Martin Vlach, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Martin Vlach, who was born and raised in Prague, Czechoslovakia, is the founder of Lynguent. In 1985, he helped start Analogy, Inc., and for the 15 years he was there, he served as a member of its Board of Directors and as Chief Scientist. He was instrumental in attracting substantial angel investment to Analogy prior to its successful IPO and subsequent acquisition by Avant! and later by Synopsys, Inc. In the year prior to its acquisition, Analogy had over 200 employees and revenue of $28M.

At Analogy, Martin conceived of and architected both the SABER simulator and the MAST hardware description language (HDL), which are still used worldwide to design a wide variety of systems, from complex mixed-signal (analog and digital) integrated circuits (ICs) to mixed technology consumer, automotive, and aerospace systems including electronic, hydraulic, mechanical, and optical components.

Martin holds a B.Math in Computer Science and M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

H. Alan Mantooth , Ph.D.
Chief Scientist

Dr. Alan Mantooth is a co-founder of Lynguent. He is also a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Arkansas and holds the 21st Century Chair in Mixed-Signal IC Design and CAD where he has directed over $20 million in externally funded research. He has over 20 years of experience developing models, and modeling methods and tools. He returned to academia in 1998 after eight years at Analogy (now a part of Synopsys, Inc.), where he directed a team of 10 engineers on modeling tool research.

Alan holds three patents on software architecture for modeling and simulation tools and has published over 100 refereed articles on models and modeling tools. He has developed semiconductor device models for MOSFETs, diodes, power diodes, IGBTs, SCRs, and most recently SiC diodes, SiC MOSFETs, SiC SITs and JFETs, and SiC thyristors.

Barbara Bakken
Chief Operating Officer

Barbara Bakken is a co-founder of Lynguent. She brings over 20 years of business experience in managing projects, programs, and teams. Throughout her career she has sought out opportunities to work in all areas of running a business. Barbara has a diverse background that ranges from conducting market research, developing and delivering corporate training programs, and managing employee relations programs.

From 1996 to 2004 Barbara managed Analogy's Saber Simulator (Analog/Mixed-Signal Simulation) research and development team through an IPO and subsequent acquisitions at by Avant! and Synopsis.

She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute. Barbara holds a BA in Sociology from Humboldt State University and an MS in Industrial and Labor Relations Management (MILR) from the University of Oregon.

James Holmes
VP Research and Applications Consulting

Jim Holmes joined Lynguent after 13 years at Texas Instruments, where he was an analog/mixed-signal system-on-chip (SoC) modeling and simulation specialist. While there he focused on validation and verification of over 40 SoCs, spanning consumer applications from servo control in hard disk drives to baseband processing in cellular phones. He supported AMS modeling activities worldwide at Texas Instruments' design centers, as well as its customer and contractor sites. He developed key modeling methods that unified specification, design, and test activities across the globe.

In 2004, Jim was elected Senior Member Technical Staff at Texas Instruments. Jim currently leads Lynguent's research team that is commercializing an expert system for analog/mixed-signal model composition and analysis. He holds a BS and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut.

Ernst Christen, Ph.D.
VP of Engineering

Dr. Ernst Christen received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering and the Dr.sc.techn. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, in 1975 and 1985, respectively. From 1985 to 1987, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, as a postdoctoral fellow.

Since 1987 he has held various leading positions at Analogy, Inc., Avant! Corporation, and Synopsys, Inc. in the area of mixed-signal simulation technology, modeling technology and language design. He was the Principal Investigator for two DARPA contracts in the area of analog and mixed-signal hardware description languages.

As the vice-chair of the IEEE P1076.1 Working Group and a co-chair of its language design committee, Dr. Christen has made major contributions to the definition of IEEE Std. 1076.1 (VHDL-AMS). He continues to serve as chair of this group. He was also the lead developer of SAE standard J2748 - VHDL-AMS Statistical Analysis Packages. Dr. Christen holds three patents and is the author of over 40 publications. His interests include hardware description languages and mixed-signal multi-technology simulation.

Eva Solarova
General Manager,
Lynguent s.r.o.

Eva Solarova has over 25 years of experience managing teams in architecture, specification, design, and implementation of information technology systems. She was head of the department of information technology at Czech Television until 2005. Eva also spent 2 years working in the Research Institute for Telecommunication and Electronics.

Eva joined Lynguent s.r.o. Prague in 2006. She graduated from Charles University in Prague with degrees in Math and Physics.

Dave Crivelli
Director

Dave Crivelli is the Vice President of Human Resources for Photon Dynamics Inc., a global supplier of flat panel test and repair equipment. He has 29 years of Human Resource and Business Management experience in semiconductor device, semiconductor equipment and the flat panel display equipment industries. He is a proven human resource, organizational development and management expert in emerging technologies and start up companies as well as Fortune 500 multinational organizations. His expertise includes executive management development and coaching, succession planning, organizational design for high performance teams, and culture design for multinational organizations.

Dave has extensive experience in setting up Asian organizations and bridging cultural differences between Western and Eastern norms and values. He has hired and trained high performance teams throughout the world and has developed problem solving techniques that have become standards throughout the industry.

Dave’s career includes executive positions with Applied Materials, Novellus Systems, Advanced Micro Devices, as well as numerous technology start ups in the United States and Asia.

Dave received his BA in Liberal Arts at Bowling Green State University and completed his graduate studies there in 1978.

L.B. Day IV
Director

L.B. Day is president of L.B. Day & Company, Inc., a strategic planning and organization design consulting firm he co-founded in 1976. His specialty areas include strategic planning, corporate culture development, organization design, executive coaching, and team building. L.B. has consulted at the executive level with organizations that include Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Materials, Fluke Manufacturing, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, Pharmacia Upjohn, Raytheon, Sun Microsystems and various U.S. government agencies.

L.B. has held the positions of adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology and at the Willamette University Graduate School of Administration, and is presently on the advisory board of Willamette University's Atkinson Graduate School of Management.

He has been published in various trade publications on strategic planning, leading change, and team leadership. He is currently developing competitive factor assessments within the semiconductor industry geared to help client organizations incorporate their competitive assessment findings into their strategic plans.

He is a member of the board of directors of Microchip Technology, Inc. Mr. Day earned his MBA from George Washington University, where he was a Scottish Rite Fellow.

Erol Moore
Director

Martin Vlach, Ph.D.
Chairman of the Board

Sam Young
Director

Sam Young is VP of Marketing and Sales for Contour Semiconductor, a start-up with an innovative approach to non-volatile memory.  Sam is also President and CEO of Young and Associates, a firm formed to help pre-IPO companies in the area of sales channel and business development, strategic planning, general management, product and market positioning/strategy and strategic partnership creation.  Sam has over 35 years of experience in memory, logic, software, RF and embedded products.  He is co-founder of three high technology companies including Flash pioneer Exel Microelectronics (fundamental patent for Flash memory),  Corsair Microsystems (leading supplier of DRAM modules with several hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue) and Hyundai Electronics Flash memory division currently doing in excess of $2 billion in revenue.   Sam also held executive positions in several other successful companies ranging from start-up mode to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.   

Sam chaired the EIA/JEDEC standards committee for all memory from 1976 – 1980 and ran Dataquest’ s memory group as Director of worldwide memory research.  He has authored numerous articles including two cover stories in leading industry publications and chaired many industry conference sessions.  Sam holds a BSEE from Pratt University.

Jean E. Armstrong

Jean Armstrong, Principal and Founder of Armstrong & Associates Public Relations.

For more than 20 years, Jean has served as a strategic counsel to top executives in growing technology companies including Cadence Design Systems, CoWare, Extreme DA, Intel Systems Group, Intel Scientific Computers, and many more. She has also counseled executives in many start-up companies including Ambric, Enuclia Semiconductors, Lynguent, Inc., Teseda, WebTrends, and others. She has used her expertise to help these executives formulate and implement strategic marketing plans and programs, including product and technology introductions and ongoing communications programs to build awareness, market momentum and leadership. Jean has created and managed more than 100 successful media, analyst, and investor relations programs, along with M&A and pre- and post-IPO communication programs.

Before founding Armstrong & Associates Public Relations in late 2008, Jean was a founding partner of Armstrong Kendall, Inc. which delivered public relations services to technology companies for 10 years. For five years prior to that, she was a principal of the Alliance Consulting Group, Inc., a PR, investor relations, and marketing consulting firm and for six years before that a principal with Regis McKenna, Inc., the premier technology public relations firm. A founding member of the Software Association of Oregon (SAO), Jean served on its board of directors and on the advisory board of the Northwest Capital Network. She currently serves on the board of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of the Northwest. Jean has an M.B.A. from Portland State University and a bachelor of commerce degree from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

Norman Armour

Norm Armour has overall responsibility for the development and execution of Fab 8 at the Luther Forest Technology Campus (LFTC) in Malta, New York. He will manage the sites overall strategic direction and focus on maximizing efficiency and agility to ensure Fab 8 meets or exceeds expectations for operations and customer-service for a world-class semiconductor foundry.

Prior to GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Armour served as vice president of fab consulting at Applied Materials, where he led a team of subject matter experts who provided consulting services to customers in the areas of fab productivity/yield, factory systems, and environmental services. Before that, Armour was vice president and general manager for LSI Logics Gresham operations, where he successfully ramped the green field start-up into high-volume manufacturing and achieved best-in-class factory systems and metrics in cycle time, line yield, defect density, and ASIC/SOC die cost. Armour also spent six years at AMD as director of operations first at Fab 10 and then Fab 25, and participated in the initial programming of our Dresden operations.

Armour holds a bachelors degree in chemistry from Southern Methodist University in Texas.

Scott Carr

Robert Harmon, Ph.D.

Dr. Robert Harmon is Professor of Marketing and Technology Management at Portland State University, where he teaches in the MBA and Engineering and Technology Management programs. He has a joint appointment in the School of Business and the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. He served two terms as Chairman of the Marketing Department and currently serves as the Director of the Marketing Area in the School of Business.

Previous faculty affiliations include the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird), Arizona State University, Oregon Health Sciences University, and the Oregon Executive MBA Program. He was an American Marketing Association Doctoral Consortium Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Harmon's research has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Business and Society, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Decision Sciences.

Dr. Harmon has over 20 years of experience as a technology-marketing consultant working with clients in the software, computer hardware, semiconductor, flat panel display, and medical industries. He is a member of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science Advisory Board at Portland State University. He received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in Marketing, Psychology, and Information Systems.

Nic Herriges

Nic Herriges, Principal and Owner of Northwest Tech Counsel.

For twenty-plus years Nic has been a trusted advisor to leading Electronic Design Automation companies in the area of Intellectual Property, Patent and Commercial Law. His clients have included Mentor Graphics, Analogy (now part of Synopsys) and Cadence Design Systems. He has worked closely with engineering, marketing, finance and sales management teams to develop and implement intellectual property, patent portfolio management and commercial strategies that enable companies to maximize their return on R&D investments.

He has served on local non-profit boards, served on local government committees and has been active in the Oregon State Bar, serving as both Treasurer and Chair of the Computer and Internet Law Section. He has been admitted to practice at the USPTO as a patent attorney, and admitted to practice in Oregon, Minnesota and Montana and holds a B.A. from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and a J.D. from the University of Montana.

David Raffo, Ph.D.

Dr. David Raffo is a Full Professor at Portland State University with joint appointments in the Schools of Business Administration, Engineering, and Computer Science. He is a Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and CEO of Quantel Systems, Inc.

His research interests are Strategic Software and Systems Engineering, Economic Analysis of Engineering Decisions, Business Case Development, Software Process Improvement, Quality Assurance Planning and Quantitative Process Management. Dr. Raffo has over fifty peer reviewed publications in the field of software engineering and is Editor-in-Chief of the leading academic journal in the field of software process. He has received research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Software Engineering Research Center SERC), NASA, IBM, Tektronix, Motorola, Robert Bosch, and Northrop-Grumman.

Dr. Raffo's prior professional experience includes programming as well as managing software development and consulting projects at Arthur D. Little, Inc., where he received the company's Presidential Award for outstanding performance. Dr. Raffo received his Ph.D., ME, and MSIA degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and a BSE from the University of Michigan.

Edward Shober

Jeff Strickler

Jeff joined the Lynguent Advisory Board in 2008, bringing his 25+ years of experience with emerging and growth companies, primarily in the technology industries. Jeff currently serves as COO/CFO and VP of Northwest Evaluation Association, an Oregon-based not-for-profit engaged in educational assessments and professional services. Jeff has practiced law with Perkins Coie and has served in various executive leadership roles at several Northwest companies, including CFI ProServices/Harland Financial Systems, Vesta Corporation, Centrisoft Corporation and CakeBoxx LLC. Jeff has also provided advisory services for many start up organizations in the Portland area.

Jeff received a B.S. in Business Administration from Oregon State University in 1982 and J.D. degree from the University at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 1985.

Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor is vice president and director of Human Resources for Intel Corporation. In this role he oversees all human resources policies and programs for the company worldwide.

Taylor joined Intel in 1986 as European audit manager. From 1989 to 1997 he held positions of United Kingdom finance manager, European controller, controller mobile computing group and director of operations Europe. In 1998, Taylor was promoted to corporate controller, and in 1999 his duties were extended to include delivery of worldwide employee services.

Prior to joining Intel, Taylor was a corporate auditor for Mobil Oil Corporation from 1981 to 1986. He worked as an audit manager with Deloitte and Touche from 1976 to 1981.

Taylor received his bachelor's degree in psychology from Southampton University in the United Kingdom in 1976. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Dr. Peter Wilson

Dr. Peter Wilson is an EDA professional with 20 years of experience in tools and applications. He worked as a Senior Design Engineer on projects including the Eurofighter (Typhoon) at Ferranti, Scotland, before joining Analogy, Inc. where he was a Technical Specialist.

Since 1999 he has been at the University of Southampton, UK, where he is Senior Lecturer in Electronics and Computer Science and carries out research on high performance digital and mixed signal design electronic systems. He teaches courses in the area of System on Chip at Masters Level and is the course coordinator for the MSc in System on Chip at Southampton. In addition, Dr. Wilson has published over 50 papers in major journals and conferences.

Peter has a long history in the Electronics and EDA industries having worked for six years at Ferranti PLC, for five years at Analogy as a product specialist, and the last 8 years as an academic in the field. Dr. Wilson is the vice chair of the IEEE Standard 1076.1.1 (Multiple Domain Packages for VHDL-AMS) and Technical Program Chair for BMAS 2008 (IEEE Workshop on Behavioral Modeling and Simulation). He is a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Wilson is a SMIEEE, MIET, and Chartered Engineer in the UK.

Michael Wright