Nobel Winner Known for LED Battle in Japan Went on to Silicon Valley

One of the three scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday is well-known in Japan as a salaryman who fought back against his employer and won millions of dollars before co-founding a Silicon Valley start-up that continues his work with light-emitting diodes. Shuji Nakamura, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, spent 20 years at Nichia Corp., a Japanese company based in Tokushima prefecture that specializes in lighting products. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published in 2004, he described himself as a typical Japanese salaryman, devoting himself entirely to the company. In 1990, Nichia patented his invention of a blue LED, the technology for which he was awarded a Nobel alongside two other Japanese researchers. For the discovery, the company awarded him ¥20,000, or about $180 at current exchange rates, beyond his regular salary. Dr. Nakamura said he realized how little that was after he started meeting more foreign researchers in the U.S. in the mid-1990s. “People in the U.S. often asked if I got paid like hundreds of millions of yen or billions of yen,” he said in the Journal interview. “When I told them my salary, they called me ‘Slave Nakamura.’ ” In 1999, Dr. Nakamura quit Nichia to head for the U.S., and he filed a lawsuit in Japan in 2001. In January 2004, a Tokyo district court ordered Nichia to pay him ¥20 billion, or $180 million, saying the company could expect to earn more than $1 billion from Dr. Nakamura’s invention. The company appealed, and the two sides ultimately reached a settlement in 2005 that paid Dr. Nakamura ¥840 million. A Nichia spokesman said Tuesday the company was proud that the Nobel Prize was awarded for research conducted at Nichia. The spokesman declined to comment specifically on the long legal battle with Dr. Nakamura. He said the discovery of the blue LED wasn’t made by Dr. Nakamura alone but represented “the efforts of the company and many Nichia employees.” Through Soraa, a Silicon Valley start-up he founded with two university colleagues in 2008, Dr. Nakamura said it was satisfying “to see that my dream of LED lighting has become a reality.” Soraa is manufacturing a novel form of LED that is typically used in commercial applications like restaurants, retail stores and museums. Most other companies make LED chips by putting gallium nitride on wafers of sapphire or silicon carbide. Soraa relies on gallium nitride for the wafer as well, an approach Dr. Nakamura says produces higher-quality light and avoids impurities that cause defects in other LEDs. “I hope that energy-efficient LED light bulbs will help reduce energy use and lower the cost of lighting world-wide, and that is why we founded Soraa,” Dr. Nakamura said.