AZZURRO Semiconductors, a pioneer and leader in GaN-on-Si technology has won two new members to its advisory board: the former CTO of Agilent Dr. Roland Haitz as well as former Siemens and Infineon top executive Dr. Karl Platzoeder.
"Extending the advisory board with technical experts in the field of LED and Power Semiconductors is an excellent move to further increase our corporate competence in these markets", said Erwin Wolf CEO of AZZURRO Semiconductors. "It will make AZZURRO a company of excellence in deeper understanding of market requirements and map these to R&D development roadmaps."
Dr. Roland Haitz is the former CTO of the Semiconductors Product Group at Lumileds' parent Agilent. As AZZURRO is using its proprietary and patented GaN-on-Si technology for large wafers to drive down the cost of LEDs, AZZURRO is very proud to have a seasoned expert on board who coined "Moore's Law" for optoelectronics: "Haitz' Law". In his role on the Advisory Board Dr. Haitz is adding his technological and strategic experience of more than 40 years in the optoelectronics industry to strengthen further AZZURRO's delivery of its cost breakthrough technology.
After studying physics in Germany, Roland Haitz joined the Shockley Transistor Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, CA. For his work with Dr. Shockley, he received his PhD degree from the Technical University Munich in 1963. After five years at the Physics Research Laboratory of Texas Instruments he joined Hewlett-Packard as R&D Manager for optoelectronic technology and component products. During his time at HP/Agilent, the optoelectronics business grew from less than 1 million USD in 1969 to more than 1.5 billion USD at his retirement in 2002. Besides his career in business he also co-founded OIDA (Optoelectronics Industry Development Association) and wrote the seminal paper that became the spark that ignited the SSL revolution of the lighting industry.
Dr. Karl Platzoeder, has an accumulated 35 years' experience in Power semiconductor at Siemens and Infineon stretching from engineering responsibilities, including productization, to President and General Manager of the power semiconductor division. He was one of the major contributors making Infineon/Siemens the number 1 in the power semiconductor field. Dr. Karl Platzoeder studied physics at Munich University. He started his professional career at Siemens as R&D engineer in the Power Semiconductor Division.
Later he was promoted to head of engineering and production. At this time, his department focused on high performance Diodes and Thyristors for industrial applications. In 1982 he was getting business responsibility for Discrete & GaAs- Semiconductors at Siemens and drove the low cost mass production as well as the development of chips for high frequency.
In 1992 Dr. Platzoeder became President and General Manager of the newly founded Discrete & Power Semiconductor Division consolidating activities in this area at Siemens. He focused on the rapid growing markets for Power MOS semiconductors in automotive and industrial applications. From 1997 to 2006 Dr. Platzoeder was responsible at Infineon for worldwide backend production and engineering.
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