Achronix Management Team

Robert Blake has worked in the semiconductor industry for over 25 years. Prior to Achronix Semiconductor he was the Chief Executive Officer of Octasic Semiconductor based in Montreal, Canada. Mr. Blake worked at Altera in a variety of sales, marketing and general management roles. As Vice President of Product Planning he was responsible for defining Altera’s programmable logic product solutions. He has been developing ASIC and programmable logic for high speed telecom and network applications for over 17 years. Prior to Altera, he worked at LSI Logic and Fairchild where he developed ASIC technology. He holds a MEng. in Business and Microelectronics and BSc. in Applied Physics & Electronics from the University of Durham in England.

Steve has over 25 years in senior management roles in the FPGA industry. Prior to joining Achronix, Steve was Sr. Director of Marketing at Altera where he was responsible for FPGA Product Marketing, Customer and Channel Marketing, IP Marketing, Strategic Partnerships, and Corporate Marketing. During Steve's tenure at Altera, his contributions and leadership helped Altera grow its revenue from fifty million dollars per year to over two billion dollars per year. Steve holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BSEE from UC Santa Barbara.

Pohan has over 30 years of experience in semiconductor sales across multiple vertical markets and applications. Prior to joining Achronix, Pohan held various senior sales management positions at Marvell, Cavium, QLogic, Vixel, and Western Digital. These positions include Vice President of Worldwide OEM sales, Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan Sales, and Vice President of Business Development. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Marvell Sales and China Country Manager based in Shanghai where he successfully accelerated the business growth through strategic design wins and market share gain while managing through the integration of multiple acquisitions and divestiture. Pohan holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Irvine.

Virantha N. Ekanayake has been developing multi-GHz custom and reprogrammable asynchronous logic for over 12 years. Prior to Achronix, Dr. Ekanayake was an Assistant Professor in the Department of ECE at Johns Hopkins University where he headed the Asynchronous VLSI and Architecture group before joining Achronix full-time in 2006. From high-level system specification to back-end custom and semi-custom circuit design, he has been involved in the reprogrammable fabric design for several FPGAs in advanced nodes ranging from 90nm down to 28nm and 22nm, and has numerous patents and publications in this field. Dr. Ekanayake holds a B.A and B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Dartmouth College, as well as an M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Recognized as an industry veteran and renowned in the field of FPGA architecture and EDA software, Dr. Choudhary is the Vice President of Software Engineering at Achronix Semiconductor. He has over 14 years of experience in the programmable logic field and holds more than 24 patents in various areas of FPGA hardware, architecture, testing, and software algorithms including placement, mapping and synthesis. Prior to joining Achronix, Dr. Choudhary was a Distinguished Engineer at Xilinx. During his tenure he held numerous R&D positions and played vital roles such as Virtex FPGA Architect and has received numerous awards from Xilinx for his innovation and technical contributions. Before Xilinx he was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Electronics Research Lab, University of California at Berkeley focused on performance driven placement, compaction, logic synthesis and other FPGA advancements. Dr. Choudhary holds a Bachelors of Technology in Electrical Engineering and Masters of Technology in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India. He has a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

Kent Orthner has over 25 years of experience working with working with all aspects of FPGA technology and high-speed silicon connectivity. At Achronix, he leads the development and implementation of our cutting-edge devices and IP solutions. Before Achronix, Kent served as the Vice President of Engineering at Arteris, where he was responsible for all hardware and software development, and where he developed and released the world’s first highly scalable and configurable cache-coherent interconnect IP. Before that, Kent spent 11 years at Altera, leading multiple cross-functional engineering teams, including IP infrastructure, system Integration tools, debug and design visibility tools, and bring-up and regression test infrastructures.   Kent’s expertise and vision drive innovation, ensuring Achronix remains at the forefront of FPGA and accelerator technology. Kent holds a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Canada, and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Mr. Nijssen has over 20 years of experience in the FPGA and EDA industries in various technical and management positions. Mr. Nijssen joined Achronix as Chief Software Architect to manage the software development group, define the foundations and algorithms of the software system, and architect key aspects of the company’s FPGA architectures. In his current role, he is responsible for the productization of the company’s current products and R&D for new technologies for future products. Prior to Achronix, Mr. Nijssen was at Tabula where he was responsible for placement and timing analysis of a time-multiplexed FPGA technology. Prior to Tabula, he was one of the first engineers at Magma Design Automation, and held multiple leadership positions in charge of routing and placement, data models and customer deployment of Magma’s Blast Plan Pro hierarchy hierarchical virtual prototyping and floorplanning products for very large ASIC designs. Mr. Nijssen received his MSEE degree from Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands, and after that followed its postgraduate program studying EDA for VLSI. He holds several patents related to P&R and asynchronous circuit technologies.

Mr. Jurrat is responsible for all aspects of manufacturing and delivery of Achronix products. He brings over 20 years experience in New Product Introduction (NPI) engineering, global supply chain management, supplier relationships, import/export compliance, logistics as well as product- and reliability engineering. He also leads the quality organization driving continuous improvement to the highest quality standards for design, manufacture, training, measurement, post-sale customer support and reliability engineering. Mr. Jurrat joined Achronix in 2008 after serving in a variety of process manufacturing technology, supply chain management, manufacturing and product and test engineering and quality management positions most recently at ChipX, Infineon and Siemens Automotive. He holds a M.S. in Electrical and Microsystems Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences in Regensburg, Germany and Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado.