Yu Cao

Yu Cao is Senior Vice President and CEO of HMI, one of the 4 business groups in ASML’s Applications Business Line. He is also Country Manager and President of ASML US. 

Yu served as General Manager of Brion from July 2015 through December 2019. Yu was a co-founder of Brion, which was acquired by ASML in 2007. He was one of the key contributors to Brion’s technology and intellectual property and led the development of its lithography modeling and simulation capabilities. Yu spearheaded the ASML-Brion integration effort, helping grow new applications of computational lithography in the fab space.  

Between 2011 and 2014, Yu was co-founder and chief product officer at Founton Technologies, specializing in computational advertising. Founton was acquired by Allyes in 2012 and later by Alibaba in 2014. 

Yu started his career at KLA-Tencor in 1996 and left as a principal engineer in 2000, to join start-up Onetta in the optical telecommunications space. 

Yu graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He earned an MS and a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology. Yu holds over 40 US patents, with a recent focus on machine learning applications in computational lithography and metrology.