Over the past few years there have been many advancements in SSD (Solid State Drive) technology, as industries realize the benefits that their products’ performance, energy efficiency, and reliability.
Innogrit- founded in 2016 by tech industry veterans- is a company that has made a name for itself through its innovations to data storage made possible by its advanced PCIe Gen 4 technology SSD controllers.
While products such as Shasta (IG5208), Shasta+ (IG5216), Rainier (IG5236), Rainier DC(IG5636), RainierQX (IG5220), Tacoma (IG5668) have gained the attention of tech leaders and enthusiasts alike, Innogrit realizes that supporters of the startup may want to learn more about the minds behind the startup.
Here, Innogrit pays homage to the co-founders of the company- tech leaders that are pushing to uphold Innogrit’s motto of “storage with no boundary”.
Zining Wu PH. D
Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO
Before founding InnoGrit in 2016, Dr. Zining Wu worked at Marvell Technology Group for 17 years, most recently as Chief Technology Officer. As CTO, Dr. Wu played a crucial technical role within the business, overseeing all technical aspects of the company, directing strategic initiatives and logistics for growth, and managing central engineering for R&D.
Dr. Zining Wu had a host of accomplishments during his time spent at Marvell, with one of the most notable being launching the first low-density parity-check LDPC code-based SSD controller- an innovation that was responsible for tripling the reliability of NAND flash.
Now, Dr. Zining Wu serves as the CEO of InnoGrit Corporation, a leading fabless semiconductor startup specializing in data storage, processing, and management. He remains extremely active in research and conversation regarding the tech world, having published a book, several technical papers, and securing almost 300 patents.
Dishi Lai
Co-Founder, Vice President of SoC Engineering
Dishi Lai served as Senior Design Manager at Marvell Semiconductor, later becoming the Senior Director of Engineering at Toshiba America where he was instrumental in front-end architecture and logic design of the innovative Enterprise PCIe SSD Controllers.
As the Vice President of SoC Engineering, Dishi Lai plays a leading role in developing high performance and low power system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for data storage and communication applications. He currently holds 3 U.S patents with 7 pending and has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Applied Physics from Tsinghua University as well as a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Rochester.
Abhilash Mathew
Co-Founder, Vice President of System Engineering
Abhilash Mathew is well known for his experience as the Director of Hardware Engineering at Marvell Semiconductor. There, he was responsible for leading a global team designing storage hardware such as SSD, HDD, Pre-amplifier, and storage networking.
Mr. Mathew brings over 20 years of optical and storage industry experience to Innogrit as the Vice President of System Engineering. Reference designs created by Mathew have seen use in production in a variety of companies’ production including Amazon, Innodisk, LiteOn, and Kingston. Mr. Mathew holds a U.S. patent for tech as well as a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from National Institute of Technology Calicut, India.
Jie Chen Ph.D.
Co-Founder, Vice President of Data Storage Technologies
Dr. Chen has made a name for himself in the tech world with his over 13 years of research and development experience in both wireline communication and data storage systems, with specialized knowledge in low power SDD controller architect and design optimization and high speed ethernet transceiver.
Dr. Chen specializes in areas such as microarchitecture analysis, physical implementation of advanced digital signal processing (DSP), and error correction coding (ECC) algorithms for data storage. His insights have spurred many innovations within the tech world as his team delivered the first low power, low-cost SSD controllers that contained LDPC solutions. Dr. Chen is also known for developing the 1st generation LDPC based HDD read/write controller alongside his team, a contribution that has been used by companies such as Hitachi, Seagate, and WD.
Dr. Chen’s educational experience includes a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Harbin Engineering University and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Minnesota. An active member of the tech community, Dr. Chen has published over 10 journal and conference papers and holds over 10 US patents.
Qun Zhao
Co-Founder, Vice President of Firmware Engineering
Prior to serving at InnoGrit, Mr. Zhao worked as the Senior Director of Software Engineering at Marvell where he led the development of crucial SSD solutions such as chip/FPGA verification, software/firmware, flash performance testing, customer support, and software evaluation. Mr. Zhao has over two decades of experience in UEFI drivers, BIOS, Windows/ Linux drivers, and applications and firmware.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Zhao has been responsible for leading collaboration and joint development among major flash memory suppliers Hynix, Micron, SanDisk, and Toshiba. The collaboration that Mr. Zhao has helped facilitate accelerated integration of new flash memory in SSDs, successfully delivering Full Turnkey and SDK products, and more. Mr. Zhao has a bachelor’s degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology and currently holds 7 tech patents.
