Kirankumar Savandaiah
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A brief profile
Swati Bharadwaj, Sep 20, 2023: The Times of India
As a child, Kirankumar Savandaiah loved fixing anything that was broken. Over the years, his passion endured, and today this Bengaluru boy has graduated to fixing big problems in the world of semiconductors. At Applied Materials, where he is director of engineering, he has been recognised as ‘Innovator of the year’ every year since 2014. Recently, he beat over 100 nominations to bag the Zinnov Awards 2023 in the technical role model category.
Kiran, 42, helms a team of over 40 engineers in the US company’s Bengaluru centre that designs and develops semiconductor manufacturing technologies that help bring faster and more powerefficient chips to the electronic products we use every day. “I always try to solve problems that others say cannot be fixed. And often, jugaad or frugal engineering has helped us solve many problems,” says Kiran, who did a BTech in mechanical engineering from Bangalore University, and spent nearly two-and-a-half years at hydraulic equipment maker Yuken India as design engineer before joining Applied Materials in 2005.
He had no knowledge of semiconductors at the time. But he says his engineering fundamentals were good, and he had a strong design background in special purpose machines/ mechatronics, with manufacturing experience. When he joined Applied Materials, it was trying to develop a large-scale product outside North America for the first time. Kiran was put on that team. The product was called Charger UBM PVD, a system that went on to define a new standard in metal deposition productivity and reliability for chip packaging. “That was the biggest turning point for me. It gave me exposure to a very large challenge right from day one. I feel those early challenges helped me reach where I am today,” Kiran says.
He’s a prolific inventor. He has 135 invention disclosures, and 99 filed patents to his name. Of those patents, 50 have been granted. One of his patents made it to the ₹Wall of Fame’ at the company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, last year, and won him a $20,000 prize.
“That was the biggest milestone for me. That got me recognition across the organisation at a global level, and also gave more people here the inspiration to strive for that,” he says.
Kiran also spends time mentoring young engineers when he’s not busy trying to fix an over 30-year-old classic Tata Sierra SUV that he picked up from a junkyard. Mentoring has helped him build a pool of talent from the ground up, especially over the past couple of years, for two critical products that his team has developed completely out of India. “In the past three to four years, I have had the opportunity to develop more than 100 engineers,” he says, noting that many youngsters who join the field of semiconductors do not have any prior experience in the field.
And he remains hugely excited about semiconductors. “It will touch almost everything on Earth today, and will change the way we will live,” he says.
