I graduated from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon, France, specializing in materials Science. I then left for the United States for my graduate education and obtained a Masters and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

My doctoral dissertation was to study silicides which are compounds formed by reacting metals deposited on Silicon for advanced CMOS chip metallization.

So you can see that my background is about semiconductor processing. I joined Lam Research in 1992 as a process engineer to develop plasma etching processes. It was exciting to work on these million dollar machines that are operated in extraordinary cleanroom environments and to be wearing a cleanroom suit everyday. I felt close to being an astronaut working on a space station actually.

As business grew, I moved from a field process engineer function to more managerial responsibilities. I managed a team of 10 engineers for 3 years and in 1998 became worldwide technology manager for the ST Microelectronics account at Lam Research. Remember in 2000, the Internet was all the rage, and I wanted to connect semiconductor manufacturing equipment to the Internet so that one could monitor processes remotely and customers could have access to expertise on a 24 x 7 basis, therefore I started Cyberfab.