an electrical engineering
professor launches
an industry giant.
By SETH MASIA
➢
Richard Swanson, a founder, past president and chief tech- nical officer at SunPower Corp., has been an innovator
in power-handling integrated circuits,
solar-powered cars and planes, and, of
course, high-efficiency silicon photovoltaics (PV). His company shipped more
than 500 megawatts of rooftop modules
last year, and is now putting up a new factory to boost production an additional
1.4 gigawatts (GW) annually.
Swanson’s passion for creating electronic gizmos began early, when he was
a kid in Columbus, Ohio. He got his
ham radio license at age 13, soldering his
vacuum-tube gear together from Heath-kits. Soon enough he was making more
advanced radios from scratch. With a
friend, he unsuccessfully tried bouncing
radio waves off the moon. “That turned out
to be harder than it looked,” he recalls.
After a flirtation with liberal arts, in
1964 Swanson enrolled in the electrical
engineering program at Ohio State University. The department was still teaching circuit design based on high-voltage
vacuum tubes, but a new course on transistors engaged Swanson’s enthusiasm
for solid-state physics. That led him to
Stanford, home of Jim Gibbons, author
of Semiconductor Electronics, the standard
textbook on transistors.
At Stanford, Swanson worked with
Professor Jim Meindl on low-power circuitry. “CMOS [complementary metal-oxide semiconductor] technology was
crude at that point,” he says. “We had
handful of 15-volt circuits from RCA. The
goal was to build battery-powered circuits,
less than 1.5 volts, for calculators, watches
and other small devices.” The solution was
to implant phosphorus or boron doping
SUnPoweR
