McAndrews Elects New Shareholder, Erick Michel, Ph.D.
03.16.20
McAndrews, Held & Malloy is pleased to announce the election of Erick Michel, Ph.D., to Shareholder, effective
March 1, 2020.
Michel’s practice includes obtaining patent protection for clients by assessing the patentability of inventions and then drafting and prosecuting patent applications before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The bulk of his work is in the semiconductor field, involving substrates, fabrication and chip design and application, among other technologies.
He has more than 13 years of patent prosecution experience, having drafted more than 300 patent applications in areas including electronics, integrated circuits and packaging, digital video, broadband, wireless networks, optical and fiber communication, silicon photonics, Bluetooth, RF, GPS, consumer electronics and other areas of electrical and computer engineering. He has also been involved in due diligence matters and litigation support for various electrical and electronics technologies.
“Erick is not just an exceptional attorney,” said McAndrews President and Shareholder Bob Surrette. “His academic and research credentials are superlative, and he also spent over a decade as an in-house engineer, which makes him particularly effective. We are fortunate that Erick has chosen to build his career here at McAndrews.”
After receiving his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Northwestern University, Michel joined Lucent Technologies, Microelectronics Group, where he worked with indium phosphide-based lasers and detectors for telecommunication applications. At Lucent and its subsequent spinoff, Agere Systems, as well as with the new owner of the optoelectronics division, Triquint Semiconductor, Michel held positions as a member of technical staff, technical manager and distinguished member of technical staff during a seven-year tenure. His work focused on the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) growth of arsenide-phosphide based materials for buried heterostructure laser devices.
In 2005, he joined Northwestern University as a Research Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. While at Northwestern, he assisted graduate students in compound semiconductor device research, with projects including Type II superlattice structures for infrared imaging applications, quantum cascade lasers, and quantum dot infrared photodetectors. At the same time, he served as Vice President of a small startup associated with his Ph.D. advisor. There he was responsible for writing proposals in response to government funding solicitations, as well as conducting research in infrared imaging technology and technical reporting of existing funded research work.
Michel has published more than 30 articles in scientific journals and conference proceedings, and has delivered six conference presentations on compound semiconductor device growth and fabrication, infrared sensing, and laser sources for fiber optic communications. His master’s thesis work resulted in a patent covering the fabrication of photonic bandgap structures.
Prior to graduate school, he worked for two years as a design and test engineer at a small ASIC design/test company and an appliance manufacturer.
Michel obtained his J.D. from Chicago-Kent College of Law, where he served as an associate editor of the Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property.