Professional Summary: This expert witness is a very active storage industry consultant and analyst and does finite element and finite difference magnetic modeling for new products. He also serves as an expert witness in the areas of optical drive systems, thin film technology, disk drive technology, and hard drive failure analysis. Additionally, he co-organizes two major data storage industry conferences that cover the latest technology in magnetic, optical and flash memories. These are the Storage Visions Conference and the Creative Storage Conference. He follows most of the major data storage manufacturers, their component and equipment suppliers. He has extensive experience in the field of disk drives, including substantial contributions to a number of very innovative and successful products and processes. These have included some of the industry's earliest magnetoresistive ("MR") head drives, Maxtor's first double-capacity drive, Maxtor's first 3.5" drive, Toshiba's first 3.5" drive, and Quantum's self-servo writing system. The technologies (heads, media, channel, servo and process) embodied in these and other products include a great many industry firsts. He is a founder of the storage industry trade association, IDEMA, a director emeritus and still active in it. His background comprises extensive thin film process experience including thin film disks and magnetoresistive heads. He has designed and built vacuum processing equipment (primarily sputtering systems with a specialty in RF diode and magnetron systems, although he also designed e-beam systems) for a number of companies including Perkin-Elmer, Hewlett Packard (now Agilent), Unisys, Eikon, and Vac-Tec. He designed Perkin-Elmer's 1st magnetron source and has developed a number of unique thin film processes (including reactive ion deposition) which required the design, construction, optimization and introduction to production of specialized vacuum processing equipment and processes. He is familiar with all aspects of thin film processing and process equipment. This expert witness also has a small failure analysis laboratory that includes a variety of video and data storage testing equipment and protocols. He also has access to other laboratory facilities that include a broad array of failure analysis techniques including accelerated life testing; microanalysis including ESCA, Auger, SIMS, and X-ray; optical, scanning electron and scanning probe microscopy; thermal imaging and mapping, etc. |