soc-verification
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Toshio Nakama and the value of finding out early
Before a chip becomes silicon, someone has to find its mistakes. S2C co-founder and former CEO Toshio Nakama built a career around giving engineers an earlier chance to do just that.
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.
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.
Breker Verification Systems
Breker Verification Systems is a Silicon Valley EDA software company that pioneered Test Suite Synthesis - automatically generating multi-threaded, self-checking test cases that verify complex systems-on-chip far faster than hand-written testbenches. Founded in 2003 by Adnan and Maheen Hamid, Breker is a founding contributor to the Accellera Portable Stimulus Standard and a leader in RISC-V and SoC verification, with its SystemVIP libraries deployed across more than 15 commercial RISC-V projects.