ASHUTOSH DAS
CEO & Co-Founder
Mr. Das is the co-founder and CEO of Smart IOPS. Before founding the company, Mr. Das had long held the position of Director of Advanced Technology at Juniper Network, responsible for developing Juniper’s high-end, network equipment, and served as senior technology architect at Intel, Sun Microsystems and Nexsi. Mr. Das holds an MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University.
DR. MANUEL D’ABREU
Chief Scientist & Senior Vice President
Dr. d’Abreu is the co-founder and SVP R&D at Smart IOPS. An IEEE Life Fellow before founding Smart IOPS, Dr. d’Abreu was a senior Fellow at AMD and SanDisk, where most recently at the company’s Corporate Engineering organization he applied his expertise in memory management and error correction. Dr. d’Abreu has more than 35 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. His experience and expertise spans the system-on-chip and system-in- package design, test and manufacturing disciplines, Signal processing, as well as flash storage technology and coding theory. As an active member of the professional high tech community, he is a special advisor to the National Science Foundation and an Adjunct Professor at Santa Clara University. His work has been published at more than 50 technical conferences and in industry journals. He has been granted 45 patents and is credited with 18 pending patents. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.
RADHAKRISHNAN (RK) NAIR
Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder
Prior to co-founding Smart IOPS, Mr. Nair served as Director of Systems Engineering at SanDisk. Mr. Nair has extensive experience in developing flash memory based systems and holds several patents in computer and storage systems. With over 20 years of experience developing storage systems, microprocessors and ASICs, hundreds of millions of units of such products have been sold globally. His prior experience includes engineering leadership at Micron, HAL, S3 and C-DoT. Mr. Nair is a mentor to several start-ups that have successfully evolved into volume production and revenue. Mr. Nair received a B.S. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from University of Kerala, and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
VIJAY AGGARWAL
VP of Business Development and Strategic Sales
Vijay is responsible for Smart IOPS’ business development activities including strategic partnerships and sales in strategic accounts. In addition Vijay is responsible for developing various sales channels including ODM/OEM sales. Mr. Aggarwal brings 40 years of distinguished technical, business, and sales experience to Smart IOPS. In the past, Mr. Aggarwal was part of a venture backed company, Tilera — a multicore processor company that he co-founded with Dr. Anant Agarwal of MIT, where he headed the sales and business development activities. Mr. Aggarwal brings wide organizational experience and has held sales, business development, COO, and CEO roles in the past. Vijay holds a BSEE degree from University College of Dublin, Ireland.
OMID TAHERNIA
Mr. Tahernia has over 28 years of experience in leading global High Tech systems and semiconductor companies. Most recently, Mr. Tahernia served as President and CEO of Ikanos, acquired by Qualcomm in late 2015. Previous to that, Mt. Tahernia served as President and CEO of Tilera Corporation, and was Senior Vice President and General Manager at Xilinx, and Motorola previously. Mr. Tahernia holds over 10 patents, and an MSc degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.
DR. KHANDKER N. QUADER
Dr. Quader was formerly the CEO and President of SK hynix memory solutions (SKHMS, a US subsidiary of SK hynix) and prior to that, he served as the Senior Vice President of SanDisk Corporation’s Memory Organization (R&D, Technology, Design, Product Development, Reliability, Qualification, Advanced memory systems solution). Dr. Quader holds undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from MIT and a Ph.D.degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley.
DR. AKASH DESHPANDE
Dr. Deshpande brings an impressive range of experience to Smart IOPS. Dr. Deshpande, currently at Google, has served as the CTO of Polycom, Distinguished Engineer at Cisco and founded Teja which was acquired by SNPS (LSE:ARK). Dr. Deshpande holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkley.
DR. ROBERT SELINGER
Dr. Selinger has over 30 years experience in the storage industry at a variety of companies – IBM Research, MIPS, Adaptec, HGST and most recently SanDisk. At SanDisk, he was in charge of the R&D leading to SanDisk’s first client SSD products, and later doing strategic planning in the office of the CTO. Dr. Selinger holds many patents, and has an undergraduate degree in EECS from MIT and his Ph.D. in Computer Architecture from UC Berkeley.
DR. NAZAR ZAIDI
Dr. Nazar Zaidi is an industry veteran in high performance processors and systems development. He started his career with Intel in 1990 where he led Pentium emulation and later IA32 architecture/design of Itanium, Intel’s first IA64 processor. Dr. Zaidi co-founded Nexsi Systems in 1999 developing industry’s first multi-gigabit switching product delivering multi-tenant Firewall, VPN, Load balancing, and SSL. After Juniper Networks acquired Nexsi’s products in 2002, Dr. Zaidi went on to co-found Raza Microelectronics that was acquired by Netlogic/Broadcom in 2008. In Broadcom Dr. Zaidi oversaw development of Vulcan, industry’s highest performance 32-core ARM64 SOC targeted for infrastructure and enterprise.
Dr. Zaidi currently serves as Corporate Vice President at AMD driving high-end server-class processor development and high performance x86 cores for inclusion into AMD’s cutting edge products. Dr. Zaidi holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Texas, Austin.