Innovative Silicon Names Michael Van Buskirk Senior VP

“In my many years developing semiconductor memory offerings, I have seldom seen a technology as revolutionary as Z-RAM,” said Michael Van Buskirk. “As DRAM capacitors are becoming nearly impossible to shrink, Z-RAM is well poised to be the DRAM memory of choice for the next generation of IC designs. I am very excited to work with this elegant single-transistor floating body memory technology and the talented global ISi team.”

“Mike has established himself as a major force in the memory industry, and he is the ideal leader as we transition Z-RAM to high-volume manufacturing,” said Mark-Eric Jones. “He has a proven record of migrating advanced-memory technologies from early concept to multi-billion dollar production volumes. I am delighted that Mike will oversee the deployment of Z-RAM to our growing customer base.”

Van Buskirk, a 30-year semiconductor industry veteran, comes to ISi from Spansion (NASDAQ: SPSN) where he was CTO and corporate vice president of engineering. While at Spansion, he spearheaded a number of memory innovations, including Spansion’s MirrorBit™ technology, used in a majority of the company’s Flash memory products.

Spansion was established in 2003 by combining the AMD (NSYE: AMD) and Fujitsu (TSE: 6707) memory operations. At both AMD and Spansion, Van Buskirk was responsible for the overall memory technology strategy, product design and development, and future product architecture. His other notable achievements include his role as lead inventor of AMD's negative gate erase technology and award winning simultaneous read-write architecture.

Prior to joining AMD in 1986, Van Buskirk was director of engineering non-volatile digital products at PMC-Sierra (NASDAQ: PMCS), formerly Sierra Semiconductor Corp. He began his career at Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) developing EPROM. Van Buskirk has authored a number of technical publications and has been instrumental in securing more than 65 U.S. patents in the field of non-volatile memory over his career. Van Buskirk also serves on the Oregon State University College of Engineering Advisory Board.