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Rick was born in California in 1958 and attended
high school in Midland, Michigan
- worldwide headquarters for The Dow Chemical Company.
Thus, when Rick entered Brigham
Young University in Provo, Utah in the
fall of 1976, it was with the intent of becoming a chemical
engineer - just like everyone else he knew.
It wasn't until the beginning of his senior year in college that Rick realized that
a traditional career as a chemical engineer in either the chemical industry or petroleum
industry didn't interest him. Fortunately, he was required to take an elective course
in electrical engineering that first semester of his senior year. The elective course
that he took in semiconductor processing sparked an intense interest in the field
of integrated circuits. At the end of that fall semester, Rick knocked on the door
of Signetics, an integrated circuit fabrication
company that had a facility in Orem, Utah, and
got his first job in the industry there before he graduated from college. Rick graduated
from Brigham Young University the next semester in 1983 with a B.S. degree in chemical
engineering.
Rick worked for about two years at Signetics, primarily as a process engineer. His
first responsibilities were in the photolithography group. As a photolithography
engineer, Rick was responsible for a wide variety of tasks. One responsibility was
to research and develop the recipes that were used to dispense the proper amount
of photoresist onto the silicon wafers, set rotational ramp up times, speeds, and
hold times for the photoresist spinners, and set times and temperatures for soft
bakes and hard bakes. Rick wrote specifications for wafer alignment procedures and
recipes, and also developed alignment structures. Responsibilities also included
failure analysis for photolithography-related defects.
Rick also worked as a thin film engineer for Signetics. Most of the depositions
were conducted using evaporation techniques. At the time, Signetics mostly used
CHA
high vacuum equipment, with a variety of
mechanical pumps,
diffusion pumps,
cryogenic pumps, and
turbomolecular pumps. A variety of
barrier metals were used, and aluminum was the predominant
conduction layer metal at the time. However,
sputtering processes were also being developed. Rick had responsibilities
for chemical vapor
deposition (CVD) processes, including low temperature chemical vapor deposition
(LTCVD), low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD), and plasma enhanced chemical
vapor deposition (PECVD). Rick also worked extensively with
ion implantation processes, which were moved into the thin film process
group from the old diffusion process group.
Rick next took a job with Raytheon Company,
working with their new high-speed, radiation-hardened
gallium arsenide devices group, where he was one of the development engineers
operating a pilot plant facility. One purpose of the facility was to reconfigure
the basic processes developed by the Raytheon research department into production-capacity
processes. Another aspect of this job was to develop the budget and specify equipment
and facilities for the state of the art microelectronics center that was built in
Andover, Massachusetts.
Rick's final position in the microelectronic industry was with Leeds & Northrup
in St. Petersburg, Florida. Rick was in charge
of the new thin film sensor group, which made
silicon strain pressure sensors and
platinum RTD temperature sensors. In this capacity, Rick was responsible
for everything from raw materials coming in the door to finished sensors going out
the door, and everything in between. During the first year he was with Leeds &
Northrup, he brought the line from a production of zero thermal sensors to over
63,000 thermal sensors per week. Through a variety of
statistical process control techniques, including
statistical experiment designs - which he had been interested in for
years, Rick brought process yields up to over 99% during the time that he was employed
with Leeds & Northrup.
Rick entered law school at the
University of Tennessee in Knoxville
in the fall of 1991, and received his Juris Doctor degree in 1994. During that time
Rick clerked for both the general practice law firm of
Frantz, McConnell & Seymour, and the intellectual property law firm
of Luedeka, Neely & Graham,
where he would eventually be employed full-time. However, the job that paid the
bills more than anything else during that time was a computer consulting business
that Rick had started while living in Florida. As a part of that business, Rick
installed and maintained
local area networks (which were just starting to become popular with small
businesses), built and sold computers and computer peripherals, and did contract
computer programming in a variety of languages and environments.
Rick became an associate with Luedeka, Neely & Graham in 1994 and a shareholder
in 1999. His early practice emphasized software licensing for relatively large-fee,
royalty-bearing software packages for a client that was the creator and leading
solution provider in their market - network management.
In addition, the licenses were somewhat different from a standard shrink-wrap-type
contract. Thus, most of the licenses were individually negotiated over a period
of time. This afforded Rick an opportunity to learn negotiation skills that were
beneficial in a number of different areas. Rick successfully negotiated approximately
two-hundred different license agreements during that time. Licenses were signed
with many of the largest companies in the computer, data services, and telecommunications
industries.
Rick has been helping clients with copyright matters
for many years, including the identification of copyright works, filing and prosecution
of federal copyright registrations, and the successful litigation of copyright matters
through the appeals court
level. Rick also maintains an extensive
trademark practice, which has included identifying client trademarks, counseling
with clients on the proper use and protection of trademarks, filing and prosecuting
federal (and state) trademark registrations, and successfully representing clients
before the Trademark Trial and
Appeal Board.
Rick has drafted and successfully prosecuted over two hundred patent applications
to issuance. Many applications have required successful prosecution through the
appeals process before
they were granted with the breadth of claims to which the client was entitled. A
wide variety of technologies are represented in his work, including mechanical devices,
chemicals and chemical processes, textiles, business and financial methods, optics,
software, and a broad array of electronic devices. Drawing from his work as an engineer
and manager in the semiconductor industry, Rick
has most prominently drafted applications relevant to the many different sub-fields
within the integrated circuit fabrication industry, including applications directed
toward instruments and equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits.
Rick is a licensed attorney in the state of Tennessee.
He is a member of several legal and intellectual property organizations, including
the Knoxville Bar Association (KBA), the Tennessee Bar Association (TBA), the
American Bar Association (ABA), and the American
Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), and actively serves
on a number of different committees in these organizations. He is admitted to practice
as an attorney before the United States Patent and Trademark
Office.
Assistant: Cindy Williams
E-Mail:
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