Igor Grekhov

Igor Vsevolodovich Grekhov (10 September 1934 to 30 August 2026) was a Soviet and Russian physicist and electrical engineer and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, known as one of the founders of the power semiconductor device industry in the Soviet Union. Born in Smolensk and raised in Simferopol, he studied electrical engineering at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, worked in industry in Saransk from 1958 to 1962 and joined the Ioffe Institute in Leningrad in 1962, where he headed the Power electronics laboratory from 1982 to 2019. His work on pulsed power devices included the discovery of impact ionization fronts in high voltage junctions and, in 1982 to 1983, the invention of the Drift Step Recovery Diode and the Reversely Switch-on Dynistor. He received the Lenin Prize, two State Prizes and several Russian state orders, and co-authored four books, about 200 patents and more than 600 papers.