Dr. Simon Min Sze, a semiconductor physics visionary most notable for his contributions to the invention of the world's first floating-gate metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), passed away peacefully on November 6, 2023, at the age of 87.
According to his obituary published by the San Francisco Chronicle, Sze was born in Shanghai on March 21, 1936, and grew up in Taiwan. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University (NTU), and an M.S. at the University of Washington. He completed his academic career with a Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1963. He was in the same Ph.D. research group as TSMC founder Morris Chang and Orient Semiconductor Electronics (OSE) founder Eugene Duh, with Dr. John Moll as their adviser.
He later worked at the renowned Bell Labs until 1990, and it was during his time at Bell Labs that he made his most notable invention regarding semiconductor technology. In 1967, Sze and his Korean colleague Dawon Kahng fabricated the world's first floating-gate non-volatile memory device, which is now widely used in non-volatile memory applications such as flash memory.
After leaving Bell Labs, he returned to Taiwan and became a faculty member of National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), nurturing the next generation of talents for the semiconductor industry. Some of his noteworthy students include Etron Technology founder Nicky Lu, former NCTU president Chang Chun-yen , and former VP of R&D and CTO at TSMC Jack Sun.
Sze's groundbreaking work spanned a wide range of areas, including the development of MOSFET technology, semiconductor device physics, and semiconductor device reliability. His contributions were acknowledged by semiconductor institutes and organizations worldwide. He was named an IEEE fellow in 1977 and was later elected a Celebrated Member of the Electron Device Society (EDS) under IEEE in 2017. Coincidentally, the most recent (2022) inductee into the EDS Celebrated Member program is TSMC founder Morris Chang.
Sze became one of the very few people to be named Academician of Academia Sinica (Taiwan), a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (US), and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (China) altogether. He is also recognized by the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP) as a JSAP Fellow International and received the Flash Memory Summit's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.
