Mr. Witter is an expert in crystal growth and characterization with 50 years experience starting as a freshman technician in the Engineering Research Department of North Carolina State University (NCSU) in 1961. About half of those years were spent at Texas Instruments (TI) and involved silicon crystal growth. Four of his patents are novel approaches to silicon crystal growth. He was recognized at TI as a Senior Member of Technical Staff in 1983 because of his efforts to automate the silicon crystal growth process which resulted in the deployment of retrofitted crystal growth control systems to all of TI’s silicon crystal growth pullers in production.
He left NCSU in 1968 with a Masters Degree in Ceramic Engineering and continued learning his crystal growth trade at Union Carbide (4y), Allied Chemical (4y), Texas Instruments (18y), MEMC Electronic Materials (4y) and finally Northrop Grumman SYNOPTICS as Director, Engineering (6y) where he retired in February of 2006. He is incorporated in the State of Texas as Anaxtal Inc. since 2000 when he began his consulting business working primarily for POCO Graphite and Chorum Technologies. He has also consulted for Concepts Research Corporation, Diversified Advanced Technologies, Nanodynamics, Lam Research and their subsidiary Silfex. His career includes crystal growth contributions to major projects concerning silicon, gallium arsenide, silicon carbide, yttrium aluminum garnet, gadolinium gallium garnet, yttrium orthoaluminate, fluorapatites, vanadates, cadmium zinc and mercury tellurides, barium strontium titanate, ruby, sapphire and magnesium aluminate spinel. He is presently Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Clemson University. He served as an expert witness in silicon crystal growth technology with Teklicon.
He has been active in the American Association for Crystal Growth since 1973 and served as the President of the Texas Section in the early 90s. In 2005 he co-chaired the International Workshop for Crystal Growth Technology in Beatenberg, Switzerland. In May of 2008 he participated in a similar workshop with the lecture entitled “Low Cost Semiconductor and Solar Silicon”. He is also a founder of United Infrastructure International of North Carolina. He has just incorporated in Delaware as ANAXTAL Silicon to launch a new business venture in Spartanburg, SC based on his novel silicon nitride materials technology that will enable his expired TI patent US04,710,260 to produce low cost solar grade silicon from silicon tetrachloride (STC), a byproduct of the Siemens process. He is presently testing the reaction for the kinetics data that will allow him to design a prototype reactor with materials that are stable enough to contain molten silicon for thousands of hours.
His contact information is included below:
David E. Witter, ANAXTAL Inc., President,
2305 Millgate Road, Anderson, SC 29621,
864-656-4679 W, 803-517-5827 M,888-525-5752 F, dave@anaxtal.com, dwitter@clemson.edu, ANAXTAL on Skype