CHIPS for America Taps UCLA Engineering Professor to Lead R&D Program

Subramanian Iyer, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been appointed director of the National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program (NAPMP) at CHIPS for America’s Research and Development (R&D) Office.

Iyer, who holds the Charles P. Reames Endowed Chair in Electrical Engineering at UCLA, has extensive academic and industrial experiences in microelectronics and semiconductor packaging — the design, manufacturing, assembly and connections of various semiconductor components, as well as the material that holds them together — for improved computing performance.

Announced Sept. 26, Iyer’s appointment came through an Intergovernmental Personnel Act agreement between CHIPS and UCLA. He will remain a UCLA Samueli faculty member while on full-time assignment to the CHIPS R&D Office, splitting his time between Los Angeles and the CHIPS office in Washington, D.C.

Operating under the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, the CHIPS for America R&D Office oversees NAPMP and three other programs designed to ensure American semiconductor manufacturers are globally competitive. To that end, NAPMP aims to accelerate the development and implementation of U.S. assembly, packaging and test capabilities in the domestic microelectronics ecosystem by identifying and integrating cutting-edge advanced packaging technologies.

Before joining UCLA in 2015, Iyer spent more than 30 years at IBM in various research and development roles, including being a fellow and director of system scaling technologies.

At UCLA, Iyer’s research and teaching interests include packaging paradigms and device innovations for high-performance architectures and medical engineering applications. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and directs the Center for Heterogeneous Integration and Performance Scaling — an interdisciplinary consortium of universities, government agencies and industry collaborators that looks to shift paradigms around integrated circuit design and manufacturing.

Iyer is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Microelectronics Assembly and Packaging Society (IMAPS). Among his many honors are IMAPS’ Outstanding Educator Award in 2020, IMAPS’ Daniel C. Hughes, Jr. Memorial Award in 2019 for outstanding technical achievements, and IEEE’s Daniel Noble Award for Emerging Technologies in 2012.