Richard A. Chapman

Biography

Richard A. Chapman was a co-recipient of the 1987 IEEE Jack A. Morton Award.

Chapman attended Rice University where he not only received his bachelor's (1954), master's and doctoral degrees (1957) in physics, but was also an accomplished football player. After receiving his PhD, Chapman began his career at General Electric where he worked on developing commercial nuclear reactor cores.

In 1959, Chapman joined Texas Instrument's Central Research Laboratory in Dallas. While here,he led several groups that worked to develop light-emitting displays and infrared detector arrays used in night-vision devices. In 1979, Chapman continued his work at Texas Instruments, but began his work with transistors for silicon integrated circuits. Specifically, Chapman was interested in developing smaller transistors. These transistors of a smaller size were crucial for the advancement of digital wristwatches, calculators, computers, and cellular phones, among other devices. Chapman continued to work with developing transistors until he retired in 1998.

Chapman received the Morton award with his colleagues Dennis D. Buss and Michael A. Kinch "For the demonstration and development of mercury cadmium telluride monolithically- integrated charge-coupled device focal plane arrays." In addition to the Morton award, Chapman has authored over 100 technical papers and holds 32 patents.