Philip Garrou

Introduction
August 1, 2007

I’ll be blogging here regularly for Semiconductor Int. (SI). I thought I’d start things off by introducing myself to many of you who might not have made my acquaintance during your time in the Microelectronics profession.

Going all the way back, I was born in the lower middle class NYC neighborhood of Hells Kitchen as part of the baby boom generation of the late 1940’s. I got what I consider a great primary and secondary education from the public school system of NY ( PS-51, JHS-17 and Brooklyn Technical HS). In the mid ’60s, with NYC crime on the rise, I escaped the asphalt jungle and received a BS degree in Chemistry from NC State University. Getting a high lottery number in the 1969 Vietnam draft, but finding no jobs available in the recession year of 1970, I headed off to Indiana University where I received a PhD in Chemistry in 1974. After a years post Doc at the Univ of Delaware, jobs started to open up and I joined Dow Chemicals R&D Labs in Wayland MA (outside Boston).

If your age allows you to recall those days, you’ll remember that Rt 128 outside Boston had an important Microelectronics concentration centered around companies like Digital and Raytheon. By the early 1980s Dow was combining all of its electronic products into an Electronic Business Unit. I joined this EBU effort and began learning and living microelectronics. By 1985 with the closing of Dows New England Labs I moved my family to North Carolina (where I remain today) and began developing technical and commercial relationships with the Industry on a global basis. For a 20 year period (until I left Dow in 2004) I served as the eyes and ears of Dow to the Microelectronics Industry. During that time I spent 3 years in Cupertino CA heading up a Dow team working with MicroModule Systems (thin film MCM-D). I’m probably best known for bringing the Dow dielectric BCB through R&D and into full commercialization. I held full technical and commercial responsibility for the BCB program from 1997 through 2002 with commercial and technical staff reporting to me from Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Germany and the USA. My last job at Dow was as Director of Technology and New Business Development for the aforementioned Electronics Business Unit.

Being the “microelectronics industry gatekeeper” for all those years it was very important to be active in professional Society activities. In IMAPS I served as VP of Technology and then President (1998) as well as starting and heading up numerous conferences and workshops. In the IEEE CPMT Society I was Technical VP for 4 years and President from 2003 to 2005. Again, also developing several conferences and serving as an Assoc Ed. of the IEEE Transaction on Advanced Packaging and more recently as the IEEE CPMT contributor to SI. I am a fellow of both IMAPS and IEEE and have been the recipient of: the 1994 Milton Kiver Award for Excellence in Electronic Packaging and Production, the 2001 IMAPS WD Ashman Memorial Achievement Award for “technical contributions to the Microelectronics Packaging Industry”; the 2004 Fraunhofer International Advanced Packaging Award for“… pioneering achievement in the introduction of new thin film polymeric packaging materials” and most recently the 2007 IEEE CPMT Sustained Technical Achievement Award for “.. 25 years of technical contributions and leadership in thin film dielectric materials and microelectronic applications including multichip modules, bumping and wafer level packaging, integrated passives, oLEDs and 3D integration”.

I often joke that there are only two groups that really understand what is going on in the microelectronics industry - the materials suppliers and the equipment vendors. Always looking out for new business development I was generally focused on the leading edge, the next generation technologies and devices, which sometimes come to fruition (ie. wafer level packaging; integrated passives) and sometimes do not (multichip modules).

A lot of my current focus has been in the area of 3D Integration which I firmly believe is the only thing I have seen in the last 25 years that could truly be a paradigm shift in how we do electronics components. A lot of my themes for these bolgs will be centered around “are we really going vertical?” and “what does that mean to the various segments of our industry” 

I recently attended the Sematech 3D mini conference at Semicon West ,. More on that in next weeks blog ...................................  

Posted by Philip Garrou on August 1, 2007 | Comments (0)