Akoustis Technologies, a manufacturer of patented single-crystal BulkONE® bulk acoustic wave (BAW) high-band RF filters for mobile and other wireless applications, has named John T. Kurtzweil as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Mr. Kurtzweil replaces Cindy Payne, who will remain with the Company as its Vice President of Finance and Corporate Controller. Concurrent with his appointment as CFO, Mr. Kurtzweil has resigned as a Director on the Akoustis Board.
Kurtzweil, age 60, brings to Akoustis significant senior-executive leadership and financial experience, including 19-years as the CFO of publicly-traded technology companies, as well as the placement of an aggregate $1.9 billion in equity and debt-financing instruments. He was previously VP Finance at Cree, Inc. (Nasdaq: CREE), a company that develops, manufactures, and sells lighting-class LEDs (light emitting diodes), lighting, and semiconductor products for power and radio-frequency applications. In addition, he served as CFO of Wolfspeed, a Cree company and provider of wide-band-gap semiconductor technology for power semiconductors and RF power amplifiers. John currently serves on the Board of Directors of Axcelis Technologies (Nasdaq: ACLS).
From 2012 to 2014, Mr. Kurtzweil served as Senior Vice President, CFO and Special Advisor to the CEO of Extreme Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXTR), a provider of high-performance, open networking innovations for enterprise, services providers and internet exchanges. From 2006 to 2012, Kurtzweil served as Executive Vice President of Finance, CFO and Treasurer of Cree, during which time Cree’s annual revenue grew from $396 million to $1.2 billion. From 2004 to 2006, he was Senior Vice President and CFO of Cirrus Logic, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRUS), a fabless semiconductor company. From 2002 to 2003, he served as Sr. Vice President and CFO of ON Semiconductor (Nasdaq: ON). Kurtzweil is a CPA (WI), CMA, has an MBA from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a bachelor's degree from Arizona State University in Accounting.
Commenting on the announcement, Akoustis CEO, Jeff Shealy, stated “I have had the opportunity to interact with John since his appointment to our Board this past January and I can say with certainity that he is a tremendous addition to the Akoustis management team. Having been the CFO at a number of multi-billion dollar Nasdaq-listed technology companies, he has expertise not only in finance, but also in strategic planning, capital formation and M&A.” Mr. Shealy continued, “Furthermore, I would like to thank Cindy Payne for her numerous contributions as CFO over the last two years and our entire management team looks forward to working with her in her new role.”
Mr. Kurtzweil commented “I am very excited to be joining Akoustis as its CFO at a time when we are squarely focused on entering the fast growing high band BAW RF filter market utilizing our patented single crystal technology. My prior experiences plus insights gained from being on the Board uniquely position me to make an immediate impact.”
Akoustis is pioneering next-generation material science to address the market requirements for improved RF filters - targeting higher bandwidth, higher operating frequencies and higher output power compared to incumbent polycrystalline BAW technology deployed today. Superior performance is driven by the significant advances of high-purity, single-crystal piezoelectric materials and the resonator-filter process technology. The advanced material properties drive electro-mechanical coupling, which translates to wide filter bandwidth. High-band RF filters are achieved by leveraging the Company’s high-sound velocity, single-crystal piezoelectric materials. These single-crystal piezoelectric materials offer high-thermal conductivity along the path of heat flow, enabling high-power handling capability of the RF filter.
