MIG/MAP Panelists Bio

Panel 1: 40 Years: Reflections on the Past and Visions for the Future

Wednedsay 1/24, 9:30 - 10:15 am

Michael Haverty, Applied Materials

Michael Haverty is a Director and Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Applied Materials with degrees in Materials and Computer Science from Johns Hopkins and Stanford.  He began his career as an intern as Intel’s first Materials modeler during the first internet boom in 2001 and now leads one of the largest atomic-scale modeling teams in the semiconductor industry.  He’s worked with some of the earliest developing software companies in the field, in the startup world as a VP of Science, his own modeling consulting firm, and advising new start-ups in the area.  He has a wide range of 30+ granted and in-process patents, funded and collaborated with academics through SRC and direct funding research projects, and obtained and worked on multiple US and European government funded grant projects.  Now leading the Materials Design team at Applied he focuses the team on discovering, screening, and designing new materials, precursor chemistries, and manufacturing strategies to extract tangible value for their experimental partners. 

Dirk Pfeiffer, IBM

Dr. Dirk Pfeiffer is the Director of the Microelectronics Research Laboratory (MRL) at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. The MRL is a state of the art 200mm wafer scale nanofabrication facility, offering a wide range of design and fabrication services, ranging from novel devices fabrication to packaging, test, design, characterization, electronics, system integration and assembly. The laboratory supports a broad range of prototyping and “lab to fab” projects to develop new computing technologies for IBM including quantum computing, neuromorphic devices for AI based computing architectures, Semiconductor device and unit process development and other. Dr Pfeiffer has been with IBM Research for 23 years and has a Ph.D. in Chemistry.

Michael Perrott, Texas Instruments

Michael H. Perrott has focused on development of new mixed-signal architectures for high performance timing circuits, including analog and digital fractional-N synthesizers, hybrid analog/digital clock and data recovery circuits, and MEMS based timing solutions.  Additional areas include VCO-based analog-to-digital conversion, high resolution temperature sensing, and high SNR, wide dynamic range MEMS digital microphones.  He is the developer of the widely used CppSim simulation package for phase-locked loop circuits.  He is an IEEE Fellow and has served the IEEE SSCS society as a Distinguished Lecturer and as an elected member of AdCom, where he helped launch the SSCS Webinar Program.

Fredrik Dahlgren, Ericsson

Fredrik Dahlgren is Head of Device Platform Research at Ericsson Research, a unit he started in December 2017, and which now consists of 30 researchers (more than 50% of whom hold a PhD). He is also an Adjunct Professor at Chalmers University of Technology. Before this, he was Director of WARA, the Research Arenas of the Wallenberg Autonomous Systems and AI research program, during 2016-2017, and in that role he was also a Guest Professor at Linköping University.

Fredrik Dahlgren has a PhD in Computer Architecture from Lund University in 1994. He was a visiting scientist at MIT 1995/1996 after which he became an associate professor at Chalmers. From 1999, he has been with Ericsson Group in various leading positions, including Head of Research at Ericsson Mobile Platforms, Head of Technology Management in the CTO Office (ST-Ericsson), and system architecture program manager for highly integrated multi-core and multimedia-centric smartphone platforms at ST-Ericsson. 

Panel 2: Navigating the Transition from Academia to Industry: My Personal Journey

Wednesday 1/24, 2:00-2:45 pm

Paul Ferguson, Analog Devices 

Paul Ferguson graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor of Arts in Engineering Sciences in 1984, and received is MSEE from MIT and joined Analog Devices in 1986.  He started in converters and became a pioneer in Delta Sigma Converters before taking a sabbatical to pursue a PhD under Professor Gabor Temes at Oregon State University in the mid-90s.  Paul completed all but the thesis writeup before returning to Analog Devices to lead the Analog Circuit Design team in the handset group, where Paul became an ADI Fellow.  When Paul’s mentor professor suddenly retired at Dartmouth, he stepped in as Adjunct Professor to teach the Analog Integrated Circuits class for several years.  Meanwhile, the handset team was very successful and when the industry consolidated, Analog Devices sold the team (and Paul) to MediaTek in 2008, where Paul continued as ACD lead until returning to ADI in 2013.  Paul has had several roles at ADI since 2013, but a side project founding ADI Technical University is most relevant here.  Today, Paul works in the CTO office leading a small advanced power architectures team and reviewing and connecting horizon 3 projects across the company.

Erika Bechtold, Upnano

Erika Bechtold is currently leading US commercial activities as the VP of US Operations. Erika brings 10+ years of early-stage startup and commercial experience, holding a variety of roles at Boston-area Universities as well as at a previous Boston-based biotechnology company Sofregen Medical Inc., a Tufts University spin-out developing injectable products for soft tissue augmentation.

Prior to Erika’s role at UpNano, she was the Director of Technology Commercialization at Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development, supporting the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.  At the Wyss Institute, she worked closely with the faculty, staff, and business teams at the Institute to commercialize their ideas and inventions through strategic partnerships and licensing agreements with academic, venture and industry partners.  She additionally supported key spinoffs from the Institute, as well as strategic initiatives for the executive team of the Wyss and the Chief Technology Development Officer at Harvard.  

Erika earned a doctorate in Biological Chemistry from Wake Forest University and completed her postdoctoral work under the guidance of Jacquin Niles in the Biological Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Esther Jeng, Lam Research

Dr. Esther Jeng is senior manager of open innovation in the Office of the CTO at Lam Research where she connects emerging technologies to Lam’s semiconductor products for manufacturing new generations of chips. She manages a portfolio of exploratory technologies in partnership with the university ecosystem to find solutions to the industry’s grand challenges. 

Dr. Jeng has held multiple roles at Lam, leveraging 14 years of experience in atomic layer and chemical vapor deposition of thin-film metals. She has collaborated closely with leading-edge customers and led globally located engineering teams to develop products from initial power-up in the lab to high-volume production for logic and memory fabrication.  Her areas of expertise include plasma and thermal thin film deposition, chemical process development and precursor handling in vacuum systems, and defect management.

Dr. Jeng’s first immersion into engineering was at MIT where she learned to foster technical discourse and execution at all levels, from the use of liquid nitrogen to make the smoothest ice cream to the development of fluorescent carbon nanotube sensors. She believes that the most robust solutions are developed from open discussions that support everyone to contribute. Dr. Jeng earned B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT and an M.S. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in chemical engineering and has authored several papers and patents. She enjoys exploration: from cities worldwide to seedlings sprouting in her backyard.

Ionut Radu, Soitec

Ionut Radu is Senior Director, Innovation at Soitec being responsible for path finding and worldwide partnerships with industrial and academic innovation platforms supporting strategic developments of substrate technologies for semiconductor industry.  

Dr. Radu obtained his B.S. in physics from University of Bucharest in 1999 and Ph.D (Dr. rer. nat.) in physics from Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2003. He has co-authored more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and reference handbooks and holds more than 80 patents in the field of semiconductor technologies. Dr. Radu has been elected IEEE fellow effective January 2024 and serves as Vice-President of the IEEE-EDS France chapter since 2018. Ionut was keynote and invited speaker at major international conferences, such as IEDM, ECS, ICICDT, VLSI Symposium, IEEE VLSI-TSA, etc