Rodney Mullendore

Rod has over 30 years experience designing advanced networking and storage processing chips and systems. He holds 28 patents and has a strong track record designing complex storage and networking chips and systems. Rod was cofounder of Skyera where he architected and implemented ASIC and FPGA-based flash controllers for two All-Flash enterprise-grade storage systems.

Rod was chief hardware architect at SandForce, which was acquired by LSI in 2011. He wrote the hardware architecture and micro architecture documents for the company’s first 2 chips, which solved a major Flash endurance limitation, caused by the device physics of multi-level flash memory cells.

Rod was a cofounder of Nishan Systems, which developed Storage over IP switches which allowed Fibre Channel traffic to be transported over Ethernet and IP networks. His design experience includes hardware compression, FC and GE MAC, Hypertransport, DDR controllers, frame parsers and generators, and TCP/IP offload hardware. He co-architected a Storage Area Network switch/router which supported Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, iFCP, and iSCSI interfaces.

At Sandia National Labs, Rod worked on the design of the Trident II warhead telemetry. He designed the logic for 3 gate arrays and a radiation hardened chip. He directed a team of engineers in hardware design for 2 classified projects. His duties included generation of design specifications, test plans, and presentations to the Department of Energy. Rod is a U.S. citizen and holds Masters and Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degrees from the University of Wisconsin.