advanced-packaging
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Rick Wallace and the case for taking the harder road
A hundred rejected applications sent Rick Wallace west in a Camaro. Four decades later, KLA’s CEO is still choosing the assignments that make him learn something new.
Gary Dickerson and the distance between an idea and a chip
After decades inside the machinery of chipmaking, Gary Dickerson is betting on a shorter route from discovery to production. His $5 billion EPIC Center puts that conviction under one roof.
Kevin Engel and the importance of the last connection
He joined Amkor through an acquisition in 2004. Two decades later, the chemical engineer is leading the company as advanced packaging changes what a chip can do - and where it can be made.
Jekaterina Viktorova and the trouble between the chips
A chemistry problem followed Jekaterina Viktorova from Germany to a Canberra lab and, for a while, her kitchen table. Now the Syenta co-founder is working on the tiny connections that help AI chips talk to each other.
Darius Bunandar and the Art of Moving Light
He began with explosions, black holes and quantum-secure messages. Now Lightmatter's co-founder and chief scientist is trying to solve AI's less glamorous crisis: the costly distance between one chip and the next.
Babu Mandava Has Spent Four Decades Solving the Layer Beneath the Next One
From a first engineering post in India to WiMAX, LTE and glass-core packaging, Mandava's career follows a recurring question: what has to work underneath before the next computing market can scale?
Stefan Pastine
Stefan Pastine is an American chemist, inventor and deep-tech founder who builds materials most people never think about but every device depends on. After earning a PhD in organic chemistry from Columbia and doing postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley, he founded Connora Technologies to make recyclable epoxy resins, which was acquired by Aditya Birla Chemicals in 2019. That same year he founded Thintronics, a Bay Area startup developing next-generation dielectric insulator films for printed circuit boards and semiconductor packaging. His pitch is deceptively simple: the insulator, long ignored while engineers obsessed over transistors, is the overlooked bottleneck for faster, cooler AI data centers - and Thintronics wants to unseat a Japanese giant that has held 90% of the market for three decades.