Dr. Misha Temkin was a beloved colleague and researcher who worked at Silvaco for over 30 years. He passed on March 12, 2019 after a long cancer illness. He was a dedicated Senior Applications Engineer in the TCAD Division at the Santa Clara, California headquarters.

Mikhail “Misha” Temkin was born August 22, 1955 in the small town Rechitsa on Dnepr River in Belarus, which was a part of the Soviet Union at that time. His parents, a mechanical engineer and a medical doctor just graduated a few months before and were sent by the government to work in an even smaller town in the middle of nowhere between Volga and Ural Mountains. According to his brother, the first 3 years of his life he grew there on not much food, but a lot of love. For the next 30 years he lived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

As a kid he played a lot of chess and won against many older players, but in Middle school he discovered the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Physics then became his passion for the rest of his life, and he studied it at Belarussian State University. His first paper “On the momentum representation of Slater-type orbitals” was published in Journal of Physics B in 1976, before his Master’s (not many postdocs in Soviet Union of that time had a single publication in an international peer-reviewed scientific journal).
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