Francois Bedard is a senior R&D manager in Synopsys’s Processor Solutions team with over 25 years of embedded software development and leadership experience across several areas including telecommunications, high performance networking applications and systems development, embedded multi-core architectures and open source software including Linux and GNU Tools. Francois holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Jeff Bier is president of BDTI. For over 20 years BDTI has helped hundreds of companies choose the right processors and develop optimized software for demanding applications in audio, video and computer vision. Jeff also oversees the Embedded Vision Alliance, a partnership of 50 technology companies that works to enable the widespread use of practical computer vision. Jeff is a frequent keynote and invited speaker at industry conferences, and writes the popular monthly column “Impulse Response.”
Joep Boonstra brings 20+ years of experience to his role as senior staff DSP architect at Synopsys. Prior to joining Synopsys, Joep held senior principal roles at NXP Semiconductors and Virage Logic, working in domains like IP design for re-use, systems-on-a-chip, networks-on-chip and off-chip interconnectivity standards. Joep has an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Twente, the Netherlands.
Mike Borza is a member of the technical staff with Synopsys’ security IP team, and has more than 20 years of experience in security system engineering, and safety critical system engineering before that. He is the founder and CTO of Elliptic Technologies, which was acquired by Synopsys. Mike has been an active contributor to the Security Task Group of IEEE 802.1; was an editor of the 802.1AR Secure Device Identifier standard; is one of the founding members of the prpl Foundation and co-chair of its Security Engineering Group; and chairs the EEMBC IoT security benchmark working group. He holds a master’s degree in engineering from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.
Fergus Casey is a senior R&D manager for ARC Processors at Synopsys, with engineering responsibility for the ARC EM, ARC 600 and ARC 700 families. He joined ARC International in 2003 as a processor verification engineer and has worked in various roles within the ARC processor group as part of ARC International and through the acquisitions by Virage Logic and later Synopsys. Prior to joining ARC, Fergus worked in a number of fabless semi and IP companies and startups in Ireland and UK, including Toucan Technologies, PMC-Sierra and Icera. Fergus holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from University College Cork, Ireland.
Rich Collins is the product marketing manager for IP subsystems at Synopsys and is responsible for developing strategies and positioning for market penetration and growth of ARC processors and ARC-based subsystems. Rich has over 20 years of experience in embedded semiconductor R&D, product marketing and business development. Before joining Synopsys, he spent 17 years at Motorola/Freescale, where he held several technical and managerial roles within CPU, IP and SoC design and marketing teams across the company. Rich holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Duke University.
Ruud Derwig has 20+ years of experience with software and system architectures for embedded systems. Key areas of expertise include (real-time, multi-core) operating systems, media processing, component based architectures, and security. He holds a master’s degree in computing science and a Ph.D. in engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. Ruud started his career at Philips Corporate Research, worked as a software technology competence manager at NXP Semiconductors, and is currently a software and systems architect at Synopsys.
Linley Gwennap is the president of The Linley Group and principal analyst for mobile. One of the most respected analysts in the microprocessor industry, he has followed the industry for more than 20 years. Starting as a processor designer at Hewlett-Packard, Linley later worked in PA-RISC marketing and then became editor-in-chief of Microprocessor Report and vice president of MicroDesign Resources before founding The Linley Group in 1999.
Kashif Kahn is the CEO and co-founder of Sage Senses, a Machine Learning startup specializing in Embedded Solutions for IoT applications. He is a serial entrepreneur and has deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence technologies in a variety of domains, including Natural Language Understanding. He takes a keen interest in sophisticated embedded machine learning solutions that can be deployed on low-power, small footprint microcontrollers for semantic interpretation of sensory data and that also significantly reduce 3rd party developers’ time, cost, and efforts for building sensory applications. Mr. Kahn is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and received a BSE in Computer Science from the Moore School and a BS in Economics from the Wharton School.
Kulbhushan Kalra is an engineering manager for hardware development of ARC Processors at Synopsys. He is responsible for the development of advanced ARC processors including architecture, RTL design, verification and physical design. He joined Synopsys through the acquisition of Virage Logic. Prior to joining Virage Logic, he was managing the development of TriMedia DSP processors and MIPS processors at NXP Semiconductors for 12 years. Kulbhushan obtained his B.S. in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering, India. His interests include computer architecture and multi-core high performance processors.
Dave Karlin is the senior vice president of product strategy at Hillcrest Laboratories. He has over 35 years of experience in product development and strategic marketing, having held numerous R&D and marketing positions with Hewlett Packard and Agilent Technologies before joining Hillcrest Labs. Dave received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University, and as a Hewlett-Packard Fellow, he was awarded a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
A. G. Karunakaran has 25 years of experience in general management, engineering and marketing for the computing, semiconductor and embedded markets. AGK was the founding president and CEO of GDA Technologies Inc., a leading Intellectual Property licensing and electronics design services company, which was acquired by L & T Infotech, India. At GDA, he was responsible for leadership development, growth strategy, prudent cash management and worked with leading semiconductor companies to commercialize the silicon intellectual property blocks. Under his leadership, GDA saw significant growth and became a leading supplier of High-speed Serial I/O Semiconductor Intellectual blocks.
Seema Mirchandaney, engineering manager of software tools at Synopsys, is responsible for the development of compilers for the embedded vision processor. Prior to this she was technical director of software tools at On Demand Microelectronics and software architect at Cradle Technologies. Her research interests include compilers and parallel computation. She has published extensively in this area and has multiple patents in compiler algorithms. Seema obtained her MS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and BA in computer science from Smith College.
Hugh O’Keeffe is Engineering Director with Ashling and has over 25 years’ experience in embedded systems and managing teams developing hardware and software debug tools. He has both a Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics) and Masters in Engineering (Computer & Communications Systems) from the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Steve Ridley is an experienced hands-on engineer with 30 years’ knowledge of real time embedded systems, both as a hardware and software engineer. Steve has worked in the Automotive, Defence, Aerospace, Telecom, and Medical sectors and has an appreciation of both common and sector specific challenges facing embedded engineers in the industry. Steve is the lead engineer for WITTENSTEIN High Integrity Systems, the company behind SAFERTOS.
Mitesh Shah is an engineering manager software development and simulation tools for ARC Processors at Synopsys. He joined Synopsys through the acquisition of Virage Logic. Earlier, he developed compilers and other related software development tools for a variety of processors such as Intel network processor, PowerPC, MIPS, and x86 at Teja Technologies, Mentor Graphics and Intel. Mitesh obtained his M.S. in computer science from Texas A&M University, College Station. His research interests include parallelizing compilers, multi-core software development, computer architecture and simulation.
Kate Stewart is a Senior Director of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation responsible for the Zephyr Projects. With almost 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles and worked as a developer in Canada, Australia and the US and for the last 20 years has managed software development teams, and product delivery, in the US, Canada, UK, India and China. She received her Master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Waterloo, and Bachelors of Computer Science (co-op program) from the University of Manitoba.
Neil Trevett By day, Neil works at NVIDIA where he helps to drive the developer ecosystem that enables applications to take advantage of advanced silicon acceleration, with a particular focus on Augmented Reality. By night, Neil is the elected President of the Khronos Group industry standards consortium where he initiated the OpenGL ES standard now used by billions worldwide every day, helped catalyze the WebGL project to bring interactive 3D graphics to the Web, chairs the OpenCL working group defining the open standard for heterogeneous parallel computation and has helped establish and launch the new generation Vulkan API.
Pim Tuyls is the Founder and CEO of Intrinsic-ID. He initiated the work on Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that forms the basis of Intrinsic-ID’s silicon fingerprinting technology. The original work on PUFs was carried out at Phillips Research, where Pim was Principal Scientist and managed the cryptography cluster. In 2008 he founded Intrinsic-ID and led the technology development. Pim has headed the company since 2010 and raised new funding in 2012 to address the growing market of mobile and IoT security. In 2015 he moved the headquarters from the Netherlands to Silicon Valley. Pim Tuyls has a Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Leuven University, holds 50+ patents and is widely accepted for his work in the field of PUFs and security for embedded applications.
Vangelis Vassalos holds a B.Sc. degree in Physics Science, M.Sc. degree in Electronics and Computer Science and a Ph.D. in the area of Computer Arithmetic Circuit Design, from the Physics Department at the University of Patras. He is currently a software engineer at Irida Labs, developing cutting-edge embedded vision software optimized for market-leading applications.
Bo Wu is a corporate applications engineer at Synopsys supporting the DesignWare EV vision processors. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Tsinghua University in China, and a Ph.D. from University of Victoria in Canada. Between 1996 and 2000, he worked as a senior system engineer and DSP engineer at Nortel Networks in Ottawa and at AT&T Wireless in Seattle, respectively. Afterwards, he held various engineering and technical marketing positions focusing on system-level design products and processor solutions at Cadence, CoWare, and Synopsys.
Uzi Zangi is a semiconductor industry veteran with over 22 years of experience in managing engineering teams, business and product lines in multi-disciplinary, global organizations, including Zoran Corporation and Siverge Networks. Uzi has experience in business development as Product Line General Manager in the consumer electronics market and as VP R&D in the Telecom market. He has managed the development of key technologies and multiple projects from concept to customer mass production. Uzi's strength is business management as well as complex technical project management of multi discipline R&D, Application, Marketing and Sales teams. He is co-founder and CEO of PLSense.