Ken Vickers
Consultant: Experienced in creating innovative manufacturing and educational environments
- Role
- President at Vickers Consulting
- Location
- Fayetteville, AR, US
- LinkedIn followers
- 500 followers
About Ken Vickers
Specialties: Graduate education, startup and management of interdisciplinary programs. Research commercialization and entrepreneurism. Industrial intrapreneurial development and execution. Cultural aspects of implementation of advanced process control in highly complex manufacturing environments. Engineering management. Integrated Circuit process and equipment engineering management. World-wide knowledge transfer across international organizations. Management of world-wide distributed problem solving teams.
Experience
President
Oct 2014 — Present · Fayetteville, AR, US
My experience is in twenty years of engineering management of high volume technology manufacturing, and then in development and management of graduate education in a university environment. I spent 20 years in Texas Instruments wafer fabs, the last eight as Equipment and Process Engineering Manager of the highest volume fab in TI. I developed model based advanced process control methods in Sherman Wafer Fab that were adopted in all TI wafer fabs as an internal product called ProcessWorks (later spun off as a commercial product from Adventa). I also led TI-wIde teams addressing test wafer usage and wafer fab knowledge sharing. The Wafer Fab Knowledge Sharing team started as a grass roots effort of wafer fab engineering managers to increase propagation of known good practices across the company. The test wafer reduction team was a wafer fab managers\' council selected project with focused resources under my chairmanship (the team’s two-year effort led to a sustained 50% reduction of test wafer usage over all TI fabs). I then retired to accept the challenge of creating an interdisciplinary sci/eng graduate program at the University of Arkansas focused on micro to nanoscale materials, processing, and devices. In addition to a full technical curriculum, I incorporated required courses in research commercialization, operations management, project planning, proposal writing, and professional ethics. These courses addressed the knowledge I felt that traditional sci/eng grad programs lacked from my seventeen years as a hiring manager in industry. That program is now in its 25th year and is one of the largest technical grad program on campus.For six years after my retirement, I concentrated on personal projects to support my family\'s goals and my own personal interests. I now find a renewed interest in using my wide range of experiences to help support organizations who have interesting organizational needs in my areas of expertise.
Education
University of Arkansas
Master of Science (MS), Physics
1976 — 1977
University of Arkansas
BS, Physics
1972 — 1976
Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance
Certified Instructor (Badge 089), Total Productive Maintenance
Skills
- Photolithography
- Pecvd
- Plasma Etch
- Powder X-Ray Diffraction
- Science
- Experimentation
- Characterization
- Engineering
- Afm
- Cvd
- Semiconductors
- Solar Cells
- Nanomaterials
- Manufacturing
- Higher Education
- Scanning Electron Microscopy
- Matlab
- Nanotechnology
- Materials Science
- Plasma Physics
- Pvd
- Engineering Management
- Thin Films
- Physics
- Spectroscopy
- Ic
- Research
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