Saied Tehrani spent forty years in silicon - magnetic memory, flash microcontrollers, and now the audio converters inside your favorite gear. He runs ESS Technology, and almost nobody outside the chip world knows his name.
There is a certain kind of engineer who never chases the spotlight and never really needs to. Saied Tehrani has spent roughly four decades building the parts of electronics that almost nobody sees - the memory that holds data when the power cuts out, the microcontroller that runs quietly inside a car, the converter chip that turns a stream of ones and zeros into sound you can actually hear. He is now President and CEO of ESS Technology, and his career reads less like a ladder and more like a map of where silicon kept moving next.
Tehrani holds a PhD in electrical engineering. Before that, an undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. What followed was not a straight line so much as a series of frontier postings - each one a hard, unsolved technology that eventually became a product category.
Tehrani's early career was built inside Motorola, where he spent roughly two decades and held a string of leadership positions. Motorola in that era was one of the great engineering schools of American industry - a place where you could spend a career learning how to take physics and turn it into something you could manufacture by the million. That grounding shows up everywhere in his later work.
When Motorola spun its semiconductor business into Freescale Semiconductor, Tehrani carried on there as a director and Fellow of Analog and Mixed Signal Technologies. The "Fellow" title matters. In a chip company it is not an honorific handed out for tenure - it marks the small group of people whose technical judgment the whole organization leans on.
He kept mastering the discipline of mastering technologies - memory, flash, audio, each a different frontier.
The work that put Tehrani's name in the record books was MRAM - magnetoresistive random-access memory. For years MRAM was one of those technologies that lived mostly in research papers: memory that keeps its contents without power, promising the speed of RAM with the persistence of a hard drive. Turning that promise into a chip you could buy was the hard part.
In 2008 the IEEE awarded Tehrani its Daniel Noble Award for the development of MRAM technology. He shared the honor that year with two of the most cited names in the field, James Daughton and Stuart Parkin - company that tells you exactly how seriously his contribution was taken.
He did not just win the science argument - he shipped. As founder and Chief Operating Officer of Everspin Technologies, the company created to commercialize MRAM, Tehrani helped bring more than 50 new MRAM products to market in under two years. For a brand-new memory technology, that cadence is close to unheard of. Depth and speed usually trade against each other; here they did not.
At Spansion, the flash-memory company, Tehrani stepped fully into general management. He served as Corporate Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Microcontroller Business Unit, and as Chief Technology Officer - running a roughly $500 million business spanning automotive, industrial, and consumer microcontrollers. It was the moment his profile shifted from the person who understood the technology to the person accountable for the whole P&L.
He later spent time on the other side of the table as a managing partner at Influence Capital Partners, the kind of vantage point that teaches an operator how investors actually think about risk, timing, and the long arc of a hardware company.
Roughly 20 years at Motorola, holding several leadership positions.
Director and Fellow of Analog and Mixed Signal Technologies; oversaw MRAM development.
Receives the IEEE Daniel Noble Award for MRAM; co-founds Everspin Technologies as COO.
SVP, GM and CTO at Spansion, running a ~$500M microcontroller business.
Managing Partner at Influence Capital Partners.
Named President and CEO of ESS Technology, Inc.
In March 2019, Tehrani took the top job at ESS Technology - a San Jose company founded in 1984 that most consumers have never heard of, and that most audiophiles argue about by name. ESS makes the SABRE line of digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs): the chips that sit at the boundary between the digital world and the analog one, deciding how clean the sound coming out of a soundbar, a phone, a car stereo, or a studio interface will be.
ESS Technology has a strong brand, great technology and product portfolio with marquee customers.
— Saied Tehrani, on being named CEO of ESS TechnologyIt is a fitting place for him to land. A DAC is, at heart, a deeply analog, deeply physical problem - the same mix of precision engineering and manufacturing discipline that defined his memory and microcontroller years. ESS turned 40 in 2024, still shipping SABRE parts into consumer, professional, and automotive audio, still run by someone who could, if you asked, explain the transistor-level physics underneath the marketing.
Read Tehrani's career quickly and it looks like job-hopping across unrelated fields. Read it slowly and a single thread appears. He keeps choosing technologies that are hard, unglamorous, and foundational - the layers other products are built on top of. Magnetic memory. Flash. Audio conversion. None of them are the kind of thing that trends on social media. All of them are the kind of thing that everything else quietly depends on.
The 75-plus patents and 70-plus technical papers are the receipts. They are also a reminder of something that is easy to forget about deep-tech leadership: the most credible operators in this world are often the ones who started at the bench, with a real problem and a real chip, long before anyone offered them a corner office.