Brian Cronquist

Brian Cronquist has over 34 years of semiconductor industry experience, most recently as Sr. Dir. Technology Development & Foundry at non-volatile FPGA provider Actel. He has global experience on “both sides of the silicon wafer table”: starting and building Chartered Semiconductor (Singapore) technology and customers as a captive then pure foundry, and non-volatile (antifuse and flash) FPGA technology at Actel as a fabless partner and customer to over 7 foundries and IDMs. He also led startup wafer fab engineering teams at Sierra Semiconductor, now PMC-Sierra, and developed new process technology at AMI and Synertek/Honeywell.

Mr. Cronquist has a diverse technical interest which includes developing ultra-thin thermal oxide and pre-cleaning technology (first to develop and implement HF-last), plasma etching of metals and oxides, database scaling techniques, process simulation & integration, novel ion implant techniques, first CMOS MOSFETs built with laser (CW) annealing, minimizing process induced damage PID) from plasma etching and ion implantation, time-to-market new product and process introduction (NPI), and customer engineering & program management.

While at Actel, he was also Principal Investigator of over $24M of government funded technology programs developing radiation hardened (RH) versions of both anti-fuse and flash based product families in commercial and RH foundries. He has published over 100 technical papers in the fields of semiconductor microelectronic radiation effects and hardening, as well as new 3D-IC, logic, antifuse & flash processes, devices, and reliability, and he holds over 50 issued or pending patents. Mr. Cronquist graduated cum laude (Chemistry Medal) in Chemistry from Santa Clara University in 1979. Currently, he is a visiting researcher at the Rice University Chemistry Department and an Industry Affiliate Partner at the Stanford University Nanofabrication Facility.