The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 15)
Check other articles in the series...SM: What you are proposing sounds very disruptive. AA: It is completely disruptive; we can displace, depending on the market, FPGAs, DSPs, processors, ASICS. Right now initial markets are really in networking, but the fundamental technology is revolutionary. It will be the way all multicore systems are built in the future.
SM: What about your management team. What have you done to put people around you who can scale this as a usiness? AA: I am the CTO, we have a world class team of people. These people are real veterans, otherwise we could not get a working chip and software system so quickly. They have done this again and again and again.
The CEO is Devesh Garg. He was the GM of the security division at Broadcom. John Brown, who leads the IC effort, was the leader in the development of the low cost Alpha line at Digital. So he has pulled a lot of people out of the old Alpha team, and also people from the low power Athelon development. It is a great heritage there.
On the software side, Richard Schooler is the VP of software. He was a director at Microsoft, so he moved to Boston to lead the team in software. He has an excellent software team as well.
Rao Gattupalli was a director at Cisco building services and routers. He is the VP of applications and solutions, and is developing the customer solutions for us, and leads a team of application engineers.
Then we have VP of Operations Nagaraj Murthy. He knows how to deliver chips. He was with ATI, Intel, and a few others.
Vijay Aggarwal is head of business development and sales.
The team is really a world class team of 64 people, all veterans in the industry. A lot of things have come together to pull something like this together.
SM: It should be exciting. AA: Investors are great, they gave us $40M. They are Bessemer, Walden, Columbia Capital, and VTA. VTA is the venture arm of TSMC, who is also our foundry. All of the stars are lined up.
SM: That is great. Good luck, and I look forward to tracking the rest of the story as you move along.
This segment is part 15 in a 15 part series
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A wonderful interview. I enjoyed both the questions and the wonderfully simple Answer from Prof. Anant Agarwal.
Some of his comments about displacing FPGA and ASIC and Large scale DSP is very interesting.
I think really good tools and programming option will improve the success of his company.
A good sign for programmers and somewhat bad sign for FPGA and custom DSP developers.
FPGA still has the lead in prototyping and also for some low-power and high performance application. Reducing the Power might be the next big challenge for this kind of architecture so that they can beat FPGA in many market.
In one of our project we found the performance of FPGA and this kind of parallel architecture is comparable. Power consumption wise FPGA is still leading the game.
P.S: I would love to work in this kind of startup company.