Ken Brown ’81 Mechanical Engineering
Ken Brown is a Senior Executive with 40+ years of experience in the Electronics Industry, primarily focused on semiconductor chip packaging, assembly, and microelectronics across all phases from innovation, through development and manufacturing. He recently retired from Intel Corporation (Nov, 2025) as Vice President, Photonic Packaging Development, Intel Data Center Group. In his most recent role at Intel, he was developing advanced packaging for Photonic Components, components and products that move both Photons (light) and Electrons to carry data. His team developed and demonstrated the worlds first CoPackaged Optical Processors. In his 25 years at Intel, he also developed Microprocessor Packaging, then built teams in the Philippines, Malaysia, and China for development and manufacturing of chip packaging for Flash Memory, Peripheral Components, Network processors, Core Logic chips, and processors for consumer electronics. Shipping hundreds of millions of products. His teams developed the thinnest stacked die, and were the first to develop and manufacture Stacked memory and logic components. Ken also led Chip Packaging development for Intel’s Custom Foundry organization, meeting with customers in the U.S. and around the world to develop and meet their product needs. When not developing packaging, Ken was responsible for investigating and resolving chip packaging related Tariff issues for Intel’s Global Tariff and Trade Organization. He appeared and won three separate cases with China, meeting and presenting cases with lead Trade Officials in that Country, and had $500 million of overall positive impact.
Prior to his work at Intel, Ken led chip packaging development at Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts. He had a 17 year tenure at DEC working in several different development capacities – assembly equipment automation, assembly process and materials development, and chip packaging design and procurement. He joined Intel and moved to Arizona when the DEC Semiconductor business was sold to Intel, and as the rest of DEC was being sold to HP. DEC was Ken’s first full time Engineering job after graduating from UMASS Amherst with his degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1981.
Ken’s work has taken him to Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Thailand, South Korea, Israel, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Scotland. A couple of million air miles in all.
Ken has numerous patents to his credit, both from DEC and Intel, has published and spoken at conferences and events around the world, and authored a chapter in a Graduate Text Book. Outside of his day job, Ken is an avid, award winning, and published Photographer.
After retiring from Intel, Ken started a consulting business, Evolution Microelectronics, to continue working technology development in areas of interest.