Lawrence Semiconductor, a U.S. owned manufacturer of engineered silicon and germanium epitaxial materials, has appointed Don Garrison as general manager and chief operating officer. Garrison reports to CEO Ali Torabi and will lead manufacturing, engineering, quality, and customer delivery as the company expands its production capacity to meet growing demand from photonics, sensing, quantum computing, and defense customers.
As a merchant epitaxy foundry, Lawrence manufactures engineered material layers that customers use as starting material for building advanced microelectronic, photonic, and sensing devices. Its product lineup includes specialized silicon, germanium, silicon-germanium (SiGe), germanium-tin (GeSn), and isotopically enriched silicon-28 epitaxial materials, all serving photonics, sensing, quantum computing, defense, and other advanced semiconductor applications. Lawrence is the only merchant supplier in the United States for production-scale GeSn and silicon-28 epitaxy, and one of very few in the world.
Ali Torabi, CEO of Lawrence Semiconductor, said the company makes advanced materials that very few companies in the world can produce, and that its customers build their most demanding devices on top of them. He said Garrison has previously run semiconductor manufacturing at a far larger scale and has direct experience running epitaxy operations specifically, which he described as rare. He said having Garrison lead operations gives the company confidence to invest in capacity and scale to meet the industry's rapidly growing demand for specialty foundry services.
Garrison brings more than 25 years of leadership experience in semiconductor manufacturing. He most recently served as vice president of global operations for the Semiconductor Business Unit at Littelfuse, where he directed manufacturing, engineering, and supply chain operations across eight fabrication, assembly, and test sites, overseeing an organization of more than 2,500 people.
Before that, he served as director of fab operations at NXP Semiconductors in Chandler, Arizona, and led manufacturing excellence initiatives at GlobalFoundries during a period of rapid factory startup and growth. Earlier in his career, he spent more than a decade at Intel in various technical and manufacturing roles. He has directly led epitaxial deposition operations at multiple companies throughout his career and lives in the Phoenix area.
Garrison said he has run epitaxy operations before and described it as one of the most unforgiving processes in semiconductor manufacturing, noting that Lawrence has been doing it well for more than 30 years. He said his job is to scale the operation to meet growing demand without compromising the quality and reliability customers depend on.
Lawrence operates a Class 100 cleanroom in Tempe with 14 epitaxial reactors running around the clock. The company is ISO 9001:2015 certified, certified under the Department of Defense's Joint Certification Program, and is in the process of implementing the IATF 16949 standard to support automotive and other high-reliability production programs.
