Intel’s 2024 Inventor of the Year Refines the Art of ‘Loving Problems’

For most of its history, Moore’s Law and its coinciding steady innovation happened primarily in transistor technology. The emergence of advanced packaging, however, expanded that rate of innovation to 2.5D and 3D stacking technologies used to combine several dies into a single device, furthering Moore’s Law in new dimensions.

With those added dimensions, sources of difficulty multiply. For Gang Duan, these are sources of opportunity.

“Innovators need to develop a great sense of loving problems,” says Duan, who works in Chandler, Arizona, as a principal engineer and backend area manager in Intel’s Substrate Packaging Technology Development Group. “That’s the beginning of everything. Where there is a problem, there is an opportunity to innovate.”

Duan and his cohorts employ an approach designed to prevent failures, but they don’t flinch when failures inevitably occur. “Some of our best ideas were actually developed from our failures.”

In his 16 years at Intel, Duan has amassed nearly 500 patent applications in his quest to help push the envelope of how silicon dies are combined in packages — inventing better interconnects, embedding tiny connector chips within the substrate (as in Intel EMIB) and pioneering glass substrates.

For his years of prolific problem-loving work, Duan was named Intel’s Inventor of the Year for 2024.

He’s quick to add, however, that it’s not just his honor. Duan calls the award “a recognition to all the co-inventors and collaborators who have been taking on the toughest challenges in the field of advanced packaging. It’s truly the spirit of collaboration that’s made this possible.”

May more problems to love lead to continued inventions.