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How Lam Inspires Future Innovators
Robotics teams at the FIRST Global Challenge oversee their robots on the competition stage
Sep 6, 2024
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  • Lam pledged $10 million to FIRST® Global, a nonprofit inspiring future STEM leaders  
  • Our university programs help students explore what’s possible in their careers

Alexandre Toscano has a confession: “I coded the robot that took a team to the FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC) – and I wasn’t even an original team member.” Just two days before the competition, Alexandre’s teacher, a mentor for the FTC team, enlisted him. Time was running out, and the team needed Alexandre, the founder of the high school’s coding club, to program their robot.

In France, performing well at the FTC can lead to the FIRST Global Challenge, an Olympics-style, robotics competition. Teams representing over 190 countries have three months to build and program a robot for the competition themed around one of the greatest challenges facing our planet.

Alexandre was nominated as vice-captain and the head of the coding team on Team France in the 2022 competition. He played a crucial role in every aspect of the Challenge–from design and construction to programming. But the thirteen-member team from Saint-Cloud, a Parisian suburb, faced headwinds. “The previous year, Team France ranked 182,” he shares, and the team didn’t leave behind any historical knowledge–whether they wanted it or not. 

The team went back to the drawing board–literally. “We built and rebuilt our robot dozens of times,” he says. They experimented with designs, some for strategy and others for amusement. “At one point, we built a catapult attached to the robot. It wasn’t competition-legal, but we were having fun,” Alexandre laughs.  

Team members who represented France in the 2022 FIRST Global Challenge.

In 2022, Rick Gottscho, executive vice president and strategic advisor to the CEO, announced on the competition stage in Geneva, Switzerland that Lam was pledging $10 million over a three-year period to FIRST Global, the non-profit that organizes the FIRST Global Challenge.

Here, Alexandre met Rick, who showed him what’s possible in his career. “As a 17-year-old passionate about technology, meeting an industry legend who has shaped the semiconductor ecosystem was incredibly inspiring,” says Alexandre. “That encounter is what drove me to pursue an internship with Lam.”  

A few months later, Alexandre joined our offices in France, working as a software engineering intern in Lam’s Semiverse Solutions group.

While Alexandre had an impressive resume–having spent the last four years programming eight hours a day and leading a team that jumped several spots in the FIRST Global Challenge rankings–he had another confession to make. “Everyone around me at Lam seemed like geniuses,” he laughs.

That summer, Alexandre was tasked with building a ray tracing program to create 2D images from 3D scene descriptions. “I learned a lot from that internship. It was a great experience, which is why I wanted to come back to Lam,” says Alexandre.

In late May, we welcomed back Alexandre, this time joining our Tualatin, Oregon campus as a data analyst intern in our Deposition Product Group. This summer, he is working on a project that will enhance efficiency at Lam.

Alexandre Toscano (right) with Rick Gottscho (left) at the 2022 FIRST Global Challenge in Geneva, Switzerland.

Lam’s products help power a vast array of cutting-edge applications, each tailored with unique configurations to meet the diverse needs of our customers. Traditionally, calculating costs for these configurations has been a manual, time-consuming process, susceptible to errors. Alexandre’s project leverages the company’s data systems to streamline and automate the process, cutting the time required for these calculations by up to 50%, all while helping to reduce the chance of errors. His project is being beta tested with product managers in our offices in Tualatin, Oregon and Villach, Austria, with a goal of eventually distributing it across the company.

Alexandre’s work at Lam mirrors his work at the FIRST Global Challenge, albeit on a different scale. Instead of collaborating with student peers in Vietnam to build a robot, he’s troubleshooting code with colleagues over a cubicle wall. This is the impact of FIRST Global–to develop and inspire the scientists of tomorrow with the skill sets to tackle technical challenges on the competition stage and beyond.

At Lam, everyone–whether an intern or a senior leader–is invited to bring their best ideas forward to help us change the world. With the semiconductor industry expected to grow to $1 trillion by 2030, and require an additional one million workers, we’re looking for the brightest minds to unleash the power of innovation together.

Join us in proving what’s possible. Explore our university programs.

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