Satish Bagalkotkar – CEO & Co Founder

Mr. Bagalkotkar is President/CEO and founding member of Synapse Design. He has more than 18 years of senior management experience

Prior to founding Synapse Design, Satish was Senior Director of Engineering at Silicon Access Networks where he was responsible for development of the industry's first 20GB router chips set. Satish pioneered the concept of a design factory for developing complex SOC’s and ensuring first time silicon success every time. Previous to Silicon Access, Satish was responsible for development of four generations of micro-processors at HAL Computer Systems, leading to the acquisition of HAL Computer Systems by Fujitsu. Satish holds a MSEE from University of Louisville, KY.

 

Devesh Gautam – COO & Co-Founder

Mr. Gautam co-founded Synapse Design in 2003 along with Satish Bagalkotkar and is responsible for Worldwide Operations and day–to–day management of the entire organization. He has a rich 17 year background in the design services space with roles in general management, sales and operations. Prior to co-founding Synapse Design, Devesh was in charge of sales and operations at Spike Technologies, where he was responsible for 75% of total revenue. He was also a key member of the executive management staff that enabled the Spike acquisition by Qualcomm.

Prior to Spike, Mr. Gautam was Director of Sales at RBM Control Systems. Devesh is a graduate of Bangalore University in Electrical Engineering.

 

Charlie Kahle – CTO

Mr. Kahle is an industry veteran with over 30 years of experience in the IC design industry. Prior to Synapse Design, Mr. Kahle held various senior management level positions with QThink, Cadence Design Systems, and Unisys Corporation, and started his career at Texas Instruments.  Mr. Kahle has experience in Front-to-Back ASIC design, EDA tool flow development and integration, software development, and library development.  During his career, he has established design services relationships with the major semiconductor companies, EDA tool vendors, IP suppliers and silicon foundries.  Mr. Kahle received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University, and has spent time doing VLSI research under Carver Mead at Caltech, as part of the Silicon Structures Project. 

 

Jim Hemeon – Vice President, Worldwide Strategic Accounts

Mr. Hemeon is outstanding in building key relationships at tier-one accounts. Jim goes above and beyond the call of duty to help others plus he brings a very lively spirit to work.

Mr. Hemeon is responsible for worldwide market & revenue for Synapse Design and has over twenty-seven years of Semi & EDA industry experience. This includes fifteen years of engineering (Wang Labs, Lockheed-Sanders Avionics, and Synopsys) and over twelve years of Sales & Business Development, having developed a worldwide, Tier-1 client base. This includes extensive, C-level, international relationships with Fortune 500 companies and a record of bringing semi & software startups (DynaChip, Aristo) to successful exit.

Previous to Synapse Design, Jim ran N. American sales & marketing for an Asian-based ASIC startup, KeyASIC. Prior to KeyASIC, Jim ran N. American Sales & Marketing for the ASIC Company, Alchip Technologies. Mr. Hemeon received his BSEE from the University of Lowell (now UMASS-Lowell).

Tom King – Vice President of Business Development

Mr. King is instrumental in building the Hitachi relationship. Tom impresses, at Synaspse, pushing the customer smoothly to get what he wants.

Mr. King brings over 30 years of experience in sales and marketing leadership positions and a proven track record in creating and executing sales strategy to penetrate major accounts. Mr. King has an exceptional record of accomplishments in achieving aggressive design-win goals and building executive level relationships as a senior sales executive for leading technology companies: Semiconductors (Motorola, Fairchild, MMI and NEC); Electronic Design Automation (Cadence Design Systems and Monterey Design Systems) and Intellectual Property/Design Services (ARM, Qthink and eSilicon). Mr. King received his BS degree from Arizona State University.

Mike Buckley – Staffing and Business Development Manager

Mike Buckley is recognized as an industry leader in helping fortune 500 companies build technical organizations in Northern America. His ability to network with executives and engineers has allowed companies to expand design groups and open design centers across the world. Mike has been the champion in building executive and technical teams for companies like AMD, Fujitsu, IBM, Sun and Infineon to name a few. Mike continues to build relationships and deliver services globally to the semiconductor and electronics industry. Mike’s expertise and experience spans all the vertical segments of the semiconductor, software and systems arena.

Mike has enjoyed a distinguished career with a total of over 25 years experience in our industry. Mike is a member of the Pinnacle Society – an elite consortium of 75 of the nation’s top executive recruiters.

Hem Hingarh brings over 35 years of semiconductor and System industry experience.  He brings product development  and Engineering management leadership to Synapse.

Most recently Hem Hingarh was executive Vice President of Mosys Inc;  responsible for worldwide Engineering and product development for High speed  Embedded DRAM, Serial Memories, Display Driver memories, Embedded Flash memory and Mixed Signal SOC.

Before joining Mosys Hem managed large Engineering organization at Hellosoft, Silicon Access Network, Sun Microsystems and National/Fairchild Semiconductor.

Hem began his career as Design Engineer for Fairchild Semiconductor and over 18+ years managed R&D development at Fairchild Research center in Palo Alto and Product Lines at National semiconductor. For 6 years he was Director of UltraSparc and Java processors design groups.

Hem has over 22 patents and 60+ publications.  He, earned his MSEE degree from  University of  California at Berkeley  and  Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics Engineering from BITS India

Mike McKean – Senior Director

Mr. McKean has over 23 years of international experience in the design, application, marketing, and business development of commodity and application specific semiconductors. In his role at Synapse Design Mike is responsible for the day-to-day leadership of the Colorado Design Center. As part of the Executive Team Mike is also tasked with enabling revenue growth and driving the successful execution of key projects.

Prior to joining Synapse Design, Mike served as Director of the Data Storage SOC/ASIC Business Unit at STMicroelectronics, based in Longmont, Colorado. He has held a variety of engineering leadership, business development and customer management roles at Agere Systems, Lucent Microelectronics, ON Semiconductor and Motorola Semiconductor. While based in Japan Mike led the spin-off of ON Semiconductor from Motorola before joining Lucent to help with their spin-off of Agere Systems.

Mike has numerous publications and industry presentations to his credit and earned a B.S. in Engineering Science from Trinity University and an M.B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin.

Haoran Wang – Director of Engineering, Syapse China

Haoran has over a decade of international experience in the design of large scale SoC device. Currently he servers the role of director of engineering of Synapse China. In this role, Haoran manages entire China engineering force including teams at Shanghai and Shenzhen. Haoran also works closely with Synapse executive team and local sales to present, promote and expand Synapse local business. In addition to engineering and business leadership, Haoran also has the responsibility to manage local company day-to-day operation by working closely with US headquarter teams.

Before joining Synapse, Haoran serves as manager of silicon implementation of NXP Home BU/Conexant STB business line of over 200 million USD yearly. Many of the devices under his leadership are first time right silicon and massively deployed in various cable/satellite/IPTV boxes worldwide. Before NXP/Conexant, Haoran served as senior consultant for Synopsys Profession Service by engaging local customers to promote Synopsys EDA/flow solutions. Haoran started his career as customer circuit designer with IDT. Haoran earned his BS in physics from Peking University and MSEE from Purdue University, West Lafayette, US.

Marco Brambilla – Director of Engineering, Synapse Europe

Mr. Brambilla’s strengths are his technical skills, his ability to build teams and to build respect and trust with the Customer; he was previously at STMicroelectronics, where in the last eleven years he has executed several projects, always at or with external customers, always taping out first-silicon successes and generating repeat business and increased customer confidence.

In 2004 Mr. Brambilla moved to San Jose, California, to open the local Design Center to support a major Networking Customer and support the sales / marketing team to present ST technology and IP offering to the customer.

Since 1999 Mr. Brambilla has executed Complex SOCs in the Wired Communication space, from specification to working samples, always with the then-new technology, often delivering to the customer their first silicon in a particular node.”