Dr Rodney Pelzel FREng

CTO, IQE plc

Dr Rodney Pelzel is an innovator and leader of international technology teams developing compound semiconductor wafers. These have revolutionised semiconductor applications in optical and wireless communications, sensing systems and efficient energy control.

Rodney is named on 24 families of IQE inventions, involving 85 patents, and is widely recognised for his influence on the complex manufacturing processes at atomic scale, generally known as epitaxy. These processes enable the volume manufacture of wafers that are subsequently processed to make many millions of advanced semiconductor chips; and is the technology that enables, for example, 5G communications and 3D facial recognition in mobile phones.