Nascentric has assembled a respected Technology Board consisting of professionals with semiconductor industry experience and insight into the advanced technology research relevant to Nascentric's product and corporate direction. Each member holds a leadership position at their particular organization, and has decades of experience in the industry.

Jim Solomon
EDA Veteran and Investor

Dr. Farid Najm
Professor & Vice-Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto

Dr. David Blaauw
Associate Professor, VLSI Design, University of Michigan

Sunil P. Khatri
Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University

Jim Solomon
EDA Veteran and Investor

Mr. Solomon's most recent endeavors include the founding of Xulu Entertainment, Inc., a provider of highly immersive, virtual environments and entertainment experiences inside and outside the home; and Smart Machines Inc, a robotics company in the semiconductor equipment area. Prior to this, Mr. Solomon is most recognized for the founding of SDA, which later became Cadence Design Systems. His most recent role at Cadence was forming the Analog and Mixed-Signal Division, where he held the position of Division President and General Manager.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Solomon worked as a designer and design manager at National Semiconductor, where he led efforts in data acquisition, switched capacitor filters, digital telecom, electronic speech, and traditional analog circuits. Before this, he started and ran the analog IC unit at Motorola Semiconductor in Phoenix and did RF/Microwave design at Motorola Systems Research Labs.

Dr. Farid Najm

Professor & Vice-Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto

Farid N. Najm received his Ph.D. Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1989. He worked at Texas Instruments from 1987 until 1992, when he joined the ECE Department at UIUC as an Assistant Professor. In 1997 he became a Tenured Associate Professor at UIUC. Dr. Najm joined the ECE Department at the University of Toronto in 1999 where he is now Professor and Vice-Chair of the ECE Department.

Dr. Najm received the IEEE Transactions on CAD Best Paper Award in 1992, the NSF Research Initiation Award in 1993, and the NSF CAREER Award in 1996. He is Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on CAD and was Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on VLSI 1997-2002. He has served as General Chairman for the ISLPED-99 conference and as Technical Program Co-Chairman for ISLPED-98. He has also served on the technical committees of ICCAD, DAC, CICC, ISLPED, and ISQED. Dr. Najm co-authored the text "Failure Mechanisms in Semiconductor Devices," 2nd Ed., John Wiley & Sons, 1997. His research is on CAD for low-power and reliable integrated circuits. Dr. Najm is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Dr. David Blaauw

Associate Professor, VLSI Design, University of Michigan

David Blaauw received his BS in Physics and Computer Science from Duke University in 1986, his MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1991. He worked at the Engineering Accelerator Technology Division, IBM Corporation, Endicott, as a Development Staff Member, until August 1993. From 1993 until August 2001, he worked for Motorola, Inc. in Austin, TX, were he was the manager of the High Performance Design Technology group. Since August 2001, he has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan as an Associate Professor.

His work has focused on VLSI design and CAD with particular emphasis on circuit analysis and optimization problems for high performance and low power designs. He was the Technical Program Chair and General Chair for the International Symposium on Low Power Electronic and Design in 1999 and 2000, respectively, and was the Technical Program Co-Chair and member of the Executive Committee the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference in 2000 and 2001.

Sunil P. Khatri

Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University

Sunil Khatri is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Engineering Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is affiliated with the VLSI CAD and Test Research Group. Previously he was an Assistant Pofessor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His industry experience includes working for Motorola on the designs of the MC88110 and PowerPC 603 RISC Microprocessors. He received a B. Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

His research is in the areas of VLSI CAD (logic as well as physical design automation), VLSI Design (techniques to address specific Deep Submicron issues like cross-talk and power) and cross-disciplinary topics (VLSI implementation of LDPC codes, embedded systems design and scheduling approaches, wavelength-division multiplexed (DWDM) optical network routing and wavelength assignment (RWA), VLSI applications in IP networking). Recent focus areas include design automation for datapath circuits, cross-talk avoidance in on-chip buses, leakage-power reduction, extreme low power circuit design, asynchronous circuit design methodologies, approximate Compatible Observability Don't Care computation, hierarchical logic synthesis, timing estimation, efficient test generation, fast logic simulation and cross-talk immune VLSI design.