
A retired chip executive went back to the journals, rented time in a university nanofab, and spent seven years proving that ordinary silicon still had another act.

After nearly two decades translating semiconductor complexity into customer language, Nancy Kelly is giving GlobalFoundries one voice for a consequential new chapter.

After 14 years marketing semiconductors, Arik Flanders moved into public-sector software. Now his job is to turn the hidden systems behind courts, taxes, schools and public safety into a story people can understand.
Jim Reinhart is the CEO of TEKVOX, a New Braunfels, Texas company reshaping the professional audiovisual industry with factory-built, pre-programmed Drop-In AV systems for classrooms, meeting rooms and complex spaces. A Rice University electrical engineer with more than 35 years in technology, he built his career across semiconductors and startups, co-founding and leading Luminary Micro, the lead partner on ARM's Cortex-M3 processor, through its 2009 acquisition by Texas Instruments. At TEKVOX he pushes a simple conviction: AV is IT, and it deserves the same discipline, standardization and lifecycle management as the rest of an organization's technology stack.
Milind Borkar is the founder and CEO of Illuma, a Plano, Texas company that uses passive voice biometrics and synthetic-voice detection to authenticate callers and stop phone-channel fraud at credit unions and community banks. He holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech, is named on 21 patents, and spent a decade at Texas Instruments launching more than 50 products before founding Illuma in 2016.
Allen Tsai is an Austin-based serial entrepreneur and engineer who spent roughly two decades shipping connected consumer electronics for Sony, Microsoft Xbox, Panasonic, Sonos, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments before turning his attention to water. After a month spent building water wells in a Nepali village, he founded Pani, the maker of the Pani Source - a tech-enabled water personalization system often described as the 'Keurig for water.' The device filters, remineralizes and customizes tap water with compostable pods, paired with an app that tracks quality and usage. Pani is Tsai's sixth startup.
Sameer Wasson is the CEO of MIPS, the storied semiconductor IP company now reborn as a RISC-V pure-play targeting the physical AI era. He joined in September 2023 after 18 years at Texas Instruments, where he ran the Processors business and earlier built TI's mmWave radar franchise. MIPS is now a subsidiary of GlobalFoundries.