Kenichi Okazaki

Kenichi Okazaki is a director of COS Division in Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co., Ltd. (SEL) in Atsugi-city, Japan (Shunpei Yamazaki, President), and a researcher of TFT devices utilizing crystalline oxide semiconductor materials.

He completed his master’s degree in engineering from Tohoku University and joined SEL in 2003. His research at SEL started with low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) TFT, and he is currently developing TFT devices utilizing crystalline oxide semiconductor materials (which are termed oxide-semiconductor FETs, or OSFETs) since the R&D on the materials started at SEL in December 2008. He was appointed as a director of COS Division in September 2019, and has been leading the research team since then.

During his career at SEL, he has been active in presenting his findings in academic conferences such as Display Week by The Society for Information Display (SID). In 2016, he contributed to “Physics and Technology of Crystalline Oxide Semiconductor CAAC-IGZO: Application to Displays” (edited by Shunpei Yamazaki and Tetsuo Tsutsui), which was published from John Wiley & Sons, Inc., a global academic publisher. His research has also been recognized in the market; OSFETs using the CAAC-IGZO technology, the fruits of his R&D efforts, were put on the market by Sharp Corporation in the displays of their smartphones (AQUOS R2 and AQUOS R2 compact). This technology and the products received the 2019 R&D 100 Award.

He maintains an important role in the research of crystalline oxide semiconductor materials, used in more and more display products, and devoting himself to the fundamental studies and optimization of the technology for further commercialization.