Henkel Appoints New Vice-President of PD&E for Semiconductor and Assembly Technologies

Key to Henkel’s strategy for streamlining advanced product development and ensuring consistency across all regions is the expert leadership of its global engineering team. The company announced the promotion of Dr. Michael Todd to the position of Vice-President of Product Development and Engineering for Semiconductor and Assembly Technologies, a move which will serve to further enhance the resource focus and technical vision for Henkel’s engineering teams worldwide.

Having played an essential role in crafting Henkel’s product development strategy over the last several years, Todd has led the Irvine, California-based teams responsible for mold compound, die attach, wafer-level underfill and CSP underfill materials. In his new role, Todd will maintain his oversight of Henkel’s Irvine applications engineering and product development initiatives, while expanding his duties to oversee product roadmaps at the company’s Yantai, China, Linyuangong, China, Tainan, Taiwan and Hemel Hempstead, UK facilities as well.

“Henkel is leading the market in total value chain materials solutions,” states Todd. “Ensuring that our research, development and applications efforts continue to align with customer requirements in specific regions is central to our strategy and key to maintaining Henkel’s top market standing and sustained, long-term growth. I look forward to working with the teams in all of our labs worldwide as we continue to set the industry benchmark for advanced materials design.”

Viewing lead-free as the most pressing short-term materials issue and one that Henkel has successfully addressed with high performance materials for wafer-level through to board-level applications, Todd believes that miniaturization and package integration will be the major market focus over the next three to five years. “The push toward efficient package integration isn’t just about footprint reduction, but also about cost savings,” comments Todd. “Consider that with stacked die, not only are you reducing the overall package size, but also eliminating the real estate required on the printed circuit board and scaling back the required HDI substrate count from two or six or eight down to one and you can start to imagine the cost reductions that may result. Henkel’s work in next-generation die attach materials – including dicing die attach films – as well as mold compound advances and new underfill systems is leading the charge toward making these devices robust, reliable, lead-free capable and cost-effective. Suffice it to say that it is a very exciting time at Henkel right now.”

Previously, Dr. Todd was Henkel’s Director of RD&E for Material Sets and has spent the last 9 years of his career at the company in various engineering and materials development roles. Todd, who holds a Ph.D. in Materials Science Engineering from the University of California at Irvine, has over 17 years of industry experience and, prior to joining Henkel, worked at Ford Motor Company evaluating and implementing advanced electronics packaging. Throughout his career, Todd has authored numerous conference papers and technical articles and was recently named to the advisory board of Advanced Packaging magazine. As Vice-President of PD&E, Todd will be based in the company’s Irvine, California Research and Applications Center.

www.henkel.com/electronics