Alain Charles

Dr. Charles is a 30 years semiconductor industry veteran. He received his Ph.D. in 1989 from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) de Toulouse (France) for his work on optical lithography for microelectronics.

Through his international career, Dr. Charles was involved in most of the key technology changes of the semiconductor industry, like subwavelength pattern printing, to larger wafer (300mm) development to power efficiency and introduction of wide bandgap semiconductors.

His international career started from driving Optical lithography effort at Motorola Mesa site (AZ, USA) and later ST-Microelectronics factory in Carrollton, (TX, USA). He later joined Motorola-Siemens Joint venture in Dresden pioneering 300mm Silicon manufacturing in Dresden, Germany, and was part of the team that produced the first 64Gbit DRAM on 300mm wafers in 1998. He then managed Fab5 and Fab3 engineering teams at Silicon Foundry Chartered Semiconductor (today Global Foundries) in Singapore. In 2003 is joined International Rectifier power device technology development team, in Newport (Wales, UK), to finally head the silicon technology development team for all discrete power devices from company headquarter in El Segundo, CA, USA. After Infineon acquisition of International Rectifier, he took the worldwide responsibility for the Gallium Nitride technology development initiative within the company.