An early November visit was made to the Northeastern US to present Semefab’s capabilities to several customers. Two companies were visited in the Boston area. One is a start up in the early stages of establishing their process and one is a founder of the MEMS technology. Needless to say that the start up was very receptive to our presentation while the bedrock company was much less so. I also was hosted by my brother in law, Eugene Sgrignuoli who supervises maintenance and gave a detailed tour of his plant at Vicor, the leader in small footprint modular power supplies.
I was fortunate to be entertained by friends and relatives the entire trip and had multiple meals of lobster, calamari, crab and mussels while consuming many varieties of the great craft beers of New England.

Next I traveled to the Eastern Pennsylvania/New Jersey area. Two customers and a university, Lehigh, my alma mater were visited. The first was a very promising business involving print head technology. It uses a non-silicon very large scale chip with a very good fit to Semefab’s process technologies. The second was less promising as it was a very small company already serviced by a 150 mm foundry. The last visit was to Lehigh University where I was hosted by my long time friend and fraternity brother, Jim Butt. He graciously took the entire day off and showed me all over campus as well as a detailed visit to his company, HindlePower. He also gave me a tour of his garage where he rebuilds Jaguars on Saturdays and allowed me to photograph all of them!
We met with Professors Bill Haller and Doug Frey who were also classmates and fellow Grad students a few years ago in the EE department. They were kind enough to introduce us to their students and also drink a few beers after classes at the old traditional Tally Ho bar. We had a great time especially since we traded stories about the pitfalls of wafer fabrication from which I gained a valuable insight from the design engineers point of view. Basically the wafer fab is a mystery which always seems to find a way not to yield well and the fab always blames the design engineers!
I also enjoyed great meals in my native Pennsylvania where I consumed Scrapple, Lebanon Bologna and Liverwurst with quantities of local craft beers!