1942-2026

Michael Shur is perhaps best known for his comprehensive textbooks on solid-state devices, most notably “The Physics of Semiconductor Devices”, Prentice Hall, which came out in 1990. He was recruited by noted device engineer Robert J. Mattauch to the University of Virginia in 1990 where he spent six years before moving to Renselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York to work closely with Professor Xi-Cheng Zhang on THz devices. His early work on terahertz transistors is groundbreaking and was not recognized as such for several years after his first publication on the topic in IEEE Electronic Device Letters in 1998 (Jian-Qiang Lu, M. S. Shur, J. L. Hesler, Liangquan Sun and R. Weikle, “Terahertz detector utilizing two-dimensional electronic fluid,” in IEEE Electron Device Letters, vol. 19, no. 10, pp. 373-375, Oct. 1998, doi: 10.1109/55.720190). Qutoing from his Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shur):

“Shur led many research efforts in diverse fields related to semiconductor devices, solid-state physics, and engineering, such as plasma wave electronics, thin film transistors, laser technology, sub-micrometer field effect transistors, terahertz technology, Surface Acoustic, and Acousto-Optic devices. Having written over 1,000 technical publications, the Institute for Scientific Information, an organization that tracks citations, lists him as one of the most quoted researchers in his field. He also authored, co-authored, or served as editor for 32 books. As of 2022, he held over 375 patents for a wide variety of microelectronic innovations.”

A memorium can be found here: https://ecse.rpi.edu/news/passing-professor-michael-shur