The Korean American Engineer Who Enabled the Microprocessor
By Goldsea Staff | 26 Jan, 2026

Dawon Kahng figured out how to make transistors scalable and power-efficient enough to be packed into today's microprocessors by the billions.

Dawon Kahng never started a famous tech giant, never became a public figure, and never attained fame.  Yet his work enabled the modern microprocessor—the engine of computers, smartphones, the internet, artificial intelligence, and the global digital economy.  Kahng was an electrical engineer who solved a simple but civilization-altering problem: how to make transistors small, reliable, cheap, and energy-efficient enough to be packed by the billions onto a single chip.

Born in 1931 in Korea during Japanese colonial rule, Kahng came of age in a country devastated by war and political upheaval.  Like many scientifically gifted immigrants of his generation, he pursued advanced education abroad, eventually making his way to the United States. Trained as a physicist and electrical engineer, Kahng joined Bell Laboratories in the late 1950s at a time when electronics a nascent field full of uncertainty.

Then the transistor itself was barely a decade old.  Invented at Bell Labs in 1947, it had already begun replacing vacuum tubes.  But early transistors had serious limitations.  They were difficult to manufacture reliably, consumed too much power, generated heat, and—most critically—didn't scale well.  As engineers tried to make them smaller and place more on a single circuit, performance degraded and failure rates soared.  The computer on a chip was a purely theoretical concept.

The core problem lay in the nature of silicon.  Silicon surfaces are chemically reactive and full of electronic defects.  When engineers tried to build field-effect transistors—devices controlled by electric fields rather than current—these surface defects caused unpredictable behavior. Earlier attempts at field-effect transistors had failed largely because no one knew how to tame silicon’s surface.

This is where Kahng’s work became decisive.

Working alongside Mohamed Atalla, another Bell Labs researcher, Kahng helped develop a solution known as silicon surface passivation. Atalla discovered that growing a thin, stable layer of silicon dioxide on silicon dramatically reduced surface defects.  Kahng then played a critical role in translating this insight into a working transistor design.  In 1959 the duo demonstrated the first practical MOSFET—the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor.

The MOSFET was fundamentally different from earlier bipolar transistors. Instead of controlling current by injecting charge carriers, it used an electric field applied through an insulated gate to turn current flow on or off.  This design had three revolutionary advantages.

First, scalability.  MOSFETs became better—not worse—when made smaller.  As dimensions shrank, switching speed improved and power consumption dropped.  This property would later underpin Moore’s Law, the empirical observation that transistor density doubles roughly every two years.

Second, power efficiency.  Because the gate was insulated by an oxide layer, almost no current flowed into it.  That meant MOSFETs consumed dramatically less power than bipolar transistors, especially when idle.  This characteristic made it possible to build complex logic circuits without melting them or draining energy budgets beyond practicality.

Third, manufacturability.  MOSFETs were well suited to planar manufacturing techniques, allowing them to be fabricated in enormous numbers using photolithography.  They were consistent, reliable, and economical to produce at scale.

These properties weren't incremental improvements; they were existential.  Without them, the microprocessor would have remained an engineering curiosity, limited to a handful of components and niche applications.  They opened the path  toward large-scale integration.

During the 1960s and 1970s MOSFET technology quietly displaced bipolar transistors in digital logic.  Engineers learned how to combine n-type and p-type MOSFETs into complementary MOS, or CMOS, circuits.  CMOS logic consumed almost no power when not switching, solving the heat and energy crises that had plagued earlier designs. By the time Intel introduced the 4004 microprocessor in 1971, MOSFET-based CMOS was already the technological foundation that made such a device feasible.

Every microprocessor since then—whether from Intel, AMD, Apple, Arm, or any other vendor—has been built on Kahng’s discovery.  Even as transistor structures evolved into FinFETs and now gate-all-around designs, they remained MOSFETs in principle. The geometry changed; the physics didn't.

Yet Kahng’s name rarely appears in popular histories of computing.  Part of this is structural.  He worked at the level of device physics, not consumer products.  His contributions were upstream—enabling rather than visible.  Another reason is cultural. Immigrant scientists, particularly Asian scientists in mid-20th-century America, often labored in obscurity, their work subsumed into institutional achievements rather than personal narratives.

But among semiconductor engineers and historians, Kahng’s stature is immense.  It isn't an exaggeration to say that he helped invent the transistor that made scaling possible.  John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor; Dawon Kahng helped invent the transistor that could take over the world.

The modern digital economy—cloud computing, smartphones, social media, AI, autonomous vehicles—rests on the ability to place tens of billions of transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail.  That feat depends on switching devices that are fast, cool, reliable, and cheap.  Those devices are MOSFETs.  And MOSFETs trace directly back to Kahng’s work at Bell Labs.

Kahng continued his research career beyond the MOSFET, contributing to semiconductor physics and device development for decades.  But history has already rendered its verdict on his most important achievement.  He helped answer the question that mattered most: not whether transistors could exist, but whether they could scale without limit.

That distinction—between invention and scalability—separates clever technology from world-changing technology.  Many inventions work once.  Very few work better the more you shrink them.  The MOSFET did.  And that property transformed computing from room-sized machines into ubiquitous infrastructure embedded in everyday life.

In that sense, Dawon Kahng wasn't merely a contributor to microprocessors.  He was one of the people who made the idea of universal computing physically possible.  His legacy lives inside every CPU cycle, every software instruction, every digital interaction that defines modern civilization.

The Korean American physicist whose name is seldom spoken helped build the invisible foundation of the digital age. The modern microprocessor is his monument—etched not in stone, but in silicon.