CASPA 2026 Spring Symposium
Date: March 21st, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM PT
Location: 951 SanDisk Drive, Milpitas, CA 95035
Theme: Paving the AI Super-Highway: Rethinking Memory and Storage at Scale
You’re invited to CASPA’s 2026 Spring Symposium, an in-person event and the first installment of CASPA’s year-round “AI Super-Highway” symposium series. The symposium will take place on Saturday, March 21, 2026, from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM at Sandisk auditorium, 951 Sandisk Drive, Milpitas, CA.
This Spring Symposium focuses on memory and storage technologies as the foundational “lanes and capacity” of the AI super-highway. As AI workloads continue to push against the memory wall, innovations in high-capacity memory & storage systems and their integration into AI computing stacks have become critical to sustaining performance and scalability. The event will bring together experts from industry and academia to discuss key challenges, recent advances, and future directions in this rapidly evolving space.
The program will feature keynote talks followed by an engaging panel discussion.
Join us for an afternoon of deep technical insight, forward-looking discussions, and valuable networking around the infrastructure powering the next era of AI.
Register Now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2026-caspa-spring-symposium-tickets-1982945123243?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl
Speakers:
Xiaodong Che
Chief Technology Officer at Western Digital
As Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at WD, Dr. Che serves as the primary architect of the company’s innovation agenda. He directs global technology strategy to ensure sustainable, long-term growth across the data-storage sector and beyond. His leadership is central to driving high-impact technology partnerships and global ventures that leverage and expand Western Digital’s core competencies.
Dr. Che’s career is defined by over three decades of pioneering contributions to magnetic data storage. He joined Western Digital through its acquisition of HGST, where he previously held the role of Vice President of Recording Subsystems. His industry foundation includes a significant tenure at Quantum Corporation, where he specialized in partial-response maximum-likelihood (PRML) signal processing and magneto-resistive (MR) sensor physics.
Dr. Che earned his Ph.D. in condensed-matter physics from UC San Diego. He further refined his technical expertise as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR), one of the world’s premier institutions for storage technology research.
A prolific innovator, Dr. Che holds over 50 patents and has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers on storage technologies. His commitment to the advancement of the engineering field is reflected in his roles as a founding board member of the Chinese American Information Storage Society (CAISS) and as a Senior Member of the IEEE Magnetics Society.
Praveen Midha
Director Segment & Technical Marketing, Data Center Flash at Sandisk
Praveen Midha is a technology executive and recognized expert in enterprise storage infrastructure. He is highly regarded for his impactful tenure leading Segment & Technical Marketing for the Data Center Flash portfolio at Western Digital and its Sandisk brand, where he drove product strategy and portfolio expansion for high-performance storage solutions tailored to Fortune 100 data centers.
At Sandisk, Praveen played a pivotal role in helping major enterprises modernize their data storage to meet the massive demands of the artificial intelligence era. He focused on aligning flash storage infrastructure with the complex needs of modern AI and real-time data processing. During his tenure, he championed key industry advancements to improve both the performance and power efficiency of data centers facing heavy new workloads.
Prior to his current role, Praveen held product and technical leadership positions at companies including Marvell Semiconductor, where he successfully delivered complex networking and storage infrastructure solutions. He holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi.
Jian-Ping Wang
Robert F. Hartmann Endowed Chair Professor
Distinguished McKnight University Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota
Niron Magnetics, Inc.
Technical Founder and Chief Scientist
Dr. Jian-Ping Wang is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the Robert Hartmann Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His career spans fundamental physics, materials innovation, semiconductor devices, deep-tech invention, and company formation. He is the technical Founder and former Chief Scientific Officer of Niron Magnetics, Inc., and the Founder and CEO of BesiMax AI Inc., advancing CRAM
architecture to address the AI hardware power crisis.
He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), IEEE, and the American Physical Society (APS). In 2024, he received the IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award, the field’s highest international honor, recognizing contributions that have shaped data storage, memory, and computing technologies.
Dr. Wang received the 2019 SRC Technical Excellence Award for accelerating the commercialization of MRAM and the 2006 INSIC Technical Achievement Award for pioneering exchange-coupled composite magnetic media widely used in global data-center infrastructure. He has led two major U.S. semiconductor industry–government research centers in spintronics—C-SPIN (SRC/DARPA) and SMART (SRC/NIST).
He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Physics from Lanzhou University, his Ph.D. from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and completed postdoctoral training in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore.
Chen Jian
Chief Scientist at Longsys
Principal at Harbinger Memory Consulting
Past Sr. Fellow, NV Compute Pathfinding at Micron Technology
Dr. Chen is a renowned technology executive and expert in semiconductor engineering. As Chief Scientist at Longsys, a role he assumed in January 2026, he guides advanced research to shape the next generation of memory and storage solutions.
Jian is highly regarded for his monumental 25-year tenure at Sandisk and Western Digital (WDC). Beginning his work on NAND technology in 1999, he was a driving force behind the evolution of modern memory storage, playing a pivotal role in scaling flash architectures and ultimately serving as Senior Vice President of 3D NAND Technology before retiring in 2020.
Prior to Sandisk, Dr. Chen began his career with four years at AMD. More recently, he served as an adjunct professor at Stanford University researching wide bandgap Gain Cells, and as a Senior Fellow at Micron focusing on memory for AI compute infrastructure.
Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
Yiming Huai
IEEE Fellow
CTO & VP of Technology & Foundry Partnership Avalanche Technology
Co-founder & CTO Grandis (acquired by Samsung)
Dr. Yiming Huai is the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Technology and Foundry Business at Avalanche Technology, a global leader in Spin Transfer Torque MRAM (STT-MRAM) solutions. He leads the company’s end-to-end development of STT-MRAM technology and products, as well as strategic manufacturing partnerships with top-tier semiconductor foundries.
A pioneering figure in the field, Dr. Huai was the co-founder, board member, and CTO of Grandis, Inc., one of the earliest innovators in STT-MRAM. Under his leadership, Grandis achieved the industry’s first demonstration of spin-transfer switching in magnetic tunnel junctions—an achievement that laid the foundation for STT-MRAM commercialization. He successfully raised over $30 million in funding and played a key role in Grandis’s acquisition by Samsung in 2011.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Huai served as Senior Director of Thin Film Manufacturing at Read-Rite Corporation (now part of Western Digital), where he led the development and volume production of leading GMR read heads for hard disk drives. He also held research roles at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada.
Dr. Huai earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from the University of Montreal. He is a prolific inventor and scholar, with more than 200 issued patents, over 120 publications, and a Google Scholar h-index of 87 with 21,000+ citations. He has delivered over 90 keynote and invited talks worldwide.
He received the R&D 100 Award in 1996 for his work on ultra-high-density magnetic sensors. In 2024, he was elevated to IEEE Fellow and honored with the AUMS Award from the Asian Union of Magnetics Societies for his exceptional contributions to magnetic materials and device innovation.
Joe Chen
President and chairman at TetraMem
Joe Chen is a seasoned entrepreneur, executive, and prolific investor. He currently serves as the President and Chairman of TetraMem and the CEO of Moatable Inc. and Oak Pacific Investments. With a diverse background spanning deep tech leadership and venture capital, he has a proven track record of guiding innovative companies from their early stages to successful market exits.
Prior to his current roles, Joe was the Founder and CEO of the pioneering social network Renren. As a highly successful investor, he has backed numerous ventures that have gone on to achieve IPOs, including SoFi, FiscalNote, XtalPi, Focused Photonics, Loadstar Capital, and Paidy. He has also been involved in major acquisitions such as Backlot Cars and Talech, and maintains a strong current portfolio featuring companies like Fundrise, Kiavi, Xueqiu, and Chrystal Pharmatech.
Joe brings a deep and multifaceted educational background to his leadership roles, holding an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and B.S. in Physics from the University of Delaware. As a recognized voice in the business community, he has been named to the T360 Swanepoel Power 200 and is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute.
Xiaoyu Ma
Senior staff engineer at Google Deepmind
Xiaoyu Ma is a Senior Staff Engineer at Google DeepMind. His interests are domain-specific computer architectures and Software/Hardware codesign for AI. His core work at Google DeepMind is to make Large Language Models faster and more capable through novel hardware accelerator architectures, LLM algorithmic improvements, and ambitious memory innovations. As one example of his work on memory innovations, Dr. Ma initiated the concept of High Bandwidth Flash with David Patterson. He received a Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.
Zhizhen Zhong
Founder & CEO of Netpreme
Activate Fellow
Dr. Zhizhen Zhong is a co-founder and CEO of Netpreme. At Netpreme, Zhong and his team are working on building networked memory processing systems for emerging AI workloads. Prior to founding Netpreme, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Research Scientist at Meta.
Tony Xia [Panel Moderator]
Director of Data Storage System Architecture at Avago Technologies
Dr. Haitao (Tony) Xia is a distinguished technical leader at Broadcom Inc., where he oversees R&D in digital signal processing (DSP) for optical communications and storage systems. A prominent figure in the semiconductor industry, he served as the President and Chairman of CASPA (2022–2023) and previously led the Chinese American Information Storage Society (CAISS).
Beyond his corporate leadership, Dr. Xia is a deeply respected scholar and editor. He serves on the Steering Committee for the IEEE Transactions on Big Data and has chaired the IEEE Data Storage Technical Committee (DSTC). His technical contributions include over 20 peer-reviewed publications and more than 120 issued U.S. patents.
Dr. Xia’s work has earned him significant industry acclaim, including the IEEE DSTC Best Paper Award (2015) and consecutive Best Paper Awards at DesignCon (2017, 2018). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and B.E. and M.E. degrees from Southeast University in Nanjing, China.
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Lung Chu speaking
Gary Wang presenting
Avery J. Lu presenting
Danny Hua presenting
Kuowei Chang presenting
Audience discussion & networking
CASPA Board Members & Former Presidents supporting the event
CASPA Special Event Team with Speakers
Group photo of all attendees
Venue: Focus Karaoke & Cafe ( 1336 Saratoga Ave, San Jose, CA 95129 )
Participation Fee:
Registration Form: 
Please Note:
Expert Speakers
Julia Hsiao, J.D., LL.M.
Group photo of speakers, organizers, and attendees
Attendees check in and network before the screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
Film director and producers greet the audience before the screening.
Moderator Dr. Zhibin Xiao introduces the distinguished panelists.
Audience members engage with the panelists during the post-screening discussion.
Panelists, CASPA leadership, and volunteers gather for a group photo at the close of the event.
