Bernard Meyerson

Bernard Meyerson has a deep appreciation for IBM’s free-thinking culture. Some of his biggest achievements, after all, emerged from disagreements. A believer that “data wins,” Meyerson’s insistent, evidence-first approach served him well throughout a career as a troubleshooter, inventor and business builder who made important contributions to semiconductors, safety and the wireless world.

The son of a teacher and a firefighter, Meyerson grew up in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood before moving with his family to city housing built for teachers and firefighters in the Bronx. He was enthusiastic about math and science from a young age and immersed himself in school projects, occasionally to his neighbors’ chagrin. Once, while running tests on a homemade radio transmitter for the science fair, he mistakenly jammed TV signals to surrounding apartments — on Super Bowl Sunday. “I did learn a few lessons from that,” Meyerson said of the experience, “one of which is to pay attention to unintended consequences.”

He tested into the Bronx High School of Science, a top public school that counts eight Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry among its alumni. He described the amount of homework as “brutal,” yet he enjoyed his physics classes. After high school, he attended the City College of New York but dropped out after a year because he considered his engineering classes too rote and the career options in physics to be limited.

He went to work in his brother’s shop that made cabinets. A year later, a City College physics professor he met by chance in the lobby of his now-wife’s apartment building encouraged him to return to school.

“He convinced me, ‘Do what you love, and you’ll be fine’,” Meyerson said. He returned to school to finish his undergrad work and went on to earn a master’s and doctorate from the City University of New York in solid-state physics.

An observation from a small gaffe he made as a doctoral student in 1979 would inform a career-defining invention. While helping a professor make silicon oxide in the lab one day, he dropped a piece of silicon he had cleaned with hydrofluoric acid. After retrieving the sample off the floor, he rinsed it in water to clean it instead of dipping it again in the acid. Something unexpected happened. “It wouldn’t get wet,” Meyerson recalled.

Decades of accepted research had led him to believe that silicon, when exposed to air, would form a protective layer of water-retaining oxide. In this case, no matter what Meyerson did, the silicon fragment repelled the water. Too busy with his own research to find an explanation, he filed the observation away in his brain and moved on.

Soon after joining IBM in 1980 as a physical sciences researcher, Meyerson would put his evidence-first approach into action. A lab explosion at its Burlington, Vermont, factory caused by silane gas forced IBM to close its manufacturing plants worldwide for fear of similar hazards elsewhere. Bomb squads removed tanks of silane, a specialty gas used to make semiconductors, from all of the company’s facilities. In explaining the event to the company, an executive mischaracterized the combustible and explosive properties of silane as similar to those of nitroglycerin. In response, IBM considered constructing fortified facilities to contain massive explosions at a cost of about USD 50 million per site.

Meyerson countered the alarmist narrative with a data-filled retort. “I don’t doubt there was an explosion, but this is not nitroglycerin,” which, unlike silane, is a highly unstable material, Meyerson recalls telling the executive. He explained that silane exploded only when it existed in air at a very high concentration — and he set out to develop a simple solution to mitigate such conditions.

He worked with IBM machinists to create a USD 38 nozzle that moderated the emission of silane during production. It was ultimately deployed across the company and, on Meyerson’s request, IBM filed a general use patent to make the nozzle available to anyone. Today it is a standard safety device worldwide.

IBM awarded Meyerson the Environmental Affairs Technical Excellence Award for the nozzle in 1991 and a USD 50,000 check. Meyerson said of his terse exchange with the executive: “It’s simple — data always wins.”

An expert in solid-state physics, Meyerson turned his attention at IBM toward semiconductor material growth and processing. He was a pioneer in the application of protective diamond-like carbon coatings in the manufacture of disk drives. He later developed ways of combining germanium — an alloy used in early transistors — and silicon to make faster semiconductors. “I looked for big problems, and the biggest problem we had was that the semiconductor technology we used then to make transistors was reaching end of life,” Meyerson said. “Our entire revenue stream was based on them.”

Scientists had been trying for 30 years to combine germanium and silicon into a composite useful for transistors. As a semiconductor, the combination should have been far superior to silicon on its own. The main barrier was the 1,000-degree-Celsius firing temperature required to burn oxide off the silicon, a temperature at which germanium clumped uselessly on the silicon surface.

Remembering his unusual observation in the lab back in grad school, Meyerson tested the surface of the silicon to understand why the oxide repelled water. It turns out the layer wasn’t oxide at all, but hydrogen, deposited during the hydrofluoric acid dip. At 600 degrees, it detached from the silicon, allowing contaminating oxide to form.

By introducing germanium before 600 degrees, he could bond the alloy pristinely with silicon. The finding challenged decades of seemingly settled research and yielded a critical breakthrough in transistor science. Silicon germanium made tremendously fast transistors at a very low cost. In recognition of his achievement, Meyerson was named an IBM Fellow, the only IBMer to be recognized in 1992.

Meyerson shopped his invention around the company. These compact, fast, inexpensive chips were perfect for the burgeoning telecommunications and wireless markets, he argued, but IBM’s priorities were elsewhere. So, with the company’s approval, he championed the technology on his own, forging outside alliances with companies like Harris Semiconductor, which was doing pioneering work in wi-fi. “A real problem can be that you don’t know what to do with what you’ve got,” Meyerson said.

Silicon germanium chips were a hit in the marketplace, and the money flowed in. Over the course of a decade starting in the mid-1990s, the chips powered countless wired and wireless devices. Meyerson went on to hold a number of executive roles at the company, including leading global semiconductor development, running strategic alliances for the Systems and Technology Group, and overhauling IBM’s Academy of Technology. As the company’s first chief innovation officer in 2010, he introduced a 48-hour decision window for innovation funding to speed the pace of new development. He later became CIO Emeritus.

Meyerson received numerous industry and global honors. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He holds a Lifetime Achievement Award from SEMI, won the 2011 Pake Prize of the American Physical Society, and was named the 2014 Turing Lecturer at the Royal Institute. The government of Singapore awarded him a National Medal of Public Service in 2015 for his years of service and advice to the nation.