The principals of Zaca Design have grown up with the electronics industry, helping to create the microelectronics revolution. Collectively we have had professional relationships with most of the leading fortune 500 corporations involved in data storage, communications, semiconductor and test equipment manufacturing.

Chris Neufeld - President and CEO

Chris has over 14 years of experience in engineering management including project management, team leadership, and program management. He had full responsibility for a 15 member engineering staff, overseeing performance, time management, and engineering processes. Previously he spent 10 years as a design engineer of test equipment for the data storage industry including equipment for tape, classical, composite, monolithic, thin film, and magneto-resistive head and media products. With over 24 years of professional experience, his background includes: digital, analog, power, motion control, signal processing, materials, tribology, computers, embedded systems, optics, interferometry, lasers, process control, statistics and ISO-9000.

William Kingsbury - Vice President, Engineering

With over 34 years in the electronics industry, William has a wide range of experience. During his 10 years in engineering management he had full responsibility for product specification, design and manufacturing engineering. As the customer liaison, he helped to clarify requirements and to create accurate system specifications and system architectures for turnkey production equipment. For the last 22 years he has specialized in embedded systems design, servo system design, robotics design and laser interferometer metrology including nanometer-scale micropositioning. He has also been involved in vacuum tube circuit design for high power RF generators as well as test engineering, including automated board testing and test equipment design.

Jim Patchell - Vice President, Research and Development

Jim is a true generalist in electronics with over 26 years of analog and digital design experience, primarily in the infrared and data storage industries. Jim has designed low-noise mixed-signal systems, high speed image processing computers, ultra-precise motion controllers, real-time operating systems, and analog signal processors. He is also an expert-level C programmer. Jim is a leader in employing computer-aided design tools to improve quality and efficiency in his work. His background in fundamentals combined with an innovative approach to new technologies makes him the backbone of our development team.