It was too late to incorporate it in Vision 2020, but they were very much in support of getting something going through a major program.”
In July 2001, Senator Bingaman introduced a bill calling for the establishment of a Next-Generation Lighting Initiative under the aegis of the Department of Energy. The bill would authorize funding of $30m for FY2002 and $50 million per annum for the next nine years. It was almost exactly what Haitz had proposed, $500 over ten years. Unfortunately, this first version of the bill foundered, dragged down by partisan politics. “The Democrats wanted to save energy, and the Republicans wanted to drill,” Haitz recalled ruefully. As a result the bill got stuck in limbo for several years. It was finally passed, as we shall see, as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and signed by President George W. Bush, at Sandia National Laboratory.
In February 2000, four months after his original presentation in Washington, Haitz gave the paper its first public airing, at the inaugural Strategies in Light conference, which was held in Silicon Valley. It was attended by around 250 people, mostly representatives from the major LED makers, together with some financial analysts. At that time nobody in the LED business was thinking seriously about lighting. The big lighting companies were conspicuous by their absence. In an industry where virtually no innovation had occurred in decades, the idea of solid-state lighting was still far too radical.
The impact of Haitz and Tsao’s paper was not con fined to the US. Its conclusions resonated around the world. Within months of its publication calls for similar well-funded national government-industry initiatives using Haitz’s rigorous analysis as a blueprint were going out in Korea, Taiwan, and China. In particular in Japan, where the government launched a five-year project called “Light for the 21st Century” aimed at developing energy-efficient LED lighting. The paper had catalyzed a revolution.
This was Haitz’s final campaign. In 2002 he retired from Agilent. But the old pack rat conti
nued to track developments in the field. In 2010 he and Tsao published another paper, Solid-State Lighting: Why it will succeed, and why it won’t be overtaken. This looked back on the dramatic developments that had occurred during the previous decade. The pair were able to report that, broadly speaking, their predications had proved accurate. Considerable progress had been made. Red had turned out to be a remarkably good predictor for white. Billions of dollars had been poured into R&D and manufacturing capacity. Developments had not always proceeded in directions envisaged in the original white paper. Unexpected new applications had popped up. Most significantly the use of LEDs as backlights to enhance the contrast of the liquid crystal displays on mobile phones and flat-screen televisions. Such huge “stepping-stone” markets had given both R&D and production a massive boost. Chipmakers had moved away from Haitz’s precious high-power LEDs to so-called “midpower” devices. Though less bright these chips were smaller and easier to make, enabling much higher yields and a consequent halving in cost.
Perhaps the biggest change had been in the attitude of the lighting industry. Convincing the “metal-benders” - as makers of lighting fixtures sometimes referred to themselves - of the merits of LEDs had proved harder than anticipated. Haitz was the first to admit that his understanding of the lighting industry’s needs had been rudimentary at best. In particular, the chip heads knew little about an all-important factor: quality of light. To them white was white, even if the output of early lamps had a distinctly blueish tint. It took them a while to learn that what consumers craved was warm light, like that shone by incandescent bulbs. Developing phosphors that could modify the output of blue LEDs to make high-quality white light for indoor applications would take the industry many years.8
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