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Frank Chu, CabCon Work Group Chair

Frank Chu is a member of SATA-IO Board of Director and the chair person for SATA-IO Cable and Connector technical committee. Frank is also active in the JEDEC Standards activities and is currently the chair of JC42,4 JTG. Frank is a senior engineer at Hitachi GST’s San Jose Research Center. Frank’s responsibilities including storage interface standards, low power consumption, and storage architecture. Frank holds MSEE from Stanford University and MBA from Santa Clara University. Frank has been awarded 6 US Patents in the field of storage architecture and others.

John Calvin currently is the chairman of the Serial ATA International Organization’s Interoperability working group. John is a principal engineer at Tektronix where he has worked for the last 14 years, with a focus on high speed serial measurements solutions for industry standards. He has worked as a contributor to SATA testing since 2000.  John holds a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from Washington State University and has been awarded 6 patents in measurement-related technology.

Chuck Hill, Phy Work Group Chair

Mr. Hill has a long history in the area of serial data interfaces.  After graduating from Stanford University with a BSEE and MSEE specializing in statistical signal processing and circuits and devices, he went to work for Argo Systems in Sunnyvale, designing a serial data receiver for a surveillance system.  Then, he joined Hewlett-Packard working on instruments for analog parametrics, protocol analysis, and microprocessor emulators.  In 1991, he became an independent consultant specializing in analog design, microwave design, signal integrity, and EMI and RFI.  Working for Quantum he worked on signal integrity and IC driver issues for ATA-33, 66, 100, and 133.  In 2001, he participated in the early Serial ATA development in the Phy area.  In 2004, he became the Phy working group chair. 

Jim Hatfield, Digital Work Group & Technical Integration Committee Chair

Jim Hatfield, Sr. Staff Firmware Engineer for Seagate Technology, is an active leader in storage standards development. For SATA-IO, he currently chairs the Technical Integration working group and is vice-chair of the Digital working group. Jim is vice-chair of T13 and is the chair of a TCG working group. Jim is an active and vocal participant in T10 (SAT), IEEE 1667 and other industry forums. Jim joined Seagate in 2002, to develop firmware and to promote and extend industry standards.

After earning a B.A in Math and Computer Science from the University of Colorado (Boulder) in 1977, Jim has mainly worked in the storage industry. He began with writing a standalone OS on a mini-computer to emulate an IBM mainframe, and device drivers to go with it (printer, clock, CRT, card reader, etc.) and tests for mainframe disk drives. Jim pioneered the development of  firmware and register- and bus-level hardware simulations of mainframe SSD,  disk and RAID controllers. In addition, he wrote general applications for management and created a functional DBMS before they were common-place. He and a partner created an OS that emulated a major IBM OS that ran in a mainframe OS virtual machine  and controlled a mainframe automated tape library. With the dawn of PCs, Jim transitioned to translating one *NIX flavor to others, and translating one SQL dialect to others. After longing to return to the storage industry, Jim found a new career writing firmware for ATAPI and SCSI tape drives before joining Seagate to write ATA disk firmware.

Conrad Maxwell, Marketing Work Group Chair

Conrad started his career in Silicon Valley in the early 80’s at Dysan Corp. He worked as an R&D Manager at Dysan and was over new product design and development of hard drive and floppy media alignment machines. Then he went into Product Management over Retail and O.E.M. products lines for GTL Ltd. / ComputerLand, Samsung and Everex . From retail/O.E.M. Product Management he went on to semiconductors, he was at VLSI Technology in Strategic Marketing and managed their investment into new peripheral technologies (audio and graphics). From there he went to Conexant Systems Inc. (formerly Rockwell), and was the Director of Technology Planning in their PC/Peripheral  products Then for a few years, he ran Maxwell Consulting Associates, a firm that helped companies with their Technology Planning, Business Planning and Business Development, IP Licensing, Management and Technical Marketing. Currently he is the Senior Product Line Manager for the SteelVine™ Storage Processor Products of Silicon Image, Inc.

He has an Electrical Engineering Degree, a B. S. from CSU, East Bay, and an MBA from ASU. He has been published in a technology textbook, magazines, technical journals, conferences, helped write multiple industry standards and has patents and patents pending. He was the Chairman of the Interactive Audio SIG -Three Dimensional Working Group, Member of the Board of Directors for the HomePNA and ACR SIG, and a voting member of the Bluetooth PAN working group, WECA/WiFi WG, 802.11 WGs, 802.15.4WGs, DVD Forum, USB WG, PCIe, T13 and VESA work groups. He currently is Chairman for the SATA-IO Marketing Work Group.