Dr. Forest Baskett
Forest joined NEA in 1999 as a Venture Partner and became a General Partner in 2004. Forest focuses on information and energy technology investments and is the NEA representative on the boards of Arch Rock, AstroWatt, Audience, Chelsio Communications, Fulcrum Microsystems, Serious Materials, SiBEAM and SuVolta. He also assists Alta Devices, Aprius, Azuray Technologies, Bandgap Engineering, Conviva, Fusion-io, Illumitex, Luxtera, NovaTorque, Solar Junction, Solar Storage Company, Svaya Nanotechnologies, Tableau Software and Tintri as either a board member, observer or advisor, usually in conjunction with another member of the NEA investing staff. In the past he has worked with Aeluros, Atheros Communications (NASDAQ: ATHR), Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP), E2O, Nanochip, Newisys, RingCube Technologies, Telegent Systems, and T-RAM Semiconductor, among others. Forest also previously held advisory positions with FineGround, PolyServe, ReShape and SMIC. Prior to NEA, Forest was senior vice president of R&D and chief technology officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. and, before that, founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation from 1982 to 1986. Previously, he was a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1971 to 1982. He also spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory building an operating system for the original Cray-1 computer, and a year and a half at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a principal scientist doing VLSI research. At Stanford, he worked with Andy Bechtolsheim on the SUN workstation project, with Jim Clark on the Geometry Engine project, and with John Hennessy on the MIPS microprocessor project. He received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Paul Mockapetris
Paul is the inventor of the Domain Name System (DNS), and is chief scientist and chairman of the board at Nominum, Inc. Paul created DNS in the 1980s at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, where he was later the director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division. His mission is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage. Throughout his career, Paul has contributed to the computing research community and to the evolution of the Internet, and has been associated with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) through its inception and continuing role as the focus of new applications and extensions to DNS. His earliest work at UC Irvine on distributed systems and LAN technology preceded the commercial Ethernet and Token Ring designs. After working at ISI on the design and initial implementation of the SMTP protocol for email as part of the birth of the Internet in 1983, Paul took on the challenge of designing DNS, and then operated the original “root servers” for all Internet names. He has chaired several IETF DNS and non-DNS working groups, and was Chair of the IETF from 1994 to 1996. Paul was program manager for networking at ARPA in the early 1990s, supervising efforts such as gigabit and optical networking. From 1995 on, Paul held leadership roles at several Silicon Valley networking startups, including @Home, Software.com (now OpenWave), Fiberlane (now Cisco), and Siara (now Redback Networks). Paul has dual B.S. degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.
Dr. Yoshio Nishi
Dr. Nishi is a professor of electrical engineering and director of the Stanford Site of National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network at Stanford University, where he is involved in the initiative for nanoscale materials and processes and for non-volatile memory technologies. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2002, Dr. Nishi was the first Chief Scientist to be appointed at Texas Instruments. As a senior vice president there, Dr. Nishi directed research work for the Digital Signal Processing Solutions R&D Center, the Silicon Technology Development at Kilby Center, the Tsukuba R&D Center in Japan, and the Converter Product Development Center in New Jersey and Dallas. Prior to that, Dr. Nishi established and became director of Hewlett Packard’s new ULSI Research Laboratory, yand also served as director of the Silicon Process Laboratory and, later, the R&D Center for Integrated Circuits Business Division. Dr. Nishi started his professional career at Toshiba Corporation where he spent more than 20 years pioneering various semiconductor related research programs. His played a leadership role in developing innovations including the world’s first CMOS 1Mb dynamic, 256Kb CMOS static and 1Mb CMOS programmable memories. He has been credited as a technology leader who helped position Toshiba as one of the world’s a leading memory manufacturers. Dr. Nishi currently serves on a number of corporate boards of directors and advisory boards and committees for organizations including the Japan-America Society of Dallas/Fort Worth, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, SIA, , and industry associations including the SIA, SEMATECH and International SEMATECH, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, MARCO/DARPA’s Gigascale Silicon Research Center, the MARCO Interconnect Research Center, and NSF/SRC ERC for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing. Dr. Nishi holds a B.S. in metallurgy from Waseda University and a Ph.D. in electronics engineering from the University of Tokyo. Dr. Nishi has published approximately 75 papers in international technical journals and conferences and has co-authored nine books. He has been awarded more than 50 patents in the U.S. and Japan. He received IEEE Fellow Award (1987), 1995 IEEE Jack A. Morton Award for “Contributions to the basic understanding and innovative development of MOS device technology” and became the 2002 IEEE Robert Noyce Medal winner for “Strategic leadership in global semiconductor research and development”.
Dr. William Siegle
William T. (Bill) Siegle has played a leadership role in achieving numerous industry milestones while at companies including IBM and AMD. After receiving his BSEE, MSEE and Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, he joined IBM, the same year that the company announced its historic System 360. While there, Bill held a number of technical, management and executive roles including director of the Advanced Technology Center that created IBM’s premier ASTC technology development platform through the 1990s. In 1990 he was recruited to Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, California, as vice president and chief scientist, where he directed development of technology platforms for logic and flash memory products that enabled AMD to launch leading-edge production at new wafer fabs in Austin, Texas, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, and Dresden, Germany. In 1998 he was promoted to senior vice president, and was responsible for AMD’s worldwide manufacturing operations in addition to his continuing role as chief scientist. Bill served as a member of the Board of Directors of SRC and as its chairman in 1993. He also has served on the Board of Directors of SEMATECH, and has been a director of public companies Etec, Inc. and DuPont Photomask, Inc. Bill retired in April 2005 and is currently a member of ASML’s supervisory board.