Dr. Dirk Pfeiffer currently manages the Microelectronics Research Laboratory (MRL) at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, which is part of the Science and Solutions (S&S) department under VP Dr. Dario Gil within IBM Research. The MRL consists of 40000sf of clean room space plus offline laboratories with a staff of 100+ engineers and scientist and a fleet of 150+ processing tools. The MRL has the full range of 200mm silicon wafer semiconductor processing tools ranging from e-beam/optical lithography, reactive ion etching, films, wets, CMP, plating, characterization tools to packaging tools such as wafer/chip bonding, deep silicon etch, and others. The MRL supports a full range of device prototype and development projects including CMOS scaling (5nm and beyond), non-volatile memory, photonics, quantum devices, devices for IoT based applications, health care, and others.
Prior to managing the MRL, Dr. Pfeiffer has been the PI of several government projects within IBM research related to hard-based security and anti-tampering. Dr. Pfeiffer started his career at IBM in the lithography group as a polymer chemist where he ran a joint development project with commercial partners to develop new polymer films for high-resolution lithography. He also worked as the technical assistant to the director of silicon technology at IBM prior becoming an IBM manager. Dr. Pfeiffer holds a Ph.D. in organometallic chemistry from Wayne State University and completed a postdoctoral assignment at the University of Pennsylvania working in organic synthesis and catalysis. Dr. Pfeiffer has authored and co-authored over 80 patents and received several IBM outstanding technical achievement awards.
