Iowa State University alumnus Frankie Roohparvar (BS CE ’84) has been named Skyera’s new Chief Operating Officer.
Roohparvar has nearly 30 years of professional experience and has joined Skyera after 13 years at Micron, where he worked primarily with Flash memory and NAND development.
“Having been involved with NAND from the early days of its adoption in solid-state storage, I was in a unique position to watch how NAND worked its way into the solid state field,” Roohparvar said. “Seeing the huge potential for disruption that Skyera’s technology is introducing, I wanted to get on the ground floor of this innovation revolution.”
Skyera, a rising company located in San Jose, California, is a provider of enterprise solid-state storage systems that can enable large classes of applications with higher performance, lower power consumption, and more cost effectiveness than the enterprise storage systems on the market today. The company is working to build a new architecture of storage technology from scratch, rather than building on what already exists. With this approach, Skyera is betting on the benefits of next-generation flash memory while overcoming the limitations faced by solution vendors that build on existing systems.
Roohparvar began his career at Xicor, and went on to be one of the founders of Micron Quantum Devices, one of the first providers of NOR Flash memory. When the company was acquired by Micron, Roohparvar joined the team, holding various senior engineering and executive positions before eventually rising to the position of vice president of NAND development. As VP, Roohparvar was responsible for managing engineering organizations all over the world.
“While we come from different cultures and backgrounds, it is the engineer in all of us that is the same everywhere,” Roohparvar said. “It is surprising to see how similar we all are. It is a way of thinking that seems to be programmed in our genes.”
Roohparvar’s technical creativity has allowed him to file more than 300 patents through the course of his career. Dr. Radoslav Danilak, CEO of Skyera, couldn’t be happier about Roohparvar joining the company.
“Piece by piece we have assembled a top-notch collection of talented individuals who will contribute their unique skill sets to the development of our revolutionary solid-state storage systems,” Danilak said. “Frankie has an incredible track record in the NAND space and we welcome his extensive experience to our company.”
Roohparvar is a member of the Board of Directors at Link_A_Media Devices, a leader in the designing and manufacturing of System-on-Chip solutions for peripheral data storage devices that include hard disk drives and solid-state devices. He also holds MBAs from Columbia Business School and the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University on top of his BS in Computer Engineering from Iowa State.