Robert Bachrach is Co-founder and Senior Vice President of eJoule since 2013. He retired after 22 years from Applied Materials in 2012. Previously he was with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and a Consulting Professor at Stanford University for 18 years, and AT&T Bell Labs Murray Hill for 4 years.
Robert Bachrach was Applied Materials Corporate Director of Technology and Manager of Strategic Technology and Productivity Programs at Applied Materials from 1991 to 2001. He and his group were instrumental in the initiation of most new corporate business opportunities at Applied Materials from 1991, including AKT-CVD, PVD and Etch for Displays and Large Area Electronics, CMP, RTP, Metrology (PDC), Environmental, Facilitization, eServices, Track, and Wet Clean. From 1994 -1996 he was Corporate coordinator for 300mm Equipment Development. He has contributed to the SEMI Standards activities for 300mm and he is the principal author of SEMI E35, Cost of Ownership Guideline.
In fall of 2001 Robert Bachrach joined the AKT Division he help found in 1991 in connection with initiating a MEMS equipment business and contributed to revitalizing the division growth to a $B revenue by launching new initiatives for PVD, and Display Inspection. In 2002, he restarted the AKT PVD business , first organically and then by promoting the acquisition starting in 2003 of Applied Films for Display PVD which was completed in 2006.
In 2004 he motivated the Applied Materials Distributed Energy Initiative and initiated the development of a Solar PV equipment business within AKT which in 2005 was transferred to the newly formed Energy and Environmental Solution Division which launched the Solar Business Group in 2006. He managed crystalline silicon PV equipment product development from 2005-2006. The Solar manufacturing equipment business was launched in 2006.
In 2007 Robert Bachrach initiated the Large Energy Storage Group which was placed in the new EES Alternative Energy Product Group. LES focused on storage for Grid Integration of Renewable Generation and the transition to Vehicle Electrification. Multiple product opportunities were defined for innovative Lithium Ion cell high loading cathode and anode electrode manufacturing processes aligned with industry requirements. LES work was awarded funding contracts by the ARPA-E BEEST Program for advanced cathodes and DOE Office of Vehicle Technologies for advanced alloy anodes.
In 2011 Dr. Bachrach was appointed an Applied Materials Fellow. ( Applied Materials Fellows Reel at 7:15)
Robert Bachrach is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Sigma Xi,. He is also a member of The Electrochemical Society, the IEEE, the Optical Society of America and has been a member of the American Vacuum Society and The Materials Research Society. Robert Bachrach has published 180 journal articles, 6 book chapters, has 58 patents, and edited a two volume book published by Plenum Press entitled, “Synchrotron Radiation Research: Advances in Surface Science”. He was a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Crystal Growth and Characterization and Journal of Science Education and Technology. He was a member of the Exploratorium the Directors’ Council 1987-1992.
Prior to joining Applied Materials, Inc in July 1991, Dr. Bachrach had throughout his research career worked with various aspects of semiconductor and metal thin film deposition, epitaxial growth and characterization of both the materials and related devices. Dr, Bachrach has developed enabling instrumentation for fundamental and applied studies of materials and devices. Dr. Bachrach also worked in the area of excimer laser crystallization of amorphous silicon on insulating substrates for thin film transistors.
As a member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, from 1969 to 1973, his principal research involved materials characterization and optical studies of GaP and GaAs. This work determined all the factors responsible for the efficiency of GaP LED’s and the achievable limits. Projects also involved fabrication and studies of GaP:N green light emitting diodes and GaAs heterojunction lasers. This work led to the transfer to production of the LED technology and the use of LED’s in the Bell system.
In 1973 Dr. Bachrach joined with Prof. F.C. Brown to initiate the synchrotron radiation research program at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He contributed to the establishment of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and had an ongoing relationship until 1995. He was a Senior Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC and in 1978 became a Consulting Professor at Stanford University. He worked on the design, construction and installation of the “Grasshopper” soft X-ray monochromator at SSRL, sixteen of which monochromators are now in operation throughout the world. He also contributed to numerous other instrumentation and facilities projects at SSRL aimed at enhancing research opportunities.
Dr. Bachrach had extensive experience with computer aided data acquisition techniques and wrote software systems for these purposes. Begun in 1973 and based upon DEC PDP11 computers, a scientific workstation was formulated with an integrated set of graphically oriented software. Some of the principal attributes were asynchronous commands, persistent field oriented databases, real time reduction and presentation concurrent with acquisition. In addition to use for his own research, fifteen other systems derived from this were established at Xerox and SSRL. This system was migrated to uVAX computers in connection with the development of SSRL beam Line V.
Dr. Bachrach initiated the semiconductor surface and interface physics program at Xerox utilizing synchrotron radiation experiments. A major research area included fundamental studies of soft x-ray physics and the use of synchrotron radiation for studies of metal and semiconductor surfaces and interfaces. He initiated a Molecular Beam Epitaxy program at Xerox in 1976 which pursued both materials and device aspects. The program used MBE techniques combined with photoemission to investigate the properties of polar semiconductor surfaces.
Dr. Bachrach initiated the development of a wiggler-undulator based beam line at SSRL in 1980 through a Xerox/Stanford Participating Research Team and obtained the required $5M in funding and then managed the project. Beam Line Wunder represented the state of the art in synchrotron radiation facilities for soft X-ray science.
From 1980-1984, Dr. Bachrach was additionally secretary of the organizing committee for the 17th International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors which was held in San Francisco, Ca, August, 1984. He and Prof. Marvin Cohen of UC Berkeley organized the US initiative which obtained the conference from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Semiconductor Commission. He developed the conference organization and obtained the volunteers for the various activities and then managed the activities required to plan and execute the conference. He raised $250,000 dollars to supplement the budget from the registration. The total budget was $500,000. He also developed a satellite conference, Physics of VLSI held at Xerox PARC, held in conjunction with the ICPS.
Dr. Bachrach was a member of the program committee for the 19th ICPS, was a member of the International Advisory Committee for the 20th ICPS to be held in Thessaloniki, Greece, and is a member of the program committee for the 21st ICPS to be held in Beijing, PRC.
Dr. Bachrach was born on June 28, 1942, in Worcester, Massachusetts and educated in the Worcester public schools. He received his amateur radio licence W1GNN in 1954. In 1959 he participated in the then experimental Physical Sciences Study Committee Course and the Thayer Academy Summer Science Program run by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As part of this he worked at the Sylvania Avionics Laboratory in Waltham Mass. He won first place in the 1960 Massachusetts State Science Fair with a project investigating electroluminescence. He attended MIT, majored in Physics, and was selected as an assistant in the Junior Physics Lab for his senior year. He was captain of the swimming team in 1964, was the first recipient of the Stewart Award for community service at MIT, and received his Bachelors of Science in Physics in June, 1964. During the summers, he worked at the RCA David Sarnoff Laboratory, Princeton, (1961), the MIT Junior Physics Laboratory (1963), and Phillips Laboratory, Eindhoven, (1964). His Ph.D. in Physics under Prof. F.C. Brown was awarded from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in January, 1969.