Management

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 180 archival journal publications and about 210 articles in conference proceedings. He holds 36 patents in the area of semiconductor processing and device fabrication.

Dr. Leonard Borucki

Board Member

Dr. Borucki was the Chief Technology Officer of Araca, Inc. from 2006 to 2017. He was 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.

Mr. Tatsutoshi Suzuki

Co-Founder and Board Member

Mr. Suzuki is a Nagoya Institute of Technology graduate, where he focused on the development of computers, along with their application and utilization. In 1978, he joined Toho Koki Seisakusho Co., Ltd. (Toho), where he introduced an automated manufacturing system (FMS) for machining large parts, a pioneering achievement in the industry. In 1998, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by the increase in the size of silicon substrates for semiconductors to 300 mm, he helped Toho enter the CMP polishing pad business. In 2000, Toho began manufacturing and selling pad grooving and surface preparation equipment to the semiconductor industry. These systems have been an industry standard in Japan, Taiwan, and China for many years and continue to be the de facto tools for pad grooving and surface preparation.

In 2002, he became the President and CEO of Toho, and shortly afterward (in 2004), he co-founded and financed Araca, Inc., together with Dr. Ara Philipossian. Since 2009, Toho has been developing the CARE (Catalyst Referred Etching) method invented by Prof. Yamauchi of Osaka University and has been working to put it to practical use as an ultra-precise process for final polishing of 50 to 200 mm SiC substrates for power semiconductors applications. This new technology is currently attracting significant attention due to its several environmentally and technologically attractive features. The process uses only water (i.e., no slurry) and does not require any pad conditioning. These (and several other key) features enable such SiC surface and sub-surface crystal qualities that traditional CMP cannot achieve.

Toho holds numerous domestic and international registered patents and will continue to expand the CARE process globally under its CARE-TEC® trademark.