
The chips powering AI, cars and data centers are becoming cities in miniature. Michal Siwinski has built a career explaining why their roads, rules and security matter as much as their engines.

After nearly five years designing Apple silicon, Ann Wu chose an unfashionably difficult startup problem: helping chip engineers find bugs, test tradeoffs, and reach tape-out before the workload changes beneath them.

The Synopsys CMO built her career at the seam between engineers and everyone else. Her method is simple to state and hard to practice: translate the technology, measure the result, and stay curious enough to rewrite the story.
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 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.