Dr. Ara Philipossian

Co-Founder, Chairman, President and CEO

Dr. Philipossian has been a professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Arizona since 2001 where he holds the Koshiyama Chair of Planarization. Since its establishment in 2004, he has also been the Co-Founder, President and CEO of Araca, Inc, the premier provider of

services and equipment to the polishing and planarization industry worldwide. He received his BS, MS and PhD in Chemical Engineering from Tufts University in 1983, 1985 and 1992, respectively. From 1992 to 2001, he was the Materials Technology Manager at Intel Corporation (Santa Clara, CA USA) responsible for development, characterization, implementation and sustaining of new and existing CMP and post-CMP cleaning consumables, low k dielectrics and electroplating chemicals. From 1986 to 1992, he worked at Digital Equipment Corporation (Hudson, MA USA) as a process development manager focusing on thermal silicon oxidation, diffusion, LPCVD of dielectric and gate electrodes, and wafer cleaning technology.

Dr. Philipossian has authored approximately 95 archival journal publications and about 150 articles in conference proceedings. He holds 22 patents in the area of semiconductor processing and device fabrication with another 25 patents pending.

Dr. Leonard Borucki

CTO

Dr. Borucki has been the Chief Technology Officer of Araca, Inc. since 2006 and is responsible for intellectual portfolio development, new applications, prototype hardware engineering and construction, analysis software development, data analysis, sales and customer

technical support. Prior to acquisition by Araca of his consulting company, Intelligent Planar, he was an independent contractor specializing in the application of physics and mathematical modeling to chemical-mechanical

planarization. Dr. Borucki has BS and PhD degrees in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

After graduation, he taught applied mathematics and statistics at Lafayette College. He then worked for IBM for 7 years, where he was the primary developer of a finite element program used extensively by IBM for process development. Following IBM, he was employed by Motorola for 13 years, where he was Fellow of the Technical Staff. At Motorola, he developed and applied new physical models for different aspects of chemical-mechanical polishing, including pad conditioning and abrasive wear, pad lifetime optimization, pad heating, oxide and copper feature-scale planarization and tiling, polish rate decay, within wafer polish rate uniformity control, and slurry hydrodynamics. He holds patents in both CMP and SiGe transistor manufacturing and has authored numerous journal papers and proceedings papers.

Tadao Kurosawa

Board Member

Mr. Kurosawa is a seasoned veteran of the semiconductor industry. He was most recently Chairman of Hitachi Chemical Co., America. From 1994 to 2004, he served as President and CEO of Hitachi Chemical Co., America. Prior to that, Mr.

Kurosawa served in a number of key executive roles at Hitachi Chemical, Hitacon USA and Hitachi Condenser Co., both in US and Japan. Mr. Kurosawa serves on the board of a number of technology companies and continues to consult for Research Frontiers Inc. and Hitachi Chemical Co., America in a senior advisor capacity. Mr. Kurosawa received his graduate degree from Chuo University, Japan.

Koichiro Ichikawa

Board Member

Mr. Ichikawa is the President and CEO of Fujikoshi Machinery Corporation (FMC), a leading producer of polishing equipment for the semi-conductor industry.

Mr. Ichikawa graduated with a BS degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Science

and Technology of Nihon University in 1963 and started working that same year for Hokusin Keiso Corporation. He worked for Shin-Etsu Handotai Co. Ltd. from 1967 until 1968, until he joined FMC, a company founded by his father. He was appointed to the company’s board of directors in 1972, and became its President and CEO in 1986.

Mr. Ichikawa has been Vice-chairman of the Nagano Prefecture Employers’ Association since 1987, and Acting President of the Nagano Chamber of Commerce and a member of the Nagano City Industrial Promotion Council since 2006. In 2010 he became a member of the Nagano Prefecture Human Resources Committee and from 2011 he has been the President of the Nagano Techno Foundation.

In recognition of his many contributions to Japanese business and society, Mr. Ichikawa was awarded the Nagano Prefecture Governor’s Award for Meritorious Industry in 2000, and the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency Director General’s Merit Award for the Promotion of Small and Medium Enterprises in 2006. In 2012, he was awarded the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun (4th Class - Gold Rays with Rosette) in the name of His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Akihito.

Dr. Cliff Spiro

Board Member

Dr. Spiro received his BS degree in chemistry from Stanford University and his PhD in chemistry from Caltech where he shared the 1980 McCoy Prize for the top thesis. Dr. Spiro joined General Electric in 1980 and held a series of progressively responsible research and

management positions for GE between 1980 and 2001.

In 2001 Spiro was named Vice President of R&D for the Nalco subsidiary of Suez Corporation where he directed a staff of 600 located throughout the world. Nalco is a leader in water, energy, and paper chemistry. Dr. Spiro joined Cabot Microelectronics in December 2003 as Vice President of R&D where he directed a staff of 150 with labs in US, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. Cabot Microelectronics is the leading supplier of chemical-mechanical-planarization technologies that are critical to the successful production of memory and logic semiconductors, hard drives and magnetic heads. He was named CTO in 2010.

Cliff also served as a Director on the Board of the Mississippi Polymer Technologies Corporation, Maxdem Corporation and Strategic Diagnostics (Nasdaq: SDIX) where he chaired the compensation committee and served on the audit committee. In 2011, Cliff left Cabot Microelectronics to form Cliff Spiro Consulting Group LLC, located in Savannah, Georgia, for the purpose of coaching innovation leaders. Cliff recently published R&D Is War And I've Got the Scars To Prove It. He holds 20 US Patents and has published 79 scientific articles and given 49 conference presentations.