Intel Corporation announced that Sunlin Chou, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, has been named by Scientific American magazine as one of the “Scientific American 50” for leading the development of new materials and processes to make possible the 0.13-micron generation of microchips.

Of course, this is a tribute to the many people in Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group, who skilfully developed the 0.13 micron technology and ramped it into volume production. For instance, a lot of other semiconductor companies, including AMD, TSMC and UMC were not able to deploy the mass production of complex microchips made according to 0.13 micron fabrication process on time and continuously postponed it.

Sunlin Chou was born in 1946 in Hong Kong and joined Intel in 1971, less than three years after the company was founded, and his career took him into multiple disciplines related to silicon technology. He designed Intel’s first charge-coupled device (CCD) serial memory, then managed several generations of DRAM design and process development. In the mid-1980s, Chou led his team to develop high-yielding wafer fabrication processes and to ramp them into production using "copy exactly" techniques. By shortening technology introduction cycles from three years to two, his team made Intel the industry leader in manufacturing with new process technologies. In the 1990s, Chou spread this successful approach to other technology areas, including packaging and testing. He expanded Intel's long-range research efforts and is leading the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV LLC) consortium to bring a new scalable lithographic technology into production in the second half of this decade.