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When Dr. John T.C. Lee talks about the evolution of electronics, he keeps coming back to the interconnect. As CEO and President of MKS Inc., he saw growing complexity in the connections between increasingly powerful devices as both a manufacturing challenge and a business opportunity.
That thinking helped drive MKS’ acquisition of Atotech in 2022, bringing process chemistry and electroplating together with MKS’ existing strengths in lasers, optics, and precision motion, and giving substance to a strategy the company calls Optimize the Interconnect™. Several years later, AI, advanced packaging, and high-performance computing are putting unprecedented demands on those interconnections.
We talked with Dr. Lee about what he saw coming, how that vision has shaped MKS’ Atotech, and its strong position to address the technology challenges being faced.
Marcy LaRont: When MKS announced the Atotech acquisition in 2021, you described the interconnect as the “next frontier for miniaturization and complexity.” What were you seeing at that time?
John T.C. Lee: Even before AI became the dominant conversation in our industry, we could see a fundamental shift underway. For decades, semiconductor performance advanced primarily through transistor scaling. However, as Moore's Law began to slow, the industry increasingly relied on system-level innovation to continue delivering performance improvements.
We observed that future gains would depend less on individual transistors and more on how efficiently chips, memory, interposers, package substrates, and advanced circuit boards are integrated and interconnected. The interconnect was becoming the critical link between all these technologies.
That insight was one of the driving forces behind the Atotech acquisition. Bringing together MKS' expertise in lasers, optics, motion control, vacuum technologies, and photonics with Atotech's leadership in process chemistry and electroplating allowed us to address manufacturing challenges across the entire interconnect stack.
Looking back, AI and high-performance computing have accelerated this trend even faster than many expected. Today, packaging and interconnect technologies are among the most important determinants of system performance, bandwidth, power efficiency, and manufacturability. In many ways, the opportunity has unfolded exactly as we anticipated, but the pace has exceeded expectations.
To continue reading this interview, which originally appeared in the October 2026 I-Connect007 Magazine, click here.
