Cypress Perform

Cathal Phelan is executive vice president of the Consumer and Computation Division (CCD) at Cypress. The division designs and develops solutions for many of the world's leading manufacturers of consumer and computation gear, including mobile phones, tablets, PCs, Digital Still Cameras, Printers, TVs, MP3 players and many other consumer electronics devices. CCD product offerings include a broad line of user interface solutions for capacitive touchscreens, capacitive buttons, optical navigation and PC trackpads. The portfolio includes the market-leading TrueTouch® portfolio of Touchscreen controllers along with associated software, firmware and sensor design solutions.

 

Phelan re-joined Cypress in September 2008 as Chief Technical Officer working on Platform Architectures, Intellectual Property and Patents, internal startups and longer term strategic planning. From early 2006 until his return to Cypress, Phelan was the CEO and president at Ubicom Inc., a venture capital backed startup in Mountain View, Calif., focused on a unique, high-performance 600 MIPS 32-bit RISC, 12-way multi-threaded communications and media processor for transporting digital media over home networks.

 

Phelan originally joined Cypress in 1991, and spent the early years in a number of positions including director of New Products and Design where he co-invented the QDR SRAM, the Synchronous business unit manager, and design project lead for numerous SRAMs in the Memory Products Division. Later during this first term at Cypress, Phelan held a number of engineering and management roles including heading up the Personal Communications which under his five-year leadership, was able to grow to better than a 40 percent market share in the standalone USB market. Prior to Cypress, Phelan worked for six years at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven where he worked on innovative memory architectures and circuits. Phelan currently holds 37 U.S. patents (27 at Cypress).

 

Phelan graduated from the engineering school of Trinity College at the University of Dublin in Ireland. He received a BAI (1st class) (bachelor's degree in electrical engineering equivalent in the U.S.), a bachelor's degree in mathematics (1984), and master's degree in electrical engineering (1985).