John Batey
Senior Vice President and President, Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc.
John Batey is senior vice president and president of Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. (QMT), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm. QMT is commercialising mirasol™ display technology, an industry-transforming technology that combines thin film optics with MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) to create ultra-low power displays that are viewable in virtually any environment. QMT's products support Qualcomm's overall strategy of rapidly increasing the capability of mobile devices whilst driving down cost, size and power consumption. QMT is headquartered in San Diego, CA, with a MEMS Research and Innovation Centre in San Jose, CA and operations in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Batey joined Qualcomm with the acquisition of Iridigm Display Corporation in 2004, where he was chief operating officer and acting chief executive officer. As one of the early-stage Iridigm employees, he helped to secure the first venture capital funding and led the early engineering efforts before focusing on the business side of the company. Following the acquisition, Batey served as assistant general manager of QMT until 2006, when he received his current appointment.
Batey began his professional career in 1983 as a research staff member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center working on the physics of insulating films. In 1987 he accepted a position in IBM's newly-formed flat panel display development group. In this role, he led IBM's display process team in transferring technology from research and development into high volume production in Japan at DTI, a joint venture with Toshiba, and also helped lead the team that developed the display module for IBM's first notebook computer. He was involved in the initial volume and yield ramp of DTI's 1st generation LCD production facility, in the scale-up to 2nd generation manufacturing technology and in the early stages of the 3rd generation facility. During his tenure at IBM, Batey authored numerous publications, was awarded several patents and received a number of awards, including an Outstanding Innovation Award and an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.
In 1995, Batey left IBM to join Xerox Corporation and worked with the management team in the Electronics and Imaging Laboratory at Xerox PARC to spin-out an independent company, dpiX Incorporated. At dpiX Batey was a corporate officer and held several positions, including vice president of operations and senior vice president of engineering, and helped lead the commercialisation of large area, solid-state X-ray imaging devices from laboratory-scale demos through medical product qualification and into volume production. He left dpiX to join Iridigm in 2001. Batey holds a Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Durham, UK.
