Dr. Saurabh Dutta Chowdhury has a unique combination of professional and academic exposure in semiconductor manufacturing as well as in nonproliferation security studies. While pursuing first an MA in Nonproliferation studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies (Middlebury College), followed by a PhD in Defense Studies at King’s College London on India’s nuclear testing decisions, he served for the past 20 years in senior management positions with the semiconductor wafer fabrication and equipment industry.
Dr. Chowdhury is a seasoned manager with over twenty years of yield enhancement, technology development, operations, and business development experience in the semiconductor wafer fabrication and equipment industry. He served over the past ten years in management at leading IDMs across functional environments interacting with device, integration, module, packaging and equipment teams. Dr. Chowdhury has broad experience in emerging technologies of wide band gap Power MOSFETs based on Gallium Nitride and is currently working with Power Integrations (NASDAQ: POWI) after his employment at UCSB based startup Transphorm (now public NASDAQ: TGAN). He is involved in joint venture partnerships in Germany and Japan as well as managing leading US based wide bandgap foundry on behalf of his current employer.
He has prior experience for over a decade in mixed signal BiCMOS technologies based on Silicon for Power and RF application; heterogenous packaging experience using TSV (thru silicon Via) and RDL (Redistribution layers for Chip scale packaging) at Maxim Integrated Products (now part of Analog Devices); and CMOS technology development and transfer to manufacturing at 90 nm and 65nm based on 193nm DUV ArF Lithogrpahy in the context of SRAMs at Cypress (now part of Infineon).
He started career over twenty-five years ago at Applied Materials, a leading frontend semiconductor fabrication maker involving customers in Taiwan, South Korea, US and Japan.

He is currently a member of the Technical Committee at Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC) hosted by SEMI

Technical education:

BS Physics/CS The University of the South-Sewanee (fully funded 3-year university scholarship)
MEng Microelectronics Eng Rochester Inst of Technology (fully funded SRC Fellowship)

MBA Santa Clara University funded by employer-Applied Materials

PLD at Harvard Business School funded by employer-Maxim Integrated Products

Nonproliferation education:

MA in Nonproliferation at Monterey Institute of International Studies (Middlebury College) part time
PhD Defense Studies at King’s College London, part time-thesis Indian nuclear testing decisions

Academic affiliations:

Honorary Visiting Fellow, The University of Leicester- Dept of International Relations

Honorary Adjunct Professor, Strategic Studies National Institute of Advanced Studies-IISc BangaloreBook publication:

Indian Nuclear Testing Decisions: A Foreign Policy Analysis Based Model –Under review with Routledge (passed review of four chapters). PhD thesis

Publications:

“India’s semiconductor mission might need a compass” (Published in The Hindu on April 1, 2023)