Innovative Silicon Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., developer of the Z-Ram zero-capacitor floating body memory technology, has announced that Michael Van Buskirk has joined the company as senior vice president of engineering and operations. He is charged with overseeing the continued development of the company’s Z-Ram memory technology and deploying it to customer licensees. Van Buskirk directly reports to Mark-Eric Jones, president and CEO. Van Buskirk, a 30-year semiconductor industry veteran, comes to Innovative Silicon from Spansion where he was CTO and corporate vice president of engineering. Spansion was established in 2003 by combining the AMD and Fujitsu memory operations. At both AMD and Spansion, Van Buskirk was responsible for the overall memory technology strategy, product design and development, and future product architecture. His other notable achievements include his role as lead inventor of AMD's negative gate erase technology and award winning simultaneous read-write architecture. Prior to joining AMD in 1986, Van Buskirk was director of engineering non-volatile digital products at PMC-Sierra, formerly Sierra Semiconductor Corp. He began his career at Intel developing Eprom. Van Buskirk has authored a number of technical publications and has been instrumental in securing more than 65 U.S. patents in the field of non-volatile memory over his career. Van Buskirk also serves on the Oregon State University College of Engineering Advisory Board.