Spotlight on Wilman Tsai, Mahboob Khan Outstanding Industry Liaison

Over the next several months, we will share experiences of Liaisons that have greatly enhanced the GRC research experience, The GRC Liaison experience is a unique program that brings everyday on-the-job reality to the academic community and connects the academic community to daily industrial challenges.

Through a group of Spotlight articles, we hope to provide some everyday examples of how Mahboob Khan Outstanding Liaisons provide value for both member companies and funded GRC researchers. We expect these examples to provide encouragement for others to become more involved in this unique program, by exercising individual talent to influence the next generation of researchers and rapidly move research results to the industrial community.

Wilman Tsai/Intel

Dr. Wilman Tsai received one of the 2009 Mahboob Khan Outstanding Liaison Awards during TECHCON 2009. Dr. Tsai is currently a Senior Program Manager of Technology Manufacturing Group at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, CA. He manages the Strategic Research Group at Intel, which is focused in the front end device science and is responsible for research programs in advanced logics and memory devices for 22 nm and beyond. Dr. Tsai has served as an Industry Liaison to several academic groups since joining Intel in 1997.

In partnership with the Nonclassical CMOS Research Center at the University of California/Santa Barbara he and his group of experts conducted regularly scheduled teleconferences with students and post-docs. Not only do these conferences cover the progress of the program, he also encouraged a discussion of technical and scientific questions. This led students to re-think their data and its implications and sometimes to conduct additional experiments to verify their results.. Students are encouraged to stay focused on questions that are important to the semiconductor industry. Several students mentioned the value of Dr. Tsai's availability to them, he always encouraged their interactions via email for additional questions and discussions.

He is willing to go the extra mile to aid students in accomplishing their goal. One student told a story of needing a particular piece of equipment, Dr. Tsai went out of his way to help the student find the equipment, even though the equipment was not found, the student was impressed by the kind gesture as it illustrated what a special person Dr. Tsai is and his commitment to student mentoring.