Staff Biographies

Alan Weber

Alan Weber is the President of Alan Weber and Associates, Inc., a consulting company specializing in semiconductor factory information and control systems, SEMI integration and communications standards, Equipment Engineering Systems (EES), Advanced Process Control (APC), and other related manufacturing systems technologies. Prior to this, he was the Vice President / General Manager of KLA-Tencor's Control Solutions Division, acquired from ObjectSpace, Inc. in March 2000. While at ObjectSpace, Alan created the Fab Solutions Division, and was responsible for all aspects of the company's semiconductor manufacturing systems business, including development of the APC Framework and its eventual commercialization and global marketing / deployment as the Catalyst APC product.

Before joining ObjectSpace in early 1997, Alan spent 8 years at SEMATECH, and was responsible for advanced manufacturing systems and related standards R&D, including the CIM Framework. Before this, Alan spent 16 years at Texas Instruments, managing a variety of technology programs in the semiconductor CAD and industrial automation / control businesses, including a 4-year tour of duty in Europe.

Alan holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. He is on the Board of Directors of Cimetrix Incorporated, a Utah-based supplier of equipment integration software products for semiconductor equipment and motion control products for a variety of electronics and high-tech packaging industries.

Paul McGuire

Paul is a senior manufacturing systems consultant at Alan Weber & Associates, and is a specialist in mission-critical distributed manufacturing system design and implementation. Before joining, Paul spent his most recent two and a half years at KLA-Tencor's Control Solutions Division, where he was the software technical lead for the Catalyst product. He has been responsible for many analysis, design, development, and implementation tasks of selected components in the Catalyst product. He has over 20 years of experience in manufacturing, the last 18 in the semiconductor industry. He joined Control Solutions in January 1997 as one of the original developers on the AMD APC Framework Initiative project, which was the precursor to the Catalyst APC product.

In his previous employment as a National Semiconductor assignee to SEMATECH, he helped formulate components of the SEMATECH CIM Framework, based on a C++ prototype implementation. While working at National, and previously at General Electric's Factory Automation Division, he gained a broad exposure to manufacturing domain applications which include manufacturing execution systems, statistical process control, process specification and automated planning, document revision management, and recipe management and automated download; as well as manufacturing systems implementation technologies, including legacy network and relational databases, and message bus and CORBA distributed systems.

Paul earned his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Master's in Manufacturing Systems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a graduate of General Electric's Manufacturing Management Program.

Jim Hollister

Jim is a senior manufacturing systems consultant at Alan Weber & Associates, and is a specialist in fab-level system requirements analysis, design, implementation and test. Before joining, Jim spent his most recent two years at KLA-Tencor as the Catalyst Program Manager. His principal responsibility was to insure that the Control Solutions' product/technology strategy and consulting activities complemented one other and were aligned with the division's goals. This included identifying software product opportunities within the semiconductor industry, identifying emerging software technologies that may be applicable in the factory automation field, providing technical support to the sales organization, and working with new customers to insure that projects got off to a good start. In addition, he was instrumental in the development and teaching of APC product training courses.

Jim has over 20 years of experience in manufacturing systems, the last 17 in the semiconductor industry. He joined Control Solutions in March 1996 as one of the original architects and developers on the AMD APC Framework Initiative project, which was the precursor to the Catalyst APC product. Before joining Control Solutions, Jim worked at SEMATECH as one of the systems architects on the CIM Framework program; before this he spent 7 years at Thesis Group pioneering the design and application of cell control technology in the semiconductor industry, and 5 years at Texas Instruments in automation systems.

Jim earned his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.