Physicist Gertrude Newmark Rothschild Sues Electronic Giants for Patent Infringement. (April 22, 2008)

While Australia's CSIRO continues its legal battles with electronic giants as regards its patents on high-speed wireless technology for digital communications, an emeritus professor of physics at Columbia University has now taken on some 30 companies, including Sony, Toshiba and Motorola regarding infringement of her patent on the manufacture of short wave-length light-emitting diodes, i.e. the sort used in the Blu-ray DVD player/recorders.

Gertrude Newmark Rothschild, who is the Howe Professor Emerita of Materials Science, learned on March 20 that the International Trade Commission will investigate her complaint. She is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on doping wide-bandgap semiconductors.

As  Nature reports: "Rothschild was awarded a patent for a process used to make wide-band-gap semiconductors in 1993. She had found an affordable way of making the semiconductors' resistivity low enough to make them commercially useful. It eventually allowed green, blue and ultraviolet LEDs and solid-state lasers to become common components in everything from mobile phones to the latest generation of DVD players."

 The manufactures of the short wave length LEDs haven't to date revealed their manufacturing methods but Professor Rothschild's lawyer claims: "We believe that her patent covers the only viable commercial process" for their manufacture.

It will be recalled that in 2004, Shuji Nakamura was initially awarded ¥20 billion (US$180 million) for his role in the development of blue LEDs for the Nichia Corporation. This was later reduced to ¥840 million (US$1.68 million) on appeal.

Professor Rothschild says she filed the complaint in part to raise awareness of women's role in science. She told Nature: "People don't pay too much attention unless there's a financial impact."

In 2005 she, together with her husband Henry Rothschild, endowed the Rothschild Chair of Computer Science at Columbia.

In establishing the professorship, Professor Rothschild said: "My husband and I felt that it was appropriate to encourage the academic careers of other women at Columbia. Columbia enabled me to do independent research that led to significant progress in my field."

She graduated summa cum laude in 1948 from Barnard College, received an M.A. in chemistry from Radcliffe as a Dana Fellow, and Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia in 1951. She began her career as a research physicist at Sylvania Research Laboratories, moving to Philips Laboratories as a senior member of their research staff. In 1985, she left Philips to become a professor of materials science at Columbia.