Phil Garrou Gets Special Award

(notes taken from award ceremony speech)

The Fraunhofer IZM special award has been given in honor of outstanding achievements by international specialist in the field of Advanced Packaging. In 1994 Dr. Paul Totta from IBM was honored with the first special award for his pioneering work of Flip Chip Interconnection. This year it is an honor for me to announce the second award winner: Dr. Phil Garrou. The name of Phil Garrou has been associated with the introduction of new polymeric materials to the microelectronic world.

A chemist by education and a PhD in chemistry from Indiana University, he has been at The Dow Chemical Company since 1975. Since the last 20 years he has concentrated his efforts on the use of polymers for microelectronic and photonic applications. He worked on a variety of developments including new molding compound formulations, PWB materials, antistatic products, AlN for thermal substrates.

His single most important contribution in the field of microelectronics has been the introduction of the Polymer BCB to many different applications of packaging. Phil Garrou has guided BCB from its early days in Dow's Central Research to its commercialization under the trade name Cyclotene. BCB is used today in such varied applications as the dielectric for passivation and redistribution of bumped chips; the inner layer dielectric for GaAs and InP telecom chips; planarization layer for high aperture flat panel displays, resin coated copper foil (RCC) for low loss / high density GHz PWB applications; passivation for VCSELS; "adhesive" for 3D wafer bonding applications; core and cladding in optical waveguide applications ect,ect.. The concept of Wafer Level Packaging was strongly supported by Phil Garrou and it became one of the dominating fields of BCB applications. In April of this year Dr. Garrou accepted the role of Director of Technology for all of Advance Electronic Materials Division and Director of New Business Development.

He has contributed his extensive knowledge of polymeric materials to many scientific journals, conferences, tutorials and workshops all over the world. In addition, he edited two books entitled "Multichip Module Handbook" and "Thin Film Multichip Modules" and has co-authored over 50 peer reviewed publications. He contributed several chapters to state-of-the-art packaging textbooks. In 2000 he won the William Ashman award for technical achievements in Microelectronic Packaging.

His 20-year experience in the area of thin film technologies has made Phil Garrou one of the world-wide leading specialist in packaging technology.

Dr. Phil Garrou is a Fellow of IEEE and IMAPS. He was the president of IMAPS in 1998 and is currently Technical VP IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Society (CPMT) and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging.

It is my great pleasure to present Dr. Phil Garrou with the Special Award of the Fraunhofer IZM for his pioneering role in the introduction of new thin film polymeric packaging materials.