Berkeley Design is proud to have world-class technical and strategic advisors who help management ensure they are developing the strongest possible technology and company.

Technical Advisors

Alper Demir - KoC University (Co-inventor of new circuit analysis)
Dr. Demir received his B.S. from Bilkent University, Turkey, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991, 1994 and 1997, respectively. Dr. Demir was with Motorola (Summer 1995), Cadence (Summer 1996), Bell Laboratories Research (1997-2000), and CeLight (2000-2002, start-up in optical communications, as the Manager for Optical Telecommunications Systems Design). He is now with Koc University in Istanbul. The work Dr.Demir has done at Bell Labs and CeLight is the subject of several patents (three issued and several pending). Dr. Demir co-authored two books in the areas of nonlinear noise analysis and analog design methodologies, and published many articles in journals and conferences. He received several best paper awards: 2002 Best of ICCAD Award: 20 years of excellence in CAD, the 2003 IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award, and the 2004 IEEE Circuits & Systems Society Guillemin-Cauer Best Paper Award.

Floyd Gardner - IEEE Fellow (Phase-Locked Loop Expert)
Mr. Gardner has been an independent consulting engineer since 1960, specializing in data communications and electronics. He is a leading authority on phaselock loops and an internationally recognized expert on synchronization. Dr. Gardner is the author of Phaselock Techniques (2d, ed., Wiley, 1979), co-author of Simulation Techniques (Wiley, 1997) and The Stædt Program (Wiley, 2002), and author of 35+ journal articles. A third edition of Phaselock Techniques is in preparation. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a registered professional engineer in California.

Ranjit Gharpurey - Univ. of Texas (Substrate Noise, RF IC Expert)
Dr. Gharpurey received his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He was on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 2003 to 2005. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in 2003, he was a Member of the Technical Staff at Texas Instruments in Dallas from 1996-2003. His research interests are in the areas of RF and analog circuit design, substrate coupling analysis in mixed-signal and RF integrated circuits, and system analysis and architecture design for wireless transceivers, interdisciplinary applications of integrated circuits.

Kartikeya Mayaram - Oregon State Univ. (Analog Simulation Expert)
Dr. Mayaram received his B.E. (Hons) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, with distinction, June 1981 from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He received his MSEE from SUNY Stony Brook, NY in 1982, and the PhD. in EECS from the University of California Berkeley, in 1988. From 1988-1992, he was with Texas Instruments in Dallas, TX. From 1992-1996, he was with AT&T Bell Labs, where he managed activities in the RF CAD group. From 1996-1999, he was an Associate Professor at the School of EECS in Washington State University in Pullman, WA. From January 2000, he has been an Associate Professor in the ECE Department at Oregon State University. He has won the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 1997, Distinguished Paper Mention at the Intl. Conf. Computer-Aided Design, 1991, the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, EECS Department, UC Berkeley, 1987. He is the Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Trans. Computer-Aided Design, Jan. 2002 – present and was the Associate Editor, IEEE Trans. Computer-Aided Design, June 95 - Dec. 2001. His research interests are in the areas of circuit simulation, device simulation and modeling, simulation of RF circuits, simulation of microsystems, analog/RF circuit design. Dr. Mayaram is an IEEE Fellow.

Ali Niknejad - UC Berkeley (Analog IC Design, Device Modeling Expert)
Professor Niknejad received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994, and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and 2000. After graduation from Berkeley he worked at Silicon Laboratories in Austin, TX, where he was involved with the design and research of analog RF integrated circuits and devices for wireless communication applications. Presently he is an assistant professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. He is an active member at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and he is the co-director of the BSIM Research Group. He is currently serving as an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. As the author of ASITIC, Professor Niknejad has interacted with hundreds of IC companies worldwide in supporting this CAD tool. His current research interests lie within the area of wireless and broadband communications. This includes implementation of integrated communication systems in silicon using CMOS, SiGe, and BiCMOS processes, device physics and compact device modeling, and numerical techniques in electromagnetics particularly as applied to the analysis and modeling of active and passive devices at microwave frequencies.

Michael Perrott - MIT (Analog IC Design, Circuit Modeling Expert)
Dr. Perrott received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM in 1988, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and 1997, respectively. From 1997 to 1998, he worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, on high speed circuit techniques for Sigma-Delta synthesizers. In 1999, he was a visiting Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and taught a course on the theory and implementation of frequency synthesizers. From 1999 to 2001, he worked at Silicon Laboratories in Austin, TX, and developed circuit and signal processing techniques to achieve high performance clock and data recovery circuits. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and focuses on high speed circuit and signal processing techniques for data links and wireless applications.

Jaijeet Roychowdhury - Univ. of Minnesota (RF Simulation Expert)
Dr. Roychowdhury received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) in 1987, and a Ph.D degree in EECS from the University of California Berkeley in 1993. From 1993 to 1995, he was with the CAD Lab of AT\&T's Bell Laboratories in Allentown, PA; from 1995-2000, with the Communication Sciences Research Division of Lucent's Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ; and from 2000-2001, with CeLight, Inc., an optical networking startup in Silver Spring, MD. Since 2001, Dr. Roychowdhury has been with the ECE Department and the Digital Technology Center of the University of Minnesota. He received Distinguished or Best Paper Awards at ICCAD 1991, DAC 1997, ASP-DAC 1997 and ASP-DAC 1999, was cited for Extraordinary Achievement by Bell Laboratories, and serves (or has served) on the Technical Program Committees of DAC, ICCAD, BMAS and SCEE. He was named an IEEE CAS Society Distinguished Lecturer for the period 2003-4. Dr. Roychowdhury's professional interests include the design, analysis and simulation of electronic, electro-optical and mixed-domain systems, particularly for high-speed and high-frequency communications. He holds ten patents.

Strategic Advisor

Bill Unger - Partner-Emeritus, Mayfield Fund