 The
Team
 Gregory
Wong is Founder and Principal Analyst. Greg has in-depth
knowledge of the cost, performance and markets and applications
of 2-bit per cell NOR, NROMand NAND flash, 3-bit per cell and
4-bit per cell NANDand 4-bit per cell NROM flash technologies
as well as solid state drives. He also tracks wafer capacity and
NAND and SSD shipments.
Greg has 11 years of management experience in strategic
planning, business development and engineering at Hitachi,
Siemens, ProMOS and Qimonda/Infineon. In these positions, Greg
was responsible for analyzing and evaluating flash memory
vendors’ strategies, process technologies, design architectures,
product performance, manufacturing capabilities and costs. Greg
worked closely with senior management on strategy formulation
and setting operational performance targets. He has worked in
Canada, Japan, China, Taiwan and Germany.
Greg earned his B.A.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from
the University of Toronto, and his M.B.A. degree from the
Richard Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario.
Contact:
greg@forward-insights.com
 Josef
Willer is Vice President of Technology. His expertise
lies in the area of semiconductor memories including DRAM,
NOR, NAND, NROM and alternative memory technologies
including FRAM, MRAM, RRAM, phase change memory, nanocrystal
memory, SONOS memory, spin-torque RAM and probe memory
and the related intellectual property.
Josef brings with him a wealth of research and development
experience in semiconductor memories from 26 years at Siemens
Semiconductor / Infineon Technologies / Qimonda AG. Prior to
joining Forward Insights, Josef was a principal at Qimonda Flash
GmbH responsible for evaluating patents and intellectual
property and developing innovative non-volatile memory
technology and novel cell concepts to overcome the ultimate
technology scaling constraints. Josef was instrumental in
enabling the start-up company Ingentix to successfully
demonstrate the feasibility of charge trapping technology for
mass storage products.
In addition to his technical publications, Josef holds numerous
memory-related patents and was named Infineon’s Inventor of the
Year in 2004. He has been a member of the technical committee of
the International Conference on Memory Technology and
Design (now International Memory Workshop) for the past four years.
Josef holds a Ph.D. from the Technical University in
Munich in solid state physics.
Contact:
josef@forward-insights.com
Luca Crippa is Senior Technical Analyst for Design Architecture. Luca has
more than 10 years of experience in MLC flash memory design. Previously,
he was Senior Designer for 48nm floating gate and 36nm floating gate NAND flash memories at Qimonda AG as
well as 90nm and 60nm MLC NAND flash products at STMicroelectronics.
He was instrumental in the development of 64Mb, 128Mb and 256Mb MLC NOR flash products at
STMicroelectronics and is the author/co-author of 20 U.S. patents and the book
Memories in Wireless Systems (Springer-Verlag ed., 2008).
Luca received his Bachelors degree at ITIS G. Marconi, Dalmine, Italy in 1992 and a Masters degree
in Electronic Engineering at the Politecnico of Milan in 1999. His thesis topic was
Analog circuits design for Multilevel Flash Memory.
Contact:
luca@forward-insights.com
 Roberto Ravasio is
Senior Technical Analyst for DSP, Flash Algorithms and ECC. Roberto has 15 years of experience in
MLC NAND and NOR flash design, algorithms and hardware
for digital signal processing, wireless base band channels and error correction
codes. Previously, Roberto was team leader for the design of the 16Gb 36nm floating gate NAND flash
memory at Qimonda AG where he was responsible for the architecture definition of the device including
matrix organization and device floor plan, HV circuits hierarchical control, ECC and redundancy,
embedded controller and compiler, embedded RAM, ROM and Fuse-ROM, DFT custom structure,
ONFI Command Interface, high-speed data path, logic design and integration (Front End) and VHDL full
chip modeling for recursive test. He also contributed to the development of the MLC algorithm for
48nm NAND flash memory.
Roberto was also team leader of 60nm and 90nm MLC NAND flash products and 0.13µm and 0.18µm NOR
flash products at STMicroelectronics.
He is the author/co-author of 25 U.S. patents and the following books: Error Correction Codes for
Non-Volatile Memories, Memories in Wireless Systems and VLSI-Design of Non-Volatile Memories.
Roberto received his Masters degree in Electronic Engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan in 1996.
Contact:
roberto@forward-insights.com
 Francesco Petruzziello is
Senior Technical Analyst for Flash Management and Solid State Storage firmware.
Francesco's expertise lies in the area of software and firmware development for embedded flash
memory systems and solid state storage systems. He previously oversaw a firmware development team of
5 engineers for solid state storage systems at Qimonda AG and was responsible for software development
of flash memory management including SW drivers, data management tools and file systems embedded
systems at STMicroelectronics. In his most recent position as Senior Applications Engineer for Memory
Systems, he was involved in the development and review of the low level software layers for proprietary
and commercial operating systems for mobile applications at Spansion, Inc.
Francesco received his Masters degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Naples, Italy.
Contact:
francesco@forward-insights.com
 Andrea Silvagni is
Senior Technical Analyst for flash and embedded flash memory design and
test. Andrea has 15 years of experience in MLC NAND, NOR and embedded flash design and test.
Most recently, he was senior staff engineer responsible for leading the design of 36nm NAND flash
products for solid state drive applications at Qimonda AG. Andrea also led design projects for
automotive and wireless NOR flash products and 16/32-bit microcontroller products at STMicroelectronics.
Andrea received his Masters degree in Physics at the University of Milan in 1993.
Contact:
andrea@forward-insights.com
 Luca De Ambroggi is
Senior Technical Analyst for Solid State Storage architectures.
Luca De Ambroggi has over 15 years of experience in semiconductor memories. At STMicroelectronics, he led a
team of 15 engineers to design and test (BIST) NOR flash memories. At Infineon/Qimonda, Luca was responsible
for concept engineering for SSDs, USB flash drives, flash memory cards and MCPs and analyzed the market and
applications for advanced phase change memory technology. As Senior Manager for Technical Marketing, Luca
had worldwide responsibility for DRAM customer-enabling activities.
Luca received his Master’s degree in Electro-technical Engineering from the University of Catania,Italy
and holds over 20 patents.
Contact:
deambroggi@forward-insights.com
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