BIOGRAPHY

Thomas M. Coughlin

T. M. Coughlin, the founder of Coughlin Associates has over 30 years of magnetic recording engineering and engineering management experience at companies developing flexible tapes and floppy disc storage as well as rigid disks at such companies as Polaroid, Seagate Technology, Maxtor, Micropolis, Nashua Computer Products, Ampex and SyQuest.

Tom has an extensive engineering background in magnetic heads and media as well as integration of these and other technologies into hard disk drives.  He was responsible as an individual contributor as well as a high level engineering and corporate manager for design of magnetic storage systems for many generations of hard disk drives at Ampex, Syquest, Seagate, Maxtor and Micropolis.  He has been involved in due diligence and quality analysis of hard disk drive manufacturing facilities, provided failure analysis services on digital storage products, worked on factory yield improvements and provided expert witness work on hard disk drive and storage systems.  He is an author on 6 US patents.  Tom has provided marketing, intellectual property and technology assessments and projections.  His clients include companies such as  Avid, LSI, Network Appliance, PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Seagate Technology, The Woodside Fund, Quantum and many others.  

Since 1997 Tom has written market and technology analysis reports and articles including the Digital Entertainment series focusing on data storage and the creation, distribution and reception of entertainment content,  Magnetic Storage Capital Equipment and Technology Report and various other reports. He has given technology and market assessment presentations at the annual Storage Visions and Creative Storage conferences (which he started and organizes), IDEMA and IIST Symposia and for the IEEE Magnetics Society as well as the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. He has published over 70 articles, reports, technical papers and presentations.  He has done several white papers for storage oriented companies.  Tom is the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics, published in 2008 by a division of Elsevier. 

Tom has a Bachelors degree in Physics and a Masters in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Materials Science from the University of Minnesota. He also has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan.    He is the chairman and organizer of the annual Storage Visions and Creative Storage Conferences, well known in the data storage and storage applications industries.  He is also the chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit.

He has been active with IDEMA where has been a chairman or a member of several committees. He is a senior member of the IEEE, was publicity chairman of the 1992, 1996, 2002, and 2004 TMRC conferences and is a past chairman of the Santa Clara Valley Magnetics Society, past chairman of the SCV Consumer Electronics Society and past Chairman of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section and the IEEE Region 6 Central Area. He is also a member of the Administrative Committee for the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society.  He is currently chairman of the 2011 IEEE Sections Congress in San Francisco.  He has been active with the Solid State Storage Initative group of SNIA.  He has organized magnetic recording Symposia from 1997-2002 for IIST at Santa Clara University where he was also an adjunct professor. He is also a member of the IEEE Computer Society, Association of Computer Machinery, American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Storage Networking Industry Association and the American Vacuum Society.

Click here to view Resume

Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view the Resume.