A Silver Ooze That Could Shrink the iPod

Bill Watkins, the outspoken former chief executive of Seagate, wants to make a thinner iPod.

Watkins, a Silicon Valley veteran, has joined the board of Vertical Circuits, a start-up that has come up with a technique for cramming large amounts of flash memory into a tight space. By using technology from Vertical Circuits, device makers can fit lots of high-speed memory into their products and leave more room for bigger displays and larger batteries.

"The thing that has stunned me is how much a Dell or Apple will pay for thinness," Mr. Watkins said. "There's a big difference for them between two millimeters and one millimeter on some of this stuff."

Mr. Watkins knows plenty about the desires of PC and device makers. He ran Seagate's hard-drive empire for years, before being dismissed as chief executive in January and replaced by Stephen Luczo, the company chairman.

Reflecting on his departure, Mr. Watkins said, "I am a certain type of person and will do things a certain way. Sometimes, I get into disagreements with people, and that was a classic example of that."

Mr. Watkins says he is "still on the hook for a while" at Seagate in a consulting role but has started dabbling with some new projects like Vertical Circuits.

The start-up specializes in what semiconductor folks call 3-D stacking technology. Essentially, this means placing chips on top of each other and forming electrical connections between the products. The technique can lead to faster communications between the chips, takes advantage of vertical space inside products and can reduce the need for wires stretching across a device.

Vertical Circuits has technology for connecting memory chips to other memory chips, computational chips to graphics chips and various other combinations. But its main focus for the moment is on connecting the flash memory chips used to store data in...