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 trials 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.
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. He is also a Research Assistant in the MICAS labs at K U Leuven in Belgium.
He has about 25 patents granted and pending, plus several peer-reviewed technical publications. He has been an invited speaker at many labs, universities, and conferences ranging from JPL to MIT. He is regularly a technical program committee member and reviewer in both the CAD and intelligent systems fields, such as IEEE Trans CAD, ACM TODAES, Electronics Letters, to the Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Hardware, GECCO, etc. His research interests include: statistical machine learning, intelligent systems and evolutionary computation, and nonlinear programming; with transistor-level CAD applications such as automated sizing, knowledge extraction, and symbolic modeling. He was awarded the 2001 Outstanding Young Alumni Award by the University of Saskatchewan for significant accomplishments since graduation.
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.
Douglas Konkin is Vice President, Product Development for Solido Design Automation Inc. Prior to Solido Design, Doug spent nine years at fabless semiconductor company PMC-Sierra, Inc., where he was a design centre manager and a Director of IC and software development, developing networking ICs and SOCs, and the associated system software.
Prior to PMC-Sierra, Doug co-founded HyperCore Technology, a startup developing cell-switching systems, led the design of real-time online auction and online brokerage systems at PDN, Inc., and led the development of Unix-based real-time monitoring systems for telecom and oil and gas applications at the Datap Systems division of Sandwell, Inc. He holds a BSc (Engineering Physics) from the Royal Military College, and an MSc (Computer Science) from the University of Saskatchewan. Solido Design Automation is Doug's fourth startup.
Zdzislaw "Z" Marcisz brings a proven track record of over 20 years in the EDA, semiconductor, and software industries. He has held senior sales positions at Viewlogic Systems (acquired by Synopsys), Ambit Design Systems (acquired by Cadence Design Systems), Arithmatica, and Barcelona Design. These positions included direct product, OEM, and services sales management roles. Earlier in his career Mr. Marcisz was Design Tools Application Manager at LSI Logic where he led an engineering team responsible for field sales and applications product support for LSI's ASIC design tools. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hartford and an MBA from the University of Phoenix.