John C. Robinson, Senior Principal Scientist in the Industry and Customer Collaborations (ICC) group at KLA, has been elected a Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Fellows are members of the society who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. John joins an elite group of nearly 1600 SPIE members who have become Fellows since the Society’s inception in 1955.

As a newly appointed fellow, John is being honored for his technical achievements, as well as for his service to the SPIE community. During his 24 years of SPIE membership, John has been an author on 47 SPIE publications. He has served two years as Conference Co-Chair and nine years on the Program Committee for the Metrology, Inspection and Process Control for Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference of SPIE Advanced Lithography. John is also an advocate for student participation at SPIE Advanced Lithography, including providing support for the Karel Urbánek Best Student Paper Award.

During his tenure at KLA, John has been indispensable in the development and industry-adoption of data analysis and metrology methodologies. He was KLA’s first applications engineer for optical critical dimension (CD) metrology, providing technical support for a joint development project that resulted in KLA’s first paper on the topic of spectroscopic ellipsometry for CD measurements. He was also instrumental in the early phases of Archer™ AIM metrology development, which resulted in one of KLA’s first papers on the topic of AIM® overlay metrology marks. As a product marketing manager and director for KLA’s data analytics products, John served a key role in helping expand metrology analysis capabilities over 15 years as the product line evolved from Archer Analyzer to K-T Analyzer® to the current 5D Analyzer®. John’s most recent work has focused on the development and use case adoption of the I-PAT® (Inline Defect Part Average Testing) method that helps automotive chip manufacturers reduce the incidence of latent reliability defects in semiconductor electronic components. John has over 60 technical publications and more than 20 patents. He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Physics from The University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in Physics from Carleton College.

SPIE is an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering, and technology. The Society serves more than 258,000 constituents from 184 countries, offering conferences and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library.