Management Team

Amit Gupta, President and CEO

Amit Gupta is co-founder, President & CEO of Solido Design Automation Inc. In 1999, he co-founded Analog Design Automation Inc. (ADA), a startup for semiconductor design software. Over the next five years, as President & CEO and VP Marketing and Business Development, he helped the company grow through periods of target market identification, initial prototype development, field trial successes, product commercialization and launch, sales generation with quarterly revenue growth and acquisition by Synopsys Inc. To fund this growth, he raised investment from venture capital and government sources.

Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, he was product manager for the wireless group at Nortel Networks and a hardware engineer for the RF Communications group at Harris Corporation. He graduated with degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with great Distinction from the University of Saskatchewan. He was awarded the 2005 outstanding alumni award for significant accomplishments since graduation.

Martin Harding, VP Worldwide Sales and Marketing

Martin Harding has established worldwide sales and marketing forces, and been instrumental in growing company sales and customer bases, at numerous successful start-ups. His early experience in the microprocessor and ASIC groups at Fairchild and RCA led him to the EDA industry, where he initially joined Gateway Design Automation to lead the semiconductor and ASIC business. He was most recently President and CEO of Tenison Design Automation, which was acquired by ARC International, having previously served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at Analog Design Automation and as Vice President, Worldwide Sales, at C Level Design, both of which were acquired by Synopsys. Prior to C Level Design, Mr. Harding was Vice President of Business Development at Cadence Design Systems following its acquisition of Ambit. His experience also includes vice president positions at start-ups Virtual Chips and Chronologic Simulation.

Martin holds an HNC (Higher National Certificate) in electronics, with endorsements in physics and mechanical engineering, from Crawley College of Technology, England.

Patrick Drennan, Chief Technology Officer

Patrick Drennan is Chief Technology Officer of Solido Design Automation Inc. Prior to joining Solido, Patrick was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola, Inc.), where he was employed for over 14 years.

Patrick was one of the creators of the backwards propagation of variance (BPV) method for statistical characterization. This model guarantees consistency between simulation and silicon measurement and it is valid for all biases and geometries, which are significant attributes for design. His mismatch (local variation) model earned the Best Regular paper at the 2002 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference. He was the first to describe the impact of shallow trench isolation (STI) and well proximity effect (WPE) on design, demonstrating that the WPE produces a graded channel MOSFET. More importantly, he showed the catastrophic impact these unforeseen phenomena can have on circuit design. For this work, he received the Best Invited Paper at the 2006 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference. Patrick has extensive experience in measurement, modeling, characterization, test structure generation and design application of systematic and stochastic semiconductor variations.

Patrick received the B.S. degree in microelectronic engineering and M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1993 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Arizona State University in 1999.

Trent McConaghy, Chief Scientific Officer

Trent McConaghy is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Solido Design Automation Inc. He was a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Analog Design Automation Inc., which was acquired by Synopsys Inc. in 2004. Prior to that, he did research for the Canadian Department of National Defense. He received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2008. He received a Bachelor’s in Engineering (with great distinction), and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science (with great distinction), both from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1999.

He has about 40 peer-reviewed technical papers and patents granted / pending. He has given invited talks / tutorials at many labs, universities, and conferences such as JPL, MIT, ICCAD, and DAC. He is regularly a technical program committee member and reviewer in both the CAD and computational intelligence fields, such as IEEE Trans CAD, ACM TODAES, Electronics Letters, to the IEEE Trans. Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, GPTP, GECCO, ICES, etc.

His research interests include statistical machine learning, computational intelligence, evolutionary computation, and nonlinear programming; with transistor-level CAD applications of variation-aware design, high-dimensional circuit modeling, analog topology design, automated sizing, knowledge extraction, and symbolic modeling. In 2001, Trent was awarded the 2001 Outstanding Young Alumni Award by the University of Saskatchewan for significant accomplishments since graduation.

Jeff Dyck, Director of Product Development

Over the past decade in the software industry, Jeff has led dozens of successful custom software development projects, both as an independent consultant and working as the Senior Software Architect for a custom software development company. Jeff combines his aptitudes for business, software architecture, project management, and user interface design to consistently deliver high quality, usable software systems. Jeff has also been a key contributor to business development, sales, and marketing strategies at companies he has worked with.

Academically, Jeff has participated in software research in the areas of Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, and Networking. Jeff has designed and developed several innovative research systems, including a massively multiplayer game platform, distributed groupware systems, collaborative tabletop systems, and information visualization systems. Jeff has contributed over a dozen peer reviewed academic publications, and has acted as an academic reviewer for journals and conferences. He has also served as an instructor for university courses in programming methods, logic, and software engineering. Jeff holds an Honours degree in Software Engineering (Great Distinction) from the University of Saskatchewan, and has received numerous academic awards in both Commerce and Computer Science.

Kristopher Breen, Director of Corporate Applications Engineering

Breen joined Solido in 2005, on the day it was founded. Serving as Lead Designer, he assembled and managed a team of skilled engineers and was responsible for evolving Solido’s new technology into the company’s first commercial product. Collaborating closely with several major semiconductor companies, Breen worked to unite Solido’s technology with the needs of circuit designers and the market as a whole. In 2007, Breen took on his current role of Corporate Applications Engineering Manager to help drive the successful deployment of Solido’s products into the market.

Breen has an M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Alberta. He also holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan, where he was awarded the Governor General of Canada’s Silver Medal in 2002. Breen is also actively involved with IEEE, and chairs a committee that helps create professional development opportunities for new graduate engineers in the local community.