2010 Buessem Award Recipient

Yukio Sakabe was born in Kyoto, Japan (1945) and graduated with B.Sc. (1968) and M.S. (1970) degrees in Physics from Kanazawa University, and a Ph.D. in materials engineering from Kyoto University (2002). He joined Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd., in 1970 as a ceramic research engineer of the R&D division. He was a leader of a research group of dielectrics for ceramic capacitors in 1974, and was a general manager of the ceramic R&D department (1988-1992); he was then promoted to a director of the capacitor division of Murata (1992-1995). He assumed the position of a board member (2000 – 2007), then being promoted to a senior vice president (2007-2008). He retired from his position as Senior Executive Vice President of Murata in June 2009. Now he is a corporate senior advisor of Murata. He also served as a visiting professor at Osaka University (2003-2005), and as a visiting lecturer at Tokyo University, (2000), Tokyo Institute of Technology (2001), Nagoya University (2002), and Kyoto University (2008-2010). He was installed as vice president of the Nano Powder Research Associations (2000-2010), vice president of the Japanese Ceramic Society (2004-2008), and planning chairman of the Japanese Fine Ceramic Center (2006-2007).

Dr. Sakabe was responsible for many R&D projects in the area of electronics ceramics. Early in his engineering effort, he developed PTC thermistor materials based on Ca doped BaTiO3 ceramics for highly reliable motor starter element (1970-1974). He started basic research on BaTiO3 dielectrics for nickel electrode multilayer ceramic capacitors in 1975. He established the key technologies to prevent the BaTiO3 from reduction reaction by Ca doping as an acceptor ion and controlling Ba/Ti molar ratio to higher than unity. After seven years of severe evaluation of reliability and improvement of the dielectrics, he finally succeeded in mass production of the highly reliable nickel electrode MLCs for the first time in the world (1982). Last year, 1.4 trillion pieces of the capacitors came to be produced all over the world. He has been recognized as a pioneer of the base metal electrode capacitors. He also succeeded in developing the highly reliable and stable SrTiO3 based dielectrics for middle and high voltage capacitors doping with MgTiO3, PbTiO3, and Bi4Ti3O12 (1976). This composition is widely used as the most excellent ceramic capacitor materials today. Under his leadership, Murata materials R&D group has contributed to the miniaturization of the electronics components and devices that realized today’s highly-networked information society. His interest in ceramics today is in making contributions to energy and environmental issues by new functions of the ceramics. He had funded a new function of Ba2TiO4 ceramics that have reversible reaction of absorption and emission of CO2 at elevated temperature (2004).

Yukio Sakabe’s many honors and awards include the Fulrath Award (1985); the Award of Technical Progress from Japanese Ceramic Society for his work on the base metal electrode MLCs (1986); and Corporate Technical Achievement Award (American Ceramic Society) for continued innovation on multilayer capacitors with base metal electrodes (1998). He received Ferroelectrics Recognition Award from IEEE (2002), Distinguished Services Prize from Japan Society of Powder and Powder Metallurgy (2003), and International Award 2005 from European Ceramic Society. The Minister of Education and Science of Japan presented him with the Science and Technology Award of Year (2005). In 2008, he received the Okazaki Kiyoshi Distinguished Achievement Award from Fulrath-Okazaki Commemoration Association.

Dr. Sakabe was elected to the International Academy of Ceramics (1999) and is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (2000). He joined the Physical Society of Japan in 1968, the Applied Physics of Japan in 1970, the Japanese Ceramic Society in 1978, the MRS in 1997, and the Japan Society of Powder and Powder Metallurgy in 2003. He has published 225 technical papers (188 in Japanese and 37 in English). He holds 406 patents in electronics ceramics. (309 Japanese Pat., 78 US Pat., and 10 others).

The Center for Dielectric Studies presented Yukio Sakabe with the 2010 W.R. Buessem Award at the CDS Awards Dinner on October 26, 2010.