SEMI Honors Machine Vision Team

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 1 -- Founders of machine vision company Cognex Corp. were among those recently honored by SEMI (Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International) at its annual industry awards banquet and SEMI Foundation fundraiser.

Bob Shillman, Bill Silver and Marilyn Matz received the 2005 SEMI Award for North America for their contributions to machine vision inspection. James S. Koford received the SEMI Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to computer-automated integrated circuit (IC) simulation and design.

"These innovators developed new technologies and continually adapted them to the rapidly changing semiconductor manufacturing process, enabling device makers to maximize their performance," said Stanley T. Myers, president and CEO of SEMI.

Shillman is Cognex's chairman and CEO. Before founding the company, he held faculty positions in electrical engineering and computer science at Tufts University and at MIT, where he earned a PhD. He has published more than 20 technical papers and is recognized as an authority in the areas of optical character recognition (OCR) and industrial machine vision applications.

Silver, a senior vice president and senior fellow at Cognex, studied machine vision and robotics at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab as a graduate student. His work on optical character recognition in 1982, normalized correlation in 1987 and geometric pattern matching in 1997 became benchmarks for industrial part identification, alignment and guidance. His latest work is a vision sensor that detects events and inspects objects at 500 frames per second. Silver holds 22 US patents, with more than 40 pending.

Matz earned a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT before joining the founding team of Cognex. In her initial role as a vision software developer, she helped develop early OCR software. She has held numerous technical management roles at Cognex, including vice president of software engineering and senior vice president of worldwide engineering. In her current position as senior vice president of PC Vision, Matz oversees the development and marketing of PC-based vision products and oversees the vision R&D group.

Koford, recipient of a SEMI Lifetime Achievement Award, developed the IC industry's first logic and functional design simulators and the first downstream design tools such as physical verification, DRC and place-and-route. His contributions over 40 years created the technological infrastructure and tools that enabled the IC industry to move from manual design, manufacture and test to automated design, manufacture and test of LSI and ULSI integrated circuits.

Koford began his career at IBM and later worked at Fairchild Semiconductor during the mid-1960s. He is a co-founder of LSI Logic and the founder of Monterey Design Systems, which was acquired in 2004 by Synopsys. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University and has over 80 patents to his credit.

For more information, visit: www.semi.org