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ELECTRONIC DEVICE FAILURE ANALYSIS | VOLUME 18 NO. 2
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our members with an FA roadmap and other information
to help them in their work.
The value of EDFAS is directly tied to the perceived
value of FA in our industry, and as a Society, we can help
promote the importance of FA.”
CANDIDATE PROFILES
CONTINUED FROM
PAGE 30
Becky Holdford
worked as
a failure analyst in the Semi-
conductor Packaging FA Team at
Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas,
Texas, before retiring in 2015.
The team was responsible for
failure analysis development of
the company’s new packaging
technology. She joined TI in 1978 after graduating with
honors from Southern Arkansas University Technical
Branch. She spent most of her TI career—31+ years—in
wafer fab and product/packaging failure analysis. She
has broad and deep experience in physical failure analy-
sis techniques and was the group’s cross-sectioning and
SEM/EDX/FIB expert. Becky also taught these techniques
to new hires and colleagues. A charter member of EDFAS,
webmaster of the Lone Star (Texas) Chapter of EDFAS, and
long-time member of the Microscopy Society of America,
Becky is also a member of the Surface Mount Technology
Association and IEEE.
Becky helped start the Lone Star Chapter of EDFAS
and continues to be involved with that chapter, having
served as vice-chair, chair, and now as webmaster. Her
involvement with ISTFA began around 2000. Since then
she has served in various capacities, such as reviewer,
Session Chair, tutorial presenter, Tutorial Chair, and, in
2015, Audio/Visual Chair. Currently Becky is the Local
Arrangements Chair for ISTFA 2016, to be held in Fort
Worth, Texas.
VISION STATEMENT
“I want to keep EDFAS in the forefront of the failure
analysis world. I want to extend its reach and relevance
to all device and system failure analysts, no matter their
experience or education level. EDFAS should be the first
thing one thinks of when thinking about electronic FA
training and information. We need to broaden the expo-
sure of EDFAS to the world and increase the relevance
of ISTFA in the industry. We can only do that by having
valuable content and classes that are relevant. I think
we, as a Society, should do more virtual seminars and
tutorials, leveraging the advantages the internet has to
offer to an industry that is spread all over the world. We
should showcase EDFAS all year long, instead of just the
once-a-year exposure of ISTFA.”
Peter Jacob,
Prof. Dipl. Ing.,
studied technical physics in
Munich, Germany, with addi-
tional engineering training in
the accelerator laboratories of
Munich University. He started
his professional career at IBM
Germany, where he developed
process failure analysis at the
IBM semiconductor plant in Boeblingen/Sindelfingen.
He later joined Hitachi Scientific Instruments in electron
microscopy customer support and training and gave lec-
tures in scanning electronmicroscopy for biologists at the
Technical University Munich.
In 1993, Peter accepted a senior research position
at ETH Zurich, where he developed an industry pool
for failure analysis and reliability research and services.
While there, his group earned the Lillehammer Award in
2002. In 1995, Peter joined EM Microelectronic Marin SA,
the Swatch Group low-power CMOS fab near Neuchâtel,
as the engineer responsible for failure analysis on both
wafer-level and packaged devices. In that same year,
his ETH working group moved to Empa (Swiss Federal
Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research), joining
the laboratory for reliability, electronics, and metrology.
In thepast 25 years, Peter has publishedapproximately
100 papers on various failure analysis topics, many of
them at international conferences such as ISTFA, ESREF,
and IPFA; these include three Best Papers and one Best
Poster. He also organized or developed many seminars
and tutorials on FA topics. In recognition for his SEM lec-
tures, he was appointed in 2007 as Honorary Professor at
Technical University Munich, and in 2010 he received the
International Dresden Barkhausen Award for his activities
in electrostatic discharge risk evaluation. Peter volunteers
in the EUFANET organization.
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