As a graduate student in materials science in the early 1980s,
John Palmour
took a chance on an unproven way to make semiconductors, substituting silicon carbide for the usual pure silicon.
Silicon carbide had long been seen as a promising chip material, especially in applications involving lots of power and heat. The rub was that it was hard to avoid defects in the tricky process of growing silicon carbide crystals. Because the material is extremely hard, it also was difficult to slice into the required sizes.
“I thought, OK, well that would be cool,” Dr. Palmour said in an interview for a Wall Street Journal podcast earlier this year, referring to his decision to join a silicon carbide research project at North Carolina State University. “Worst-case scenario is I’ll get a [doctoral] degree. Best-case scenario is I’ll be on the ground floor of something new.” He was, but it took several decades for the technology to begin paying off in a major way—notably in supplying electronic devices used in electric vehicles, solar energy, windmills and cellphone towers, among other things.
In 1987, Dr. Palmour and other researchers at NC State were among the co-founders of Cree Research, now known as
Wolfspeed Inc.
In the early days, the company subsisted mainly on research grants and sales of blue light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Now Wolfspeed, based in Durham, N.C., is focused on silicon carbide and gallium nitride electronic devices. Revenue for the fiscal first quarter ended Sept. 25 was $241.3 million, up 54% from a year earlier.
In a sign of the technology’s strategic importance, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. in 2017 blocked the sale of a large part of the company to Infineon Technologies AG of Germany.
As Wolfspeed flourished over the past five years, Dr. Palmour remained chief technology officer, even while being treated for lymphoma. He died Nov. 13 at a hospital in Raleigh, N.C., at age 62.
Wolfspeed is ramping up its manufacturing capacity. In April, it opened a silicon carbide chip-fabrication plant in Marcy, N.Y. The company plans another new plant in Chatham County, N.C., to produce silicon carbide wafers.
Along with his technological chops, Dr. Palmour provided a dose of zany humor and salesmanship to help sustain the company through its early years.
When he pitched silicon carbide in those days, Dr. Palmour said, “the general reaction was, ‘Yeah, come back and talk to us when it’s the same price as silicon.’ ” He argued that the potential savings from more-efficient devices more than justified the higher price. “Once you finally get those first couple of people, everybody else wakes up and starts to follow suit,” he said. “Getting those first early adopters is the hard part.”
Silicon carbide makes sense, he said, whenever “you need to pull energy out of a battery or out of the wall and convert it to make it useful for whatever the application is.”
John Williams Palmour,
the youngest of three children, was born in Raleigh on Oct. 14, 1960. His father,
Hayne Palmour III,
was a professor of ceramic engineering at NC State. His mother,
Barbara Grace Palmour,
later taught kindergarten.
His early jobs included driving a school bus. He breezed through high school with little studying, and joked that he was voted most apathetic student but didn’t show up to collect the award.
After enrolling at NC State in the late 1970s, he had to buckle down. When he completed his bachelor’s degree, he looked for a graduate school research project and found that NC State had federal funding for work on silicon carbide.
While studying at NC State, he met
Nancy Myers,
who was studying English. They married in 1985. She survives him along with three children, a brother and a sister.
Money was tight while he was in graduate school.
John Edmond,
another co-founder of Wolfspeed, recalled that before getting married Dr. Palmour was happy to accept leftovers from the Edmond family refrigerator, even if they were a bit moldy.
Frugality was a helpful trait at a tech company that was slow to blossom. Wolfspeed was able to keep going because “we were small, we were nimble, we were crazy,” Dr. Edmond said.
Over his career, Dr. Palmour published 386 scientific papers and earned more than 140 patents worldwide. Earlier this year, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. He had a summer home in Wrightsville Beach, N.C., where he liked to cook for his family, work on crossword puzzles and sip Carolina Pale Ale.
Of his early days as an entrepreneur, Dr. Palmour wrote: “We were full of big plans and high hopes, but we were too young and stupid to know how hard it was going to be, how long it would take, or if it was even possible.”
Write to James R. Hagerty at [email protected]
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