Herb Goronkin

Herb Goronkin served as a Venture Partner with Lux Capital from 2005-2012. Herb was most recently Vice President and Director of the Physical Research Labs at Motorola. Following research assignments in compound semiconductors, silicon ICs, optical sensors, and microwave semiconductor devices, he joined Motorola in 1977 to establish their GaAs electronics program. He led the development of Motorola’s early versions of heterostructure transistors for low power, low noise wireless applications and high efficiency power transistors for cellular telephones. He teamed to develop the high power, low voltage heterostructure power transistor for the StarTac phone. In the mid-90s, his lab developed a new class of high density DNA biochips for analysis of genetic mutations and spun the effort into a newly formed division in 1998. The lab focused on development of microfluidic chips and achieved biological sample preparation and analysis in a single small cartridge. He focused significant attention of his labs on the field on nanoelectronics beginning in 1998 while contributing to efforts that led to creation of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The nanoelectronics effort focused on fabrication and utilization of carbon nanotubes for field emission displays and electronic devices intended for future logic, wireless and biosensor applications. The lab synthesized and evaluated numerous organic electronic molecules for potentially useful device properties. Herb started background investigations of MRAM in 1993, kicked off the formal program in 1995, and continued to spearhead development of MRAM in Motorola until it was transferred from the labs to manufacturing in 2000 for commercialization in 2003. His labs continued to explore radical scaling of MRAM memory elements as well as new device applications of spintronic structures and materials. Herb became well respected within Motorola for his ability to choose superior leaders who carried out these programs. Herb is a Fellow of the IEEE and member of the American Physical Society and Sigma Xi. He has served on numerous conference committees and professional organizations. He has over 65 patents and numerous publications. He received Motorola’s Distinguished Innovator Award in 1992 and the Master Innovator Award in 1995. He was a member of Motorola’s Science Advisory Board Associates and was selected as Senior Engineer of the Year in 1993 by the Phoenix Section of the IEEE. Herb was a Motorola Dan Noble Fellow. He received the B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Temple University. Herb serves on boards of companies, university research centers and national laboratories.