Dr Ravi Pai
Chairman and Managing Director

Ravi has more than 18 years of experience in semiconductor and EDA industry. Ravi joined Silicon Automation Systems (now Sasken Communications Ltd.) in 1991, when it was an EDA startup in Bangalore. He later became the Senior Manager and head of EDA division. He was instrumental in growing the EDA division to size of 90+ engineers. His areas of interest include Physical Design Automation and Post Layout EDA tools. He has several technical papers published in reputed national and international conferences in the area of physical design automation.

Ravi holds Bachelors degree in Engineering (B.E.) from Mysore University and Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-Bombay.




Nachiket Urdhwareshe
Chief Executive Officer

Nachiket has more than 14 years experience in developing and managing EDA tools. He joined Silicon Automation Systems in Feb. 1992 and served as Senior Manager in EDA group, and later as Senior Engineering Manager in Silicon Automation Systems, Japan. His areas of expertise include System and Logic design tools, HDL Simulation and Synthesis. He has published several technical papers and was adjudged "EDN Asia Innovator of year 2000" by EDN Asia.

Nachiket holds Bachelors degree in Engineering (B.E.) from Indore University and Masters Degree in Technology (M.Tech.) from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay.




Shridhar Laddha
Director

Shridhar has more than 12 years of experience in developing EDA tools.He joined Silicon Automation Systems in 1994 and served as Project Leader in EDA group. He later on worked as a Project Leader at Synopsys, India. His areas of expertise include: Logic design tools, Hardware Description Languages and FPGA Synthesis tools. He has published several technical papers in international conferences.

Shridhar holds Bachelors degree in Engineering (B.E.) from Pune University and Masters Degree in Engineering (M.E.) from Department of Computer Science, Bombay University.




Kamal Aggarwal
VP Marketing & Strategy

Prior to joining SoftJin, Kamal was the co-founder and Director (Technology) at MeraNet, an Application Service Provider that provided contact management solutions to web portals and cellular service providers. Before that, Kamal worked at Cadence Design Systems R&D center at Noida (India) where he was involved in development of logic simulation products. He has over 8 years of experience in the EDA industry.

Kamal holds Bachelors degree in Computer Science & Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.




Jagmohan Nanaware
Director

Jagmohan joined Silicon Automation Systems in Feb. 1993 and has served as Project Leader in EDA group. He is currently a Product Line Manager in the Marketing Division of Sasken.
He has more than 8 years of experience in developing EDA tools. His areas of expertise
include: Simulation, Synthesis, Computational Geometry, multimedia codecs and embedded systems. He has published several technical papers in reputed international conferences.

Jagmohan holds Bachelors degree in Engineering (B.E.) from WCE, Sangali and Masters Degree in Engineering (M.E.) from Department of Computer Science, Bombay University.



ADVISORS

Prof. Pramod Chandra Purushottam Bhatt

Prof. Bhatt was a Senior Professor at Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIITB) from April 2001 to April 2004. Prior to IIITB, Prof. Bhatt was Professor and teaching at IIT Delhi from 1969 to 1996 including Chairman of Dept. of Computer Science (1984-1989). At IIT Delhi, Prof. Bhatt taught in various subject areas including Computer Organization -Architecture, CAD of VLSI, Symbolic Computing, Compilers, Software Engineering, Programming Languages and Operating Systems. As a Researcher, he supervised several PhD theses in the areas of CAD of VLSI, Computer Architecture and Parallel Algorithms. He also led the setting up of Design Automation Lab, AI and Robotics Lab and Education and Research Network (ERNET) Lab at IIT, Delhi.

Prof. Bhatt has undertaken Visiting Professor Assignments abroad in several universities in UK, Canada, Germany and Japan. He also served as a Director, Computer Development, Department of Electronics, Government of India (1980-82). He has published various papers in the areas of Computer Architecture, CAD of VLSI, parallel and distributed algorithms, distributed AI, Software engineering and Number Theory.

Prof. Bhatt holds a PhD from IIT, Kanpur and M.E. from Calcutta University.




Rajat Gupta

Rajat is currently Managing Director, Beceem Communications Pvt. Ltd., India. From July 1999 to Jan 2004, Rajat was the Managing Director of Cypress Semiconductor India where he was responsible for the P&L of Indian operations. He also directed teams in emerging product areas, hiring as well as liaison with Industry and Academia. Prior to Cypress, Rajat was VP Technology Development at Arcus Technology, Bangalore (India) for seven years. At Arcus, Rajat developed analog and mixed signal design technology in-house to enable Arcus to address the emerging mixed-signal market. He developed and successfully implemented a self bootstrapped growth strategy for Arcus based on a high technology content IC design service model. Arcus was eventually acquired by Cypress. Prior to Arcus, Rajat was Design Manager at Semi-Conductor Complex Ltd., Chandigarh (India) for ten years. At SCL, Rajat led design teams for the development of several ASICs for Defense, Space and other Government agencies.

Rajat holds B.E. (Electronics & Tele-Communications) from Calcutta University and M.Tech (Integrated Electronics & Circuits) from IIT, Delhi. He holds 3 Patents and has published 5 Papers in the semiconductor domain. He was adjudged “EDN Asia Innovator” in July 1996 by EDN Asia.