At the age of 93, Ukrainian scientist and engineer Lubomyr Romankiv, who worked at IBM for more than 50 years, has passed away in the United States. During his life, he wrote more than 150 scientific articles and patented 67 inventions.
Among Romankiv’s inventions, the most famous are thin-film magnetic recording heads. Their creation made hard disks and computers possible. He did not emphasize his inventions; people simply learned about them from information about the world around them.
In the 1970s, Liubomyr Romankiv, together with David Thompson, created the first magnetic thin-film heads. They made it possible to increase the density of data on magnetic drives, reduce their size and cost of maintenance. This was an industrial breakthrough, and now they are used in every HDD.
«Apple started when Steve Wozniak bought these drives from us and built the first personal computer in his garage, — Romankiv told Voice of America in 2017.
Other achievements of the inventor include technologies for forming multi-level connections and soldering microcontacts on the processor. Thanks to their development, modern chips can have up to 12 layers of metal connections.
Liubomyr Romankiv’s achievement is the technology of copper interconnects, which was introduced into mass production of processors by IBM in 1997. The technology is now a standard in semiconductor production and at one time doubled the performance of processors. Previously, less efficient aluminum contacts were used.
«Copper was considered a killer of semiconductor devices. The general consensus was to stay away from copper as much as possible,” Romankiv quotes IBM’s website.
In 1998, IBM began building PowerPC processors with this technology, and in 1999, it introduced a server with copper chips that increased performance by 50%. In recent years, Romankiv has worked on improving the efficiency of solar panels and holds several patents related to this.
Born in Lviv, Ukraine, Liubomyr Romankiv emigrated with his parents to Canada at the age of 13, crossing Europe. There he studied at the University of Alberta and received his Ph.D. in metallurgy and materials science from MIT. He recalls with horror the beginning of the Soviet repressions that his father may have suffered from:
«When the Soviet troops came to Zhovkva in the evening, the lists of those who were to be shot the next morning appeared at night… If I had stayed in Ukraine, I would have been in Siberia or shot,» Romankiv told Radio Liberty in 2021.
Source: Forbes
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