Achronix Management Team | Achronix Semiconductor Corporation

	Robert Blake, President and Chief Executive Officer Robert Blake has worked in the semiconductor industry for over 25 years. Prior to Achronix Semiconductor he was the Chief Executive Officer of Octasic Semiconductor based in Montreal, Canada. Mr. Blake worked at Altera in a variety of sales, marketing and general management roles. As Vice President of Product Planning he was responsible for defining Altera’s programmable logic product solutions. He has been developing ASIC and programmable logic for high speed telecom and network applications for over 17 years. Prior to Altera, he worked at LSI Logic and Fairchild where he developed ASIC technology. He holds a MEng. in Business and Microelectronics and BSc. in Applied Physics & Electronics from the University of Durham in England.
	Steve Mensor, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Planning Steve has over 25 years in senior management roles in the FPGA industry. Prior to joining Achronix, Steve was Sr. Director of Marketing at Altera where he was responsible for FPGA Product Marketing, Customer and Channel Marketing, IP Marketing, Strategic Partnerships, and Corporate Marketing. During Steve's tenure at Altera, his contributions and leadership helped Altera grow its revenue from fifty million dollars per year to over two billion dollars per year. Steve holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BSEE from UC Santa Barbara.
	Pohan Chiang, Vice President of Worldwide Sales Pohan has over 30 years of experience in semiconductor sales across multiple vertical markets and applications. Prior to joining Achronix, Pohan held various senior sales management positions at Marvell, Cavium, QLogic, Vixel, and Western Digital. These positions include Vice President of Worldwide OEM sales, Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan Sales, and Vice President of Business Development. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Marvell Sales and China Country Manager based in Shanghai where he successfully accelerated the business growth through strategic design wins and market share gain while managing through the integration of multiple acquisitions and divestiture. Pohan holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Irvine.
	Dr. Kamal Choudhary, Senior Vice President Software Engineering Recognized as an industry veteran and renowned in the field of FPGA architecture and EDA software, Dr. Choudhary is the Vice President of Software Engineering at Achronix Semiconductor. He has over 14 years of experience in the programmable logic field and holds more than 24 patents in various areas of FPGA hardware, architecture, testing, and software algorithms including placement, mapping and synthesis. Prior to joining Achronix, Dr. Choudhary was a Distinguished Engineer at Xilinx. During his tenure he held numerous R&D positions and played vital roles such as Virtex FPGA Architect and has received numerous awards from Xilinx for his innovation and technical contributions. Before Xilinx he was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Electronics Research Lab, University of California at Berkeley focused on performance driven placement, compaction, logic synthesis and other FPGA advancements. Dr. Choudhary holds a Bachelors of Technology in Electrical Engineering and Masters of Technology in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India. He has a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
	Raymond Nijssen, Vice President and Chief Technologist Mr. Nijssen has over 20 years of experience in the FPGA and EDA industries in various technical and management positions. Mr. Nijssen joined Achronix as Chief Software Architect to manage the software development group, define the foundations and algorithms of the software system, and architect key aspects of the company’s FPGA architectures. In his current role, he is responsible for the productization of the company’s current products and R&D for new technologies for future products. Prior to Achronix, Mr. Nijssen was at Tabula where he was responsible for placement and timing analysis of a time-multiplexed FPGA technology. Prior to Tabula, he was one of the first engineers at Magma Design Automation, and held multiple leadership positions in charge of routing and placement, data models and customer deployment of Magma’s Blast Plan Pro hierarchy hierarchical virtual prototyping and floorplanning products for very large ASIC designs. Mr. Nijssen received his MSEE degree from Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands, and after that followed its postgraduate program studying EDA for VLSI. He holds several patents related to P&R and asynchronous circuit technologies.
	Randolf Jurrat, Vice President of Operations Mr. Jurrat is responsible for all aspects of manufacturing and delivery of Achronix products. He brings over 20 years experience in New Product Introduction (NPI) engineering, global supply chain management, supplier relationships, import/export compliance, logistics as well as product- and reliability engineering. He also leads the quality organization driving continuous improvement to the highest quality standards for design, manufacture, training, measurement, post-sale customer support and reliability engineering. Mr. Jurrat joined Achronix in 2008 after serving in a variety of process manufacturing technology, supply chain management, manufacturing and product and test engineering and quality management positions most recently at ChipX, Infineon and Siemens Automotive. He holds a M.S. in Electrical and Microsystems Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg, Germany and Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado.
	Scott Senst, Vice President of Hardware Engineering Scott has over 25 years of experience in the ASIC, FPGA, and EDA industries, with extensive experience in both software and hardware roles. Scott is responsible for leading the hardware engineering teams in designing, verifying, bringing-up, and productizing new technologies and next-generation Achronix products, as well as supporting the full set of current product lines. Scott is a key contributor and leader in hardware and software R&D and architecture, excelling in solutions that combine complex hardware and software systems. Scott originally joined the Achronix software team over 19 years ago, and held the role of Vice President of Software Architecture prior to joining the hardware team. Scott specializes in making complex systems intuitive and easy to use by focusing on the customer facing product user interface. Prior to Achronix, Scott worked at LSI Logic to architect, develop, and test a set of EDA tools from the ground-up for the RapidChip platform ASIC (metal-configurable FPGA). Before that, Scott worked in the microelectronics division at IBM, where he gained his first software patent as an intern working on IP configuration tools for complex network processors. Scott also worked on hardware design and verification flows for the Cell processor for the PlayStation3. Scott received his honors BS degree in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University.