Helping silicon design organizations improve execution and scale output
Joel Jorgensen
Has The Experience You Need
Experience
10 Years Self-Employed
Ran the family farm, owned financial services, commodity brokerage, and consulting LLCs
25 Years of Experience in the Semiconductor Industry
20 Years of Improving How Teams Work
Semiconductor Roles
Analog Design Engineer NOR and NAND Flash Memory - Transistor-level circuit design. Charge pumps, high-voltage circuits, voltage detectors, DACs, NAND algorithms, wafer probe debug, and characterization.
Manager for analog, logic, and data path IO design engineers
NOR and NAND Flash Architect - owned device architecture and datasheet, ONFI representative
Project Management: led post-silicon design team for our first 3-bpc NAND
Fab Product Engineering NPI Chair - enabling new analog front-end and MAC baseband devices to run in our Fab, a single point of contact for product development teams
System Engineering Operations - SSD requirements engineering lead, collaborated with external consultants on business competitiveness assessment, operations improvement projects, and led engineering staff meeting
High Velocity Program Office
Drove operational improvements to facilitate scale for our growing SSD business
Coaching: executive coaching on scaling operations, Lean, Agile, and phase gate product development methodologies
Ran a corporate-wide meeting with engineering leaders across divisions, sharing learning in regard to improving and scaling engineering operations, and collaborated with an external consultant, dialing in his teaching to better address our challenges
Device and System Level Engineering: architecture, design, and test
Software development
Customer engineering and support
Debug: root cause analysis
Technology development
Manufacturing
Finance
Business and capacity planning
Supply chain
Packaging
Hiring
New employee onboarding
The kind of work doesn’t matter; if people do work, it can be improved
Worked on a Great Team
Workflow Improvements
Trained 1,700 team members on how to improve workflows in short 3-week sprints
Enabled 1,250 workflow improvement efforts
Identified over 6,000 workflow defects as improvement opportunities
Millions of dollars saved by removing workflow defects
If it were quantifiable, the additional revenue from shipping products sooner would dwarf the benefit of the labor hours saved by removing workflow defects
Improved customer satisfaction by building a new work process
Developed a new customer engineering work process for marketing and engineering collaboration
Scaling the business required scaling operations
$400M revenue blocked by existing customer issues
We did our part by helping to move our organization's customer satisfaction scores from the bottom to the top of their lists
Scaling Product Development
Workflow Improvements Led by Joel
Revamped our Product Life Cycle, saving $1.8M
Details:Redefined the purpose of each milestone goal. Updated and expanded the criteria for each milestone. Got buy-in across Leaders, Strategic Planning, Marketing, and Engineering
Reduced design post-silicon stepping cycle time by 60% to meet aggressive 5-week cadenced release cycle
Details: Pre-silicon workflows were built over months between program milestones; post-silicon workflows required weeks for the same work. Improved simulation throughput, reduced validation time, and optimized backend tape-in flows for short cycles. The 5-week stepping cycle included device validation of functionality and performance for a new silicon device, added new customer and test features, and taped out new mask layers for fab to create reticles for the next silicon stepping.
Enabled Successful Ramp of New NAND Memory Technology
Details: Delivered improvements across 5 quarters, focused on improving quality and throughput for a new NAND technology ramp. Developed new milestone checklist goals to align technology and product development teams. The program delivered on time and met quality standards for ramping the latest-generation NAND device.
Turned a Crisis into Coordinated Collaboration for our Supply Chain and Product Development Teams
Details: Redesigned our new product introduction supply chain, including supply, demand, and reconciliation workflows. Low-yielding silicon for the new technology put our teams in constant firefighting mode as production ramped up. Turned firefighting into a synchronized, coordinated effort. Synchronized development team demand for samples with supply chain supply actuals and forecasts based on wafer starts and yield trends. Reduced supply/demand analysis from multiple times a day to once a week. Designed a new weekly cadence-based process with each day’s tasks clarified for each team, including what each team needed to deliver. Designed three escalation paths, identifying clear decision makers to address different types of silicon planning problems that leaders needed to weigh in on. Issues could impact current or future revenue, customers, or teams.
Joel's Career
1984
Ran the family farm
3,000 acres of dryland wheat in southwestern Nebraska. Jorgensen homestead 1884.
1993
Started 3 LLCs
Western Commodities LLC, Jorgensen Financial Services LLC, Jorgensen and Wyatt Consulting LLC.
1996
Went Back to School
University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering (BSEE)
1999
Intel Corporation
Started in the Rotation Engineering Program, NOR Flash Analog Design and Architecture, Fab23 Fab Product Engineer, NAND Flash Analog Design and Architecture, System Engineering, and High Velocity Program Office
