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

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

The 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 Vertical Circuits’ technology, 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 2mm and 1mm 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 the company’s chairman, Stephen Luczo.

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’s “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 hand-held devices.

According to Sunil Kaul, the chief executive at Vertical Circuits, current stacking methods are cumbersome and inefficient. Companies today will stack some types of memory chips on top of each other using a technique known as wire bonding, where loops of gold wires link the chips together and to an underlying circuit board. Or they will create packages where groups of chips are meshed together inside some conductive material that then has a wire coming out of it to connect to the rest of the system.

In either case, the wires and the packaging material take up a fair amount of space.

Vertical Circuits has developed a patented ooze that it uses to create electrical connections between chips. It dribbles this silver-based epoxy over the chips, reducing the need for wires or clunky packages that group chips together. When seen under the microscope, the goo covering the chips is reminiscent of lava coating terraced farms on a hillside.

Mr. Kaul says that Vertical Circuits can save device makers space and let them use larger, higher-capacity chips.

Ultimately, the company is talking about a difference of 1.6 mm — about the thickness of a chain necklace — between its stacks of memory chips and more conventional ones.

“The device makers are dying to get that 1.6 mm back,” Mr. Kaul said. He argues that the 1.6 mm could be the difference between a larger battery or larger screen fitting into a new device.

Vertical Circuits is staying quiet about its arrangements with chip makers and assemblers, although Mr. Kaul said he hoped to announce a number of partnerships in the coming months. The company has yet to turn a profit, but it will in “the next few quarters,” Mr. Kaul said.

Devices using the silver ooze should appear later this year.

Intel and other major chip makers are working on even more complex 3-D stacking techniques that would create direct connections between computational processors and memory, speeding the flow of information between the devices.

As for Mr. Watkins, he’s biding his time until that consulting gig with Seagate runs its course. In addition to serving on the boards of Vertical Circuits and Flextronics, he’s helping some solar technology companies navigate the ways of Washington.

“I have time on my hands, but I am not about to go to Napa and grow wine,” Mr. Watkins said.