Board of Directors

T.J. Rodgers

Chairman of the Board
Founder, President, Director, and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor

T.J. Rodgers is founder, president, CEO, and a director of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. He is a former chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and sits on the board of directors of high-technology companies, including Bloom Energy (fuel cells), Cypress Envirosystems (energy-saving systems) and SunPower Corp. (advanced solar cells). He is also a member of the board of Dartmouth College, his alma mater.

Dr. Rodgers was a Sloan scholar at Dartmouth, where he graduated as Salutatorian with a double major in physics and chemistry. He attended Stanford University on a Hertz fellowship, earning a master's degree (1973) and a Ph.D. (1975) in electrical engineering. At Stanford, Rodgers invented, developed, and patented VMOS technology, which he sold for cash and royalties to American Microsystems Inc. (AMI). He managed the MOS memory design group at AMI from 1975 to 1980 before moving to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), where he ran AMD's static RAM product group until 1982.

Ron Sartore

Chief Executive Officer, AgigA Tech

Mr. Sartore was executive vice president and on Simtek's board of directors before he became President of AgigA Tech, a subsidiary of Simtek. In September 2008, Simtek was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor. Mr. Sartore spearheaded Simtek's new product initiatives bringing innovative ways to apply Simtek technology to new and larger markets. He has more than 30 years experience in the computer and semiconductor fields, most recently serving as a Vice President for Cypress Semiconductor. Mr. Sartore was also the Founder, CEO and President of Anchor Chips, an early market leader in USB controllers, which was acquired by Cypress Semiconductor in 1999. Prior to that, he co-founded Cheetah International, where his product designs received worldwide acclaim for ingenuity and technological advancement. Mr. Sartore also served engineering leadership and product definition roles at AMCC, Inmos, and Texas Instruments. He currently holds 17 U.S. patents with ten more pending and obtained a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Cathal Phelan

Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, Cypress Semiconductor

Cathal Phelan re-joined Cypress in September 2008 as executive vice president and chief technical officer, having left Cypress at the start of 2006.

In his role as chief technical officer, Phelan is focused on driving Cypress's transition from a silicon provider to a system-level solutions vendor. He is responsible for defining and leading all applications and systems engineering groups, solution centers and lead architect and software teams across the company.

From early 2006 until his recent return to Cypress, Phelan was the CEO and president at Ubicom Inc., a venture capital backed startup in Mountain View, Calif., focused on a unique, high-performance 32-bit RISC, 12-way multi-threaded communications and media processor for transporting digital media over home networks.

During his first term at Cypress, Phelan held a number of engineering and management roles at the company ending with his position as the EVP of the Data Communications Division from January 2005. Prior to that he headed up the Personal Communications Division (now the Consumer and Computation Division) which under his five-year leadership, was able to grow to better than a 40 percent market share in the standalone USB market.

Phelan originally joined Cypress in January 1991, and spent those early years in a number of positions including director of New Products and Design, the Synchronous Business Unit manager, and RAM3 design project leader in the Memory Products Division, now MID. Prior to Cypress, Phelan worked for six years at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, Netherlands. He worked in the Advanced Memory Design Center on innovative memory architecture and design. Phelan currently holds 37 U.S. patents (27 at Cypress).

Phelan graduated from the engineering school of Trinity College at the University of Dublin in Ireland. He received a BAI (1st class) (bachelor's degree in electrical engineering equivalent in the U.S.), a bachelor's degree in mathematics (1984), and master's degree in electrical engineering (1985).

Brad W. Buss

Executive Vice President, Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer, Cypress Semiconductor

Brad W. Buss was appointed executive vice president of finance and administration and chief financial officer at Cypress in August 2005. Prior to joining Cypress, Mr. Buss served as vice president of finance at Altera Corp. A veteran of the electronics industry, he spent seven years as a finance executive with Wyle Electronics, culminating as chief financial officer and secretary of the Atlas Services Division. Mr. Buss was also a member of Cisco System's worldwide sales finance team. In addition, he served as senior vice president of finance and chief financial officer and secretary at Zaffire Inc.

Mr. Buss graduated from McMaster University with a bachelor's degree in economics. He also received an honors business administration degree, majoring in finance and accounting, from the University of Windsor. He began his finance career as an auditor with Arthur Anderson. Mr. Buss is currently a member of the Board of Directors and Audit Committee Chairman for privately held Cafepress.com and Tesla Motors.

John Matze

Founder and CEO, BridgeSTOR

John Matze is currently founder and CEO of BridgeSTOR, LLC, an Advanced Data Reduction company that is innovating Application Optimized Storage appliances and Bridges to cost-effective cloud storage. Mr. Matze was most recently Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Exar Corporation which he joined through the acquisition of HiFN. HiFN had acquired Saifu Software where Mr. Matze was founder and CEO. Mr. Matze, recognized by CRN Magazine as a Top 25 Innovator in storage, is also one of the original authors of the iSCSI protocol. He has over 15 years of storage software experience including: vice president & CTO, Overland Storage; director of software, Veritas Software; and principal architect, STAC. Mr. Matze has also been the creator of many successful products including: Overland Storage REO products, Okapi ipXcelerator, STAC Replica for NetWare and APC PowerChute UPS Monitoring Software.

Mark Ross

Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, Striiv

Mark has been at the center of the Silicon Valley business and technology world for years working for companies like Dell, Cypress Semiconductor, Cisco Systems, and Sun Microsystems.

Mark was directly responsible for shipping five systems for the communications and computation markets that contributed over $1 billion in revenue. As a member of the Cypress Executive team, Mark led technology development across lines of business and two Cypress acquisitions in the image sensor space.

At Cisco, he pioneered the development and use of ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs) in communications systems, and developed the world’s first Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network interface controller (NIC) and multichannel GbE switch.

Mark holds both a B.S. and M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.