Draper winners invented an industry
Steve Scheiber, Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 2/1/2006
Genuine engineering breakthroughs don't happen very often. When they do, they deserve to be recognized.
The National Academy of Engineering recently awarded the 2006 Charles S. Draper Award to George Smith and Willard Boyle. According to the NAE Website (www.nae.edu), the annual award goes to "an engineer whose accomplishment has significantly impacted society by improving the quality of life, providing the ability to live freely and comfortably, and/or permitting the access to information." Smith and Boyle own the basic patent for the charge-coupled device (CCD) that they developed at Bell Laboratories in 1970. The two men will split the $500,000 prize.
CCDs represent the basic technology that spawned the digital imaging industry. CCDs replaced Vidicon tubes as camera sensors, so imaging was no longer restricted to large cameras whose timing was defined by the designers of conventional television. The new approach permitted adjusting image-acquisition resolution and timing to reflect the target application.
In addition to his work on CCDs, Dr. Smith was involved in a variety of investigations on junction lasers, semiconducting ferroelectrics, electroluminescence, and transition-metal oxides. Dr. Boyle was the first to use infrared spectroscopy to measure donor and cyclotron energy levels and developed the first continuously pumped ruby laser.
