Zack brings to Crocus over 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. His experience includes sales and business development, product and strategic marketing, IP and licensing, building and developing international organizations. Zack held several senior positions with worldwide responsibilities at SanDisk, AMD/Spansion, ST Microelectronics and Motorola. Most recently Zack served as a Senior Vice President of Global Accounts and Enterprise Storage at Samsung Semiconductor. He holds an M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Southern Illinois University.
Florence Cheung brings to Crocus over 20 years of international corporate accounting and financial management experience. Prior to joining Crocus, Florence was the Chief Financial Officer at Cortina Access, a spin-off from Cortina Systems. As the Vice President, Finance and Corporate Controller at Cortina Systems, she managed a complex international corporate structure with twelve legal entities. She led the financial diligence and integration on a number of acquisition transactions and successfully completed the sale of Cortina Systems to Inphi Corporation and Cortina Access to Realtek Inc. She had held senior management positions at several private companies following her public accounting career.
Florence is a licensed CPA in California and a member of Financial Executives International (FEI). She earned her BBA degree in management information systems from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and her MBA and MS in Accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Leads the Magnetic Sensor technology development team since 2016 and brings to Crocus over 20 years of experience in magnetic materials, memory, and sensors. Jeff has held R&D, Management, and Director-level positions at major data storage companies in Silicon Valley since 1998. After joining IBM Research, he worked on the development of low-resistance magnetic field sensors using magnetic tunnel junctions, initiating some of the early trials of the TMR technology currently being used in all recording head sensors. Most recently, Jeff was Director of Non-Volatile Memory Materials at Western Digital, developing MRAM and ReRAM memory technology for next-generation data storage application. Jeff holds a B.A. in Physics from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in experimental solid-state Physics from Johns Hopkins University. Jeff has over 135 publications and 90 issued patents in the fields of magnetic materials and technology and is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Dr. Karanicolas is the Vice President of Integrated Circuit Design at Crocus Technology. Leads all analog, mixed-signal and high-precision integrated circuit architecture, engineering and design in CMOS and TMR process technologies. Previously, Dr. Karanicolas held key leadership and technical positions at Infinera, Maxim Integrated and Level One Communications (acquired by Intel) as well as at venture capital funded semiconductor start-up companies including early IoT investments in integrated transceivers and software. He started his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories. With more than twenty five years of semiconductor industry experience, Dr. Karanicolas is a recognized expert in analog, mixed-signal, high-precision and high-speed integrated circuit and photonics architecture, engineering and design with Si CMOS/BiCMOS/Bipolar and III-V HBT/pHEMT process technologies. Key publications and patents by Dr. Karanicolas include pioneering research in digital self-calibration techniques for high-speed and high-resolution data converters, widely used in communications, instrumentation and medical applications. He led the initial wave of integration of radio architectures to low cost CMOS process technologies with research in low power CMOS broad-band integrated circuit design techniques. Dr. Karanicolas received the Ph.D., S.M. and S.B. degrees in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Bill brings to Crocus over 25 years of semiconductor industry experience to the team. His background includes ASIC design, system integration, business development, strategic marketing, and sales leadership across multiple global and Fortune 500 companies. Bill has held multiple VP/GM roles with global responsibilities at Honeywell, STMicroelectronics, Samsung, and Motorola bringing a track record of thriving success in driving revenue and margin growth while gaining, a share of demand in each market. He holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University.
Mr. Jha was Chief Executive Officer of GlobalFoundries Inc. the world’s second-largest semiconductor foundry business from 2014 to 2018. Prior to joining GlobalFoundries, Mr. Jha was Chief Executive Officer for Motorola Mobile Devices from 2008 to 2012, a role he held until the company’s acquisition by Google. Before joining Motorola, Mr. Jha was at Qualcomm for over 14 years, ending his tenure at Qualcomm as the Chief Operating Officer (2006 to 2008) and President of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (2002 to 2008). Mr. Jha was a member of the board of directors of the Semiconductor Industry Association and also served as Chairman of the Global Semiconductor Alliance. Additionally, he is a member of the board of trustees of UC San Diego and the Salk Institute and serves of the board of several private start-ups. Mr. Jha holds a Ph.D. (2001), and D.Sc (Hon) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Strathclyde. He was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering in 2018.
Aymeric Sallin is the Founder and CEO of NanoDimension, a nanotechnology-focused venture capital firm, with offices in Silicon Valley and Switzerland. Since 2002, Aymeric has actively promoted nanotechnology around the world, receiving the “NSTI Fellow Award” and “2012 EPFL Alumni award” for “his entrepreneurial spirit, his dedication and exceptional contribution to the field of nanotechnology”. Recognized as a nanotechnology and innovation leader, Aymeric works closely with the business, government and academic communities. Aymeric is currently on the Board of Directors of Crocus Technology SA, Selecta Biosciences, Tarveda Therapeutics, H55 and Natron. Aymeric is an elected member of the World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders” of Class of 2013. He is the Chairman of the Board of the EPFL Alumni and a member of the Strategic Advisory Board of EPFL (Switzerland).
