Hubacek, Jerome

2016 Distinguished Alumni Award

For innovation and leadership in the development of state-of-the-art etching tools for the semiconductor industry

Jerome Hubacek is the Managing Director of the Supplier Materials and Technology Group at Lam Research Corporation, a leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry. His team is responsible for developing the supplier technology required to meet the customer challenges of Lam’s entire product line and for overall supplier quality to support Lam factories and customer spare parts.

In his more than 20 years at Lam Research, Jerome has led the Dielectric Etch Engineering organization through the successful release of the Exelan confined plasma product line at 200mm and scaled it into production at 300mm. He served as the product line head for a Dielectric Etch applications group and his Linear Clean Engineering team took Confined Chemical Clean technology from a lab prototype to a production-worthy product positioned in leading-edge fabs. Jerome holds 11 patents, including the original patent for an elastomer-bonded silicon showerhead electrode.

Jerome was Professor Joe Lyding’s first graduate student and played a critical role in establishing the Lyding Research Group. He set up crystal growth capability that generated niobium triselenide crystals which were used to support John Bardeen’s theoretical research on Charge Density Waves. He also played a major role in the adaptation of Professor Lyding’s novel scanning tunneling microscope design into ultra-high vacuum, enabling atomic-resolution research on semiconductor materials.

Since graduating, Dr. Hubacek has established the Lam ECE ILLINOIS undergraduate scholarship. He continues to serve as the Lam executive sponsor for recruiting at Illinois, sharing his insight on careers in the semiconductor equipment industry at various student seminars.