Isvar Cordova (Fed)

Isvar Cordova currently serves as a CHIPS Metrology program manager overseeing 14 projects developing Advanced Metrology for Future Microelectronics Manufacturing, as well as the Federal Program Officer in charge of 7 CHIPS Metrology Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards. Although the breadth of methods and industrial applications of these projects are broad, his overarching focus is on maximizing the industrial impact of the investments made across the greater CHIPS R&D program by serving as a technical advisor helping to identify and bridge specific gaps that are essential to executing research that meets industry challenges.

Before joining NIST, Cordova was a systems design engineer in KLA's Films and Scatterometry Technology (FaST) division, where his team designed and built prototype metrology tools that were targeted toward supporting the high-volume manufacturing of next-generation leading-edge semiconductor devices. Cordova was part of their Advanced Development Group, which assessed both technical feasibility and business viability across a variety of new metrology techniques. This experience was essential to understanding the various return on investment factors that help industry stakeholders determine whether to take a risk on productizing a measurement tool for eventual adoption. 

Cordova holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University, where he focused on developing ultrathin nanostructured coatings for electrochemical energy conversion and storage applications. As a Physicist Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Advanced Light Source synchrotron, Cordova learned about the potential of a variety of soft x-ray characterization methods and transferred that knowledge to strengthen collaborations in the semiconductor industry during his time with the Center for X-ray Optics group that is renowned for their work addressing critical Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography challenges.