Photo: David Stuart

James D. Meindl, professor of microelectronics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the most important part of his job is making graduate school fun and exciting. Lots of professors make the same claim, of course, but Meindl, the winner of the 2006 IEEE Medal of Honor, has an explosive story to prove it.

It was the mid-1970s, and Meindl was a professor at Stanford University, in California. His group had just paid more than US $1 million for a shiny new epitaxial reactor, in which atoms are deposited layer by layer to produce semiconductor devices, usually experimental ones. It was the latest and greatest tool of the day, and Meindl assigned one of his newest and brightest students to see what it could do.

The department's safety rules forbade students from working alone, but that new student wasn't much for following rules. One night, working by himself, he opened a valve to let silane gas flow into the reactor. Alas, he'd forgotten to purge the air out of the chamber, and silane explodes on contact with oxygen. The resulting blast ripped the reactor out of the wall. The student was lucky to escape serious injury.

Clearly, he had to be punished. Meindl couldn't bring himself to do it, so he prevailed upon a colleague, who banned the young man from the laboratory for two weeks.

Even today, Meindl beams when discussing that brash young researcher. And well he might: that student, T.J. Rodgers, went on to found Cypress Semiconductor Corp., in San Jose, Calif. Last year Cypress had $886 million in revenues. “Those were the good old days, when well-meaning accidents were just punished by a slap on the wrist,” Rodgers says today of the incident.

Before he met Meindl, Rodgers recalls, he had never worked on big problems involving the coordination of many individual research efforts. He had never heard of Silicon Valley and had never known an engineer who had started a company. Meindl brought him into this incredibly exciting world, he recalls, and “it was thrilling.”

Meindl says of his students, “My reward is to see them succeed.” He's been very well rewarded. Rodgers was one of some 80 engineers who did their graduate work under Meindl's tutelage. Among the others are William Brody, president of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore; Levy Gerzberg, president of Zoran Corp., the Silicon Valley company whose signal-processing hardware is in just about every digital camera today; and Richard Swanson, who founded SunPower, a pioneer in high-efficiency solar cells, which was purchased by Cypress in 2002.

Another Meindl disciple, L. Rafael Reif, provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, says, “I try to emulate everything about him: I listen to everyone. I try to find the kernels of truth in what people are saying. I try always to find the glass half full.”

Gerzberg credits the success of Zoran to the lessons he learned from Meindl. And Jim Plummer, dean of engineering at Stanford, declares, “There is no other individual who has had more of an impact on my career than Jim Meindl.”