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Dave Kelf
Dave Kelf is the CEO of Breker Verification Systems, a San Jose-based EDA company whose test suite synthesis technology automates verification of large, complex chips including more than half of the world's RISC-V processor core projects. A UK-trained engineer turned marketing and business leader, Kelf spent three decades across Cadence, Synopsys, Co-Design Automation, Novas, and OneSpin, where he helped introduce and grow the SystemVerilog language and the Verdi debug environment. He rose from Breker's chief marketing officer to chief executive in October 2021 and has since guided the company through back-to-back years of 35 percent revenue growth.
Gilad Tal
Gilad Tal is co-founder and CEO of DualBird, a Boston-based deep tech startup rebuilding the foundation of analytics and AI data infrastructure by running silicon acceleration as cloud-native software. A Technion-trained electrical engineer and physicist with 14 years in ASIC and software development, he previously founded and led TerrainEDA, an EDA startup acquired by Synopsys. At DualBird he and his co-founders use rewritable FPGA hardware to plug into Apache Spark and Iceberg environments, claiming up to 100x faster performance and up to 90% lower cost with no changes to existing workflows.
Adnan Hamid
Adnan Hamid is the founder and core-technology inventor of Breker Verification Systems, a San Jose EDA company that pioneered graph-based, specification-driven chip verification and helped birth the industry's Portable Stimulus Standard. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer and computer scientist with an MBA from UT Austin, he earned the nickname 'The Breaker' for a simple reason: he breaks things for a living. After leading AMD's verification team to 100% coverage on an x86-class microprocessor and a stint at Cadence, he founded Breker in 2003 with his wife Maheen. He now serves as Executive President and CTO, holds more than 17 patents, and is regarded as one of the original visionaries behind teaching computers to verify the chips inside nearly every modern device.
Duncan Haldane
Duncan Haldane is the co-founder and CEO of JITX, a Berkeley-born startup that lets electrical engineers design circuit boards by writing code instead of dragging lines on a screen. Before software, he built robots: at UC Berkeley he created two Guinness World Record machines - the X2-VelociRoACH, the fastest robot relative to its size, and Salto, the most vertically agile jumping robot ever built. He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and started JITX in 2017 because he wanted a faster way to design the hardware inside his robots.
Sassine Ghazi
Sassine Ghazi is the president and CEO of Synopsys, the electronic design automation company whose tools underpin most of the world's advanced chips. He took the top job in January 2024 after 26 years inside the company and steered the $35 billion acquisition of Ansys to close in July 2025.
Aki Fujimura
Aki Fujimura is the founder, Chairman, and CEO of D2S, Inc., a San Jose-based semiconductor technology company he started in 2007. Armed with MIT degrees in EECS and over 100 US patents, Fujimura has spent four decades at the sharp edge of semiconductor design automation - co-founding Tangent Systems (acquired by Cadence), serving as President/COO at Simplex Solutions (acquired by Cadence), and incubating new businesses at Cadence before betting on GPU-accelerated curvilinear mask technology at a time when the industry thought it impractical. Today D2S powers the photomask manufacturing pipeline for leading-edge chipmakers worldwide, with over 40 Computational Design Platform installations and a growing body of proof that curvilinear ILT masks deliver dramatically better process windows than conventional Manhattan OPC.