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.
Trent McConaghy, Chief Technology Officer
Trent McConaghy is co-founder and Chief Technology 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, VP Technical Operations
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
Kris 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.
Pete Hansen, VP North America Sales
Pete Hansen joined Solido in 2010 and brings a wealth of sales and business development experience.
Pete is responsible for the North American sales organization, which is focused on bringing the company’s high-value software tools and solutions to market, and building strong customer relationships through outstanding technology, service and support. Prior to Solido, Hansen was co-founder of Envision Technology, played an instrumental role in a successful Magma IPO, and held management positions at Avant! Corporation and IBM. Mr. Hansen holds a degree in Electronic Design and Packaging, from the Technical Institute of Santa Clara, CA.
