Robert B. Laughlin Quotes

So I, I knew something in a business sense about semiconductors and I appreciated their possibilities.

Electronics was something I could always fall back on when I needed food on the table.

I still love the semiconductor industry.

Semiconductor research and the Nobel Prize in physics seem to be contradictory since one may come to the conclusion that such a complicated system like a semiconductor is not useful for very fundamental discoveries.

I just really love building chips.

Just because something has tubes doesn't mean it's the best. I mean, tubes are obviously good, but the circuit of this thing is designed well and it sounds good.

Well, I think first of all, probably the most fundamental thing is that we are a mixed-signal analog semiconductor company, which, along with some of the other well-known names in the industry, enjoys very good economics.

Very many researchers, including the front runners in gallium nitride, abandoned the development of gallium nitride-based devices. I have devoted myself to the study of crystal growth, aiming at the development of the p-n junction of gallium nitride.

You would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.

My background is in hardware design. I found hardware work to be a welcome change from thousands of hours of programming and that led to the designs you mentioned.

Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.

Graphene is a single plane of graphite that has to be pulled out of bulk graphite to show its amazing properties.

Learning how to interact with customers is something that anyone starting any business must master. It's an amazing opportunity to be able to learn the ropes at an established company and then employ your expertise at your own company.

A factory that can turn carbon nanotubes into a sheet a yard wide and long enough to stretch one-fourth of the way to the moon is not something you'll find at your local industrial park. That's the show-stopper for the space elevator. The ribbon.

It's amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it.

Quantum physics forms the foundation of chemistry, explaining how molecules are held together. It describes how real solids and materials behave and how electricity is conducted through them... It enabled the development of transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, LEDs, digital cameras and all the modern gadgetry that surrounds us.

Today, people tend to credit me with having the original idea and made the first circuits.

Chips will continue to shrink, of course. We, along with other semiconductor companies, are continuing to push toward the next goal of 10 nm, but going beyond 10 nm will require the development of new technologies, materials, and manufacturing processes that are still being perfected.

What is important about graphene is the new physics it has delivered.

I suppose the reason I chose electrical engineering was because I had always been interested in electricity, involving myself in such projects as building radios from the time I was a child.

When I was a teenager in the late 30's and early 40's, electronics wasn't a word. You were interested in radio if you were interested in electronics.

I'd learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw - shapes of characters and things.

As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

It is a neck-and-neck race between Mr. Gray and myself who shall complete our apparatus first. He has the advantage over me in being a practical electrician - but I have reason to believe that I am better acquainted with the phenomena of sound than he is - so that I have an advantage there.