Hemant Thapar

Hemant Thapar is the Chairman, CEO, and Co-founder of OmniTier Inc.. He previously founded and led two successful startups, DataPath Systems, and Link_A_Media Devices, which were acquired by LSI Corporation and SK Hynix, respectively. Together, these startups delivered many “industry firsts” in controllers for data storage and data recovery and system-on-a-chip technologies. During his early career, Dr. Thapar held technical and management positions at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Holmdel, and at IBM Corporation, San Jose, where he made pioneering contributions in circuit-switched networking, data communications, and data storage. He has over 50 publications in the areas of data communications and storage, and his work on Extended Partial Response (EPR) Systems became the de facto industry standard for data recovery in the hard disk drive and tape drive products. He is a co-recipient of three best paper awards. Dr. Thapar was elected Fellow of the IEEE and also received the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from Santa Clara University. He holds a Ph. D degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. Dr. Thapar serves on the Advisory Boards of the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University and on India’s Ambala College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.