D.L. Pulfrey received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Manchester, England in 1965 and 1968, respectively. Since 1969 he has been on the faculty in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He retired in 2011, and is now Professor Emeritus.
He taught and researched in the area of semiconductor devices. He received awards for his teaching at the university-, provincial- and international-levels: inaugural winner of UBC's Teaching Prize for Engineering in 1990; the 2009 Teaching Award for Excellence in Engineering and Geoscience Education from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia; the 2009 Education Award from the IEEE Electron Devices Society. He received recognition for his research work by being made Fellow of IEEE (2000) and the Canadian Academy of Engineering (2002).He has written 3 books: "Understanding Modern Transistors and Diodes" (2010); "Introduction to Microelectronic Devices" in 1989 with Garry Tarr; "Photovoltaic Power Generation" in 1979. He has written book chapters on heterojunction bipolar transistors for Wiley's Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (1999) and for Roblin and Rohdin's "High-speed heterostructure devices" (2002).
He was the inaugural appointee to PMC-Sierra's in-house university, and gave courses there on "Deep sub-micron electronics" and also on "Nanoelectronics". He has given guest courses on "Modern semiconductor devices" at the Technical University of Vienna, and at the Universities of Pisa and Western Australia. He has been a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Electron Devices Society, giving lectures on carbon nanotube transistors in Mexico City. Under the auspices of the Canadian International Development Agency he gave a course on "Photovoltaics engineering" at the Institute of Engineering in Kathmandu.
He has published over 130 refereed articles on the topics of: electrical breakdown in thin dielectrics; the preparation and properties of plasma-anodized thin oxide films; the analysis and fabrication of surface junction solar cells; the modeling and reliability of high-gain polysilicon-emitter transistors; the analysis of silicon MIS tunnel junction structures and related devices; circuit techniques and algorithmic macrocell generation for CMOS VLSI; the compact modeling of bipolar heterostructures (supported by Nortel, Ottawa in the 1990's); the development of physical and predictive models for carbon nanotube devices, both as high-performance transistors and as biomolecular sensors.
He spent periods of study leave at: the University of Western Australia (working on solar cells and UV photodetectors); Plessey Research, England (working on high-gain bipolar transistors); Microtel Pacific Research, Vancouver (working on CMOS memory design); Laboratoire d'Automatique et d'Analyse des Systemes, Toulouse (working on AlGaAs/GaAs HBTs); UC Santa Barbara (working on AlGaN/GaN HBTs); Technical University of Vienna (working on carbon nanotube FETs).
He maintains an interest in the theoretical and practical aspects of solar cells and light-emitting diodes, two devices that are important for the electrical-energy sustainability of the planet. He has given courses on this topic in Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Zambia as part of IEEE's Africa Initiative.