Management/Technical Team

Sathyam Pattanam, President, CEO and Co-Founder

Sathyam has over 35+ years of experience in company and engineering management and in software development primarily in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies. He has headed companies, global engineering and marketing organizations in Fortune-500 (4) and in startups (8) companies to introduce innovative and successful products. He has led several startups such as Karthik Electronics, Atrenta, and ArchPro Design Automation to successful mergers and acquisitions. Sathyam's current roles are also as CTO and Board Member at Optima Design Automation, and as President, CTO, Co-Founder at SandFirst Inc. His prior roles were at Avery Design Systems, Atrenta, Synopsys, ArchPro, BlueSpec, Cadence Design Systems, AT&T Bell Labs, Karthik Electronics and Hindustan Teleprinters Ltd. His experience in EDA includes SoC Design, Low Power Verification, Electronic System Level Design and Verification, Logic Design Simulation/Formal Verification/Emulation, Fault Simulation and Integrated Circuit Layout Extraction, Design-rule Checking, and Compaction. He has organized and participated as Presenter and Panelist at several IEEE sponsored conferences. Sathyam has a mini-MBA from Santa Clara University, USA, MS (Computer Engineering) from Rutgers University, USA, and a B.Tech (Electronics) from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He enjoys playing cricket, table-tennis and billiards in his leisure.

Dr. Rahul Razdan, Chairman, Chief Technical Advisor and Co-founder

Dr. Rahul Razdan is a seasoned scientist and business executive who has had significant roles in the world of academia, startups, and fortune 500 companies. In corporate roles, he was the Sr Vice President of Strategy for Flextronics (FLEX), General Manager of the System and Functional Verification Business at Cadence Design Systems(CDNS), and Alpha CPU architect at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He has successfully built successful startups in areas such wireless power, machine learning, and low-power electronics design. In academia, beyond a large range of worldwide collaborations, he maintains academic appointments at the University of Florida, Florida Polytechnic University, and Institute for Human Machine Cognition. Today, he is CEO of Raztech Research Institute (razinstitute.com ), a technology based research institute which incubates ideas in the intersection of technology and society. Active projects for the institute include avvc.net in the area of autonomous vehicles, nextgenedu.net in the area of STEM education, and Anew-da.com in the area of EDA for long life cycle products. He has a BS (1984) and MS (1985) from CMU and Phd from Harvard University (1994)."

Hemant Shah, Advisor, Product Strategy and Marketing

Hemant Shah is the chairman of the IPC-2581 Consortium. Shah led the effort to create an industry wide consortium of design and supply chain companies to get IPC-2581 – the standard for transferring PCB design data to manufacturing – adopted. He was with Cadence Design Systems until April 2020 as Group Director of Product Management for Allegro PCB & FPGA products. Prior to managing the PCB and FPGA products, he managed the Allegro Signal and Power Integrity products for PCB & IC Packaging. Shah also led an industry wide effort to get a new, revolutionary algorithmic modeling standard (IBIS-AMI) approved and adopted.

Prior to joining Cadence in year 2000, Hemant worked at Xynetix Inc. in R&D and Marketing roles, and before that at Intergraph Corporation as senior R&D manager. He is passionate about developing, marketing leading edge software products for PCB design.

Hemant has a Master’s in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA and a Bachelor’s of Science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.

Faiq Fazal, VP Engineering

Faiq has 35+ years of hands-on software development, engineering management and product delivery experience spanning many areas including storage systems, electronics design automation, enterprise systems and telecommunications. Over the years Faiq has led cross-functional and cross-geographical teams on many large projects. His management style is focussed on business goals and results, maintaining a positive and optimistic outlook, quickly adapting to changes and leading by example. Faiq has also practised various software development models such as AGILE, SCRUM, Waterfall, etc on several products. Over the years Faiq has led software development within many companies including Honeywell, ATT Bell Labs, Protocol (a division of Zycad), Cadence Design Systems, Knowlent and most recently at Dell-EMC. His experience in EDA includes functional simulation and hazard analysis as applied to both ASIC and system design, hardware acceleration of functional and fault simulation and analog design verification tools. Faiq has a strong interest and experience in AI/ML technology which is much required for the AI/ML based products at Anew Design Automation. Faiq has a B.Tech in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India and a Masters in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Faiq loves spending time fixing things in his house or lawn or doing projects with his Arduino kit. Faiq also has a very strong interest in promoting STEM within the K-12 education curriculum.

Rick Meitzler, Architect

Rick has over 20 years working in EDA. He worked at Cadence Design Systems as a GUI Senior Member of Consulting Staff working on the SimVision and Indago Debug environments for logic simulation and formal verification products. He helped architecting the design and implementation of the SimVision GUI application, with extra focus on the source browser and waveform windows. Rick was instrumental in defining and implementing the walk-up connection features in SimVision which allowed the debugger to be run in a client-server mode. He was a key contributor to the overall usability of the SimVision product and worked to improve the tool over the years. For the Indago debug environment Rick was the designer and developer responsible for the waveform tool. Rick also worked to design and develop the methods used to access data from multiple engines for Indago to be used by the GUI and has a patent on this. Before this Rick started his career in the Navy for 6 years on submarines as an electronics technician. Rick worked at Stratus Computer for 11 years, working on Design and Verification Methodology and tools development, while attending classes at Northeastern University for Computer Science. In his spare time Rick enjoys living on the lake in New Hampshire, USA, boating and fishing.