About ThruChip

ThruChip Communications LLC was formed in partnership with Keio University in 2007 to facilitate the licensing of many years of research in 3D stacking of silicon chips by Professor Kuroda and his colleagues. Under the leadership of Professor Kuroda, the Kuroda Lab at Keio University has designed and tested many generations of silicon chips pioneering the use of near field wireless using inductive coupling for high-speed and low-power die-to-die communication.

ThruChip provides technology licensing, documentation, and helps customers to successfully use ThruChip's technologies to achieve breakthrough products.

Executive Bios

David R. Ditzel
Chief Executive Officer



Dave Ditzel is a co-founder of Thruchip Communications and the CEO of the company since December 2013. He is bringing over 3 decades of leadership, technology development and licensing experience to the company.

Prior to becoming CEO of Thruchip, Mr. Ditzel spent five years as a vice president and chief architect for hybrid computing at Intel Corporation. He was responsible for leading a world class architecture team to design a next generation processor architecture using binary translation. He was a co-founder of Transmeta Corporation, and served as its CEO from March 1995 to its successful IPO. He spent ten years at Sun Microsystems in various positions including CTO of the SPARC Technology Business, Director of Advanced Systems and acting director of Sun Labs. Prior to Sun he worked for ten years at ATT Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he was the architect for the CRISP Microprocessor, one of first RISC processors, and he was a co-author of "The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer." Ditzel has worked on the development of over two dozen computer systems, has published three dozen papers on advanced computer design and has received 11 patents.

Tadahiro Kuroda
Chief Technology Officer



Professor Tadahiro Kuroda is a co-founder of Thruchip Communications. He is the pioneer of using inductive coupling as a means of achieving high speed communication and power delivery in 3D chip stacking.

Tadahiro Kuroda received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, in 1999. In 1982, he joined Toshiba Corporation, where he designed CMOS SRAMs, gate arrays and standard cells. From 1988 to 1990, he was a Visiting Scholar with the University of California, Berkeley, where he conducted research in the field of VLSI CAD. In 1990, he was back to Toshiba, and engaged in the research and development of BiCMOS ASICs, ECL gate arrays, high-speed CMOS LSIs for telecommunications, and low-power CMOS LSIs for multimedia and mobile applications. He invented a Variable Threshold-voltage CMOS (VTCMOS) technology to control VTH through substrate bias, and applied it to a DCT core processor and a gate-array in 1995. He also developed a Variable Supply-voltage scheme using an embedded DC-DC converter, and employed it to a microprocessor core and an MPEG-4 chip for the first time in the world in 1997. In 2000, he moved to Keio University, Yokohama, Japan, where he has been a professor since 2002. He was a Visiting Professor at Hiroshima University, Japan, and is a Visiting MacKay Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include ubiquitous electronics, sensor networks, wireless and wireline communications, and ultra-low-power CMOS circuits. He has published more than 200 technical publications, including 50 invited papers, and 18 books/chapters, and has filed more than 100 patents. Dr. Kuroda served as the General Chairman for the Symposium on VLSI Circuits, the Vice Chairman for ASP-DAC, sub-committee chairs for A-SSCC, ICCAD, and SSDM, and program committee members for the Symposium on VLSI Circuits, CICC, DAC, ASP-DAC, ISLPED, SSDM, ISQED, and other international conferences. He is a recipient of the 2005 IEEE System LSI Award, the 2005 P and I Patent of the Year Award, the 2006 LSI IP Design Award, the 2006 IP/SoC Best Design Paper Award, the 2007 ASP-DAC Best Design Award, and the 2009 IEICE Achievement Award. He is an IEEE Fellow, an elected AdCom member for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and an IEEE SSCS Distinguished Lecturer.