Zener was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and earned his PhD in physics from Harvard in 1930 with the thesis Quantum Mechanics of the Formation of Certain Types of Diatomic Molecules. He taught at several American universities before working at the Watertown Arsenal during World War II. He taught at University of Chicago (1945-1951), worked at Westinghouse (1951-1965) taught at Texas A&M University (1966_1968), and then at Carnegie_Mellon (1968_1993).
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Pictures of Zener (http://www.aip.org/history/esva/catalog/esva/Zener-Melvin.html)
In 1961 Clarence M. Zener, Director of Science at Westinghouse, published the first of several papers (1) on a new optimization technique he had discovered while working on the optimal design of transformers.
A professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, Richard Duffin, began collaborating with Zener to extend the procedure.
On seeing Zener's work, they were able to obtain the same results from the classical theory of maxima and minima and extend this to polynomials.
However, the current is not unlimited, so the Zener diode is typically used to generate a reference voltage for an amplifier stage, or as a voltage stabilizer for low-current applications.
When connected in parallel with a variable voltage source so that it is reverse biased, a zener diode acts as a short circuit when the voltage reaches the diode's reverse breakdown voltage, and therefore limits the voltage to a known value.
A zener diode used in this way is known as a shunt voltage regulator (shunt meaning connected in parallel, and voltage regulator being a class of circuit that produces a fixed voltage).
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