Kyle McElhinny: 2026 Early Career Award recipient

BSMS&E ’11, MSMS&E ’13, PhDMS&E ’17
Senior staff packaging module development engineer and process technologist, advanced packaging TD substrate and wafer assembly, Intel Foundry

A materials engineer whose advances in semiconductor device packaging have set the pace for highly integrated electronics.

One of the emerging ways semiconductor foundries are making their chips smaller and more powerful is through a technique called advanced packaging. Using various strategies, they connect multiple components such as computing dies, memory and other chiplets within a single package, creating heterogeneous systems with capabilities that would be difficult to achieve on a single chip.

Since joining Intel in 2017, Kyle McElhinny has played a major role in developing advanced packaging and translating the approach into market-ready solutions. His most impactful work includes developing critical lithographic processes for the Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB), the technology at the core of Intel’s advanced packaging solutions.

McElhinny led a team developing multiple equipment platforms and processes to scale up use of EMIB techniques that will enable next-generation packaging and co-packaged optics. His work has earned him several in-house awards and a promotion to technologist, putting him on the principal engineer development track.

McElhinny says he honed his skills as a problem solver at UW-Madison. “I maximize my impact by helping 10 different people fix 10 different problems,” he says. “I ask what’s the key bit of insight we need to keep a problem moving forward. Eventually, someone will solve the problem. It’s just a matter of how long it takes and what that time costs. So, I’m helping everyone in my sphere of influence get their stuff done more quickly, as well as working on things that I think are going to be truly disruptive.”

How did your engineering education enable your success?

I worked with the UW-Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center’s interdisciplinary education group as an undergraduate, and that really taught me how to be a communicator. I think, particularly in our industry, that’s really important—because if you explain things in PhD jargon, no one can understand you except other PhDs. But out in industry, you’ve got to explain your ideas to coworkers with disparate training and backgrounds. So that combination of academics and communications training prepared me really well.

What engineering professor made the greatest impact on you?

My advisor, Materials Science and Engineering Professor Paul Evans. He really pushed me, always asking do you really understand it yet, what does it mean to do science, what does it mean to understand a problem, what does it mean to really prove your point? He set a high bar for me, and there are lots of “Paulisms” he would say that are still ingrained in my life. The core of how I do science was built at UW.

Which do you like best?

Bascom Hill or Observatory Hill?
Bascom Hill for sure. I played Ultimate Frisbee every Friday for nine years on that hill. Winter, wind, rain, snow—no matter what. We did a lot of questionable things. We played during a tornado warning. I remember playing in a T-shirt in the snow in the middle of winter.

Favorite Madison experience?
The Madison Ultimate Frisbee League and Madison in the fall. I’m not originally from Madison. We moved to Merton, Wisconsin, when I was 10, but I consider Madison to be my hometown. When people ask me where I’m from, I tell them Madison.