Abstract :
This paper claims that Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Intel Corp., was the inventor of the tunnel diode even as Leo Esaki received the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics for the achievement. When Esaki, then a 49-year old semiconductor research scientist at IBM Corp., won his Nobel Prize, neither he nor the Nobel committee had any idea about Noyce´s work. Esaki had made a tunnel diode and measured its current versus voltage behavior 16 years earlier. The Nobel committee, in fact, dated Esaki´s discovery from 1957, roughly contemporaneous with Noyce´s recollected work in the same field. Noyce offers a notebook from 1956 which contains a complete description of the tunnel diode as proof.
