Growing the Team: Meeting Challenges and Building for the Future

[Michael Wishart]

Hi all

First of all, thanks for your continued support. We are near completion on the debug of Open MPW-2 and will be back to you soon with the means to access your designs and a recounting of what happened and the path forward.  Stay tuned.

In this message I want to touch on the organizational side of what we are doing. Despite setbacks, a lot has been achieved over the past year.  You have generated 650 designs and we are showing the path to more than a 100X reduction in the person-years required to design a chip - open source chips are now a reality.  This is a testament to your hard work and creativity.  It also means parallel developments on our part in EDA, chips, cloud, automation and business processes.  This is a big task and I am sure it won’t be a surprise to hear that part of the difficulties to date were a result of gaps in critical skills at Efabless. In this email, I want to introduce you to various new additions to our team, their backgrounds and what they are doing.  

As of today, Andy Wright joined us as head of new product development and will initially work closely with Mohamed Shalan and Tim Edwards to lead our engineering efforts in IC Design and EDA.  Andy has been working with us since early August, auditing a deep dive into the root causes of the Caravel chip issues.  He brings a fresh, experienced set of eyes and engaging Andy has proven to be timely.  Among his past experiences, Andy led new product development at Cypress Semiconductor, including for products on the same Skywater 130 process we use today.  

In point of fact, the filling out of the team has been ongoing since closing venture funding in December.  In July, we hired Sara Nia as technical program manager to drive the Open MPW and chipIgnite programs. Sara has over 15 years of relevant experience, including most recently as senior program manager at Applied Materials.  In February, we hired Nathan Pier as director of business development to increase our presence in the market and to free up time from our leadership team that has been stretched too far for too long. Nathan previously served in a similar role at the chiplet startup zGlue.  

In the coming weeks, we will complete what has been a year-long process to form a permanent presence in Egypt.  This will allow us to continue to build out our highly capable team of chip, EDA and web developers and to provide a foundation for long-term growth to better meet your needs and that of the market.  Mohamed Shalan, who many of you know as a prominent contributor and thought leader in the open source chip and EDA community, will head the office.

Finally, we will continue to fill out the team and are actively looking for experienced people to drive silicon validation, chip integration and quality.  If you are interested or have some ideas, please let us know.

All the best.

Regards

Mike Wishart
CEO, Efabless Corporation
efabless.com