Sonics Fortifies Sales Leadership Team to Target Emerging Markets For SoCs

Hayssam Balach Returns to the Company as VP Global Sales; Marcelle Loveday Focuses on Role as VP of Major Accounts

November 19, 2013 – Sonics, Inc., the world’s foremost supplier of network-on-chip (NoC) technologies and services, today appointed Hayssam Balach to the position of Vice President of Global Sales. After his successful tenure with the Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA), Balach returns to Sonics to lead its next phase of growth addressing the market opportunity for NoC in complex, systems-on-chip (SoC) that power devices in the consumer digital, communications, and information technology markets. To further strengthen its sales organization and leadership, Marcelle Loveday is moving from her current position as Vice President of North American Sales into the role of Vice President of Major Accounts where she will focus her full attention on day-to-day and long-range customer requirements of strategic accounts.

“As we progress into the mobile cloud era with its rapid convergence of compute and communications systems, our NoC products are more relevant to SoC design success than ever before,” said Grant Pierce, Sonics CEO. “We see a window of opportunity to not only improve our NoC market share lead versus the competition, but also position the Company for future growth. People are at the heart of what we do to make our customers successful with their SoC designs. As we address new markets such as the Internet of Things, we plan to add more outstanding semiconductor industry professionals like Hayssam Balach and Marcelle Loveday.”

About Balach and Loveday

Balach is a seasoned semiconductor industry executive with more than 20 years of technology, operations, and sales experience. Prior to re-joining Sonics, he served as Senior Vice President for Business Development at DSOA where he provided oversight of the organizations’ technology investments while highlighting its role as a facilitator of entrepreneurship, innovation, and research and development in the Middle East region.

Balach previously spent 11 years with Sonics and most recently held the position of Vice President of Operations for Europe and Asia. In that role, he drove significant growth in licensing revenues and played a key role in signing on Asia and Europe’s largest semiconductor integrated device manufacturers. Earlier in his career, Balach held positions of increasing responsibility at MIPS Technologies, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Seiko Epson. Balach has received an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from University of California, Santa Cruz.

“I am excited to be back at Sonics to write the next chapter of the on-chip network market,” said Balach. “Sonics has the best interconnect technology, engineers, system architects, and customers in the business. I look forward to bringing more customers into the fold as we expand the product portfolio and services to capitalize on our opportunities.”

Loveday has been a key sales and business development executive at Sonics since joining the Company in 2002. Under her watch as Vice President of North American Sales, Sonics established executive-level and engineering relationships with several of the world’s top semiconductor companies including Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, Toshiba America, and Marvell. These relationships helped Sonics exceed $100 million in total NoC sales revenues.

In addition to driving the sales team, Loveday has been an important contributor to Sonics’ product roadmap for the wireless handset and digital consumer markets and helped build partnerships with Cadence, Intel, and CoWare. Prior to Sonics, Loveday held director and management level positions with Wyle Design Services, Advanced Micro Devices, and Monolithic Memories. She received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

Loveday’s new role as VP of Major Accounts is a natural extension of her success at Sonics and a critical component of the Company’s overall sales organization as it focuses on the new market opportunities ahead. The goal of Major Accounts is to accelerate growth by ensuring that Sonics’ NoC products and services are broadly adopted and deeply embedded within customers’ SoC engineering organizations and cultures. These collaborative Major Account relationships are also critical to the evolution of Sonics’ technology to address both current and future market requirements.

“I’ve had the great pleasure of working with the world’s top semiconductor and system companies,” said Loveday. “As SoCs for our target markets continue to increase in speed and complexity, these companies face daunting technical challenges to connect the growing number of processor cores in their designs. Helping customers meet these challenges compels us to dedicate sales and engineering resources that ensure the best possible results in the shortest time using our NoC technology.”

About Sonics, Inc.

Sonics, Inc., headquartered in Milpitas, CA, was the first company to develop and commercialize on-chip interconnect to accelerate volume production of complex, systems-on-chip (SoC) containing multiple processor cores. As the pioneer of network-on-chip (NoC) technology since its inception in 1996, Sonics offers SoC designers a comprehensive portfolio of interconnect technologies that deliver the communication performance required by today’s most innovative consumer digital, communications, and information technology devices and electronic products. Sonics is dedicated to SoC customer success and providing the best NoC design experience in the semiconductor industry. Evidence of Sonics’ NoC leadership and accomplishments include more than 138 patent properties held and shipment of more than two billion SoCs by its global customers. For more information, please visit www.sonicsinc.com, www.sonicsinc.com/blog.