Movellus Names Semiconductor Industry Veteran Ken Wagner to Lead Engineering Team

Movellus co-founder Jeff Fredenburg also promoted to CTO as part of executive team expansion to meet accelerating demand

SAN JOSE, CA, and ANN ARBOR, MI, February 20, 2020 — Movellus, a leader in design-optimized, process portable “analog” IP technology, today announced the appointment of Dr. Ken Wagner as Vice President of Engineering. The hiring of the semiconductor, IP, and software veteran underscores Movellus’ commitment to ensuring its customers have the industry’s most advanced analog IP in substantially shorter delivery times, as well as its goal to rapidly expand the company’s analog IP coverage.

Dr. Wagner brings decades of semiconductor experience from companies such as Sidense and PMC-Sierra, where he served as VP of Engineering; he was also a Solutions Director at Synopsys. Dr. Wagner is also an adjunct professor of ECE at McGill University. He received his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a BSEE with honors from McGill University. He holds 12 patents.

“Dr. Wagner’s strong track record in building and running multi-site teams, and as both a provider and consumer of IP and tools, will be invaluable to Movellus as we grow our team and expand our technology,” said Mo Faisal, President and CEO of Movellus. “Further, his deep SoC design expertise will ensure that Movellus IPs are implemented for the best possible performance, power and area as it pertains to the entire system and not just the IP blocks.”

As complexity and the need for customization grow and delivery schedules shrink, the demand for Movellus’ digitally-implemented, design-optimizable “analog” IP continues to increase at a rapid pace.

“Movellus offers a unique opportunity to remove the major analog roadblock when developing leading edge SoCs and chips with greatly accelerated delivery times,” said Wagner. “Their solution is architected to deliver the highest quality analog IP possible, while removing the need for long development cycles or to purchase off-the-shelf IPs that require design customization to use properly. It’s exciting to be a part of accelerating the industry impact.”

As part of this executive expansion, Movellus co-founder Dr. Jeff Fredenburg has been promoted from Vice President of Engineering to Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Fredenburg, who was instrumental in developing early architectures and software processes for Movellus’ underlying technology, will now increase his technology development focus as the company builds additional products and further extends it analog IP coverage.

“Expanding our executive engineering team equips Movellus to scale its technology innovation and breadth, while continuing to achieve rapid engineering execution for its customers,” stated Dr. Jeff Fredenburg, Movellus’ CTO. “I was impressed with Dr. Wagner’s success in managing global teams and his extensive design implementation, embedded software, and product lifecycle management track record — applied to diverse products from the IP level to the system level.”

About Movellus Product Portfolio

Movellus uses digital tools and standard cells to create analog IP blocks with better power, performance and area than their custom analog counterparts. Additionally, each IP is process-portable, customizable and DFT enabled. This type of automation enables customers to utilize analog components that are optimized for their design instead of the other way around and meet their aggressive schedules.

About Movellus

Movellus uses digital infrastructure to automatically produce design-optimized, process portable analog blocks that serve both the high-performance cloud computing and the ultra-low power edge AI markets. Movellus’ customers span cloud computing, AI, edge AI, and FPGA markets.