Atul Sharan is a 20+ year veteran of the hi-tech industry with experience as an engineer, manager, serial entrepreneur, senior executive and angel investor.

Prior to joining AutoESL in October 2008 he was co-founder, President and CEO of Clear Shape Technologies, Inc., which was acquired by Cadence in August 2007 where he then served as a Corporate Consultant. Previously Mr. Sharan was a resident at Mohr-Davidow Ventures, a premier Silicon Valley Venture firm while also providing CEO-consulting to start-ups. From 1998 to 2003, Mr. Sharan was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Numerical Technologies, Inc. He was instrumental in growing the company from pre-revenue stage to a highly successful IPO in April 2000 and was a driver for its acquisition by Synopsys in 2003 where he then served Vice President. In addition, Mr. Sharan held executive and engineering management positions at Ambit Design Systems (acquired by Cadence in 1998); from 1991 to 1997 Mr. Sharan was at Compass Design Automation, where as GM-India Operations, he established a software development center in India. Mr. Sharan also worked for VLSI Technologies and Integrated Device Technology. At IDT he helped initiate the company's first overseas Test and Assembly plant in Penang, Malaysia.

Mr. Sharan has an MBA from University of California, Berkeley, an MS in Engineering from Houston, Texas and a B. Tech Degree in Engineering from IIT, Kanpur - India. He is a charter member of TIE, an organization devoted exclusively to entrepreneurism.

Dr. Varma has an extensive and extremely rare combination of successful business and technical experience in the electronics industry. In 2002 he founded Calypto Design Automation and was CEO until 2006 leading the company through multiple funding rounds, multiple successful  product launches and to its current growth stage. He was subsequently Chairman of the Board at Calypto. Earlier he was a Founder and Managing Director of Caltos Capital, a venture capital firm. Prior to that he was a founding-employee of Ambit Design Systems (where he worked with Mr. Sharan) as Head of R&D and CTO. Dr. Varma was also a key driver of Ambit's acquisition by Cadence. Subsequent to the acquisition by Cadence he was a Cadence Fellow and a Vice President & CTO of the Ambit Group of Cadence. He has held senior engineering positions at Silicon Compiler Systems, Mentor Graphics and Viewlogic Systems. Dr. Devadas served on the Board of Directors of Optim Networks and ArcadiaOne.

Dr. Varma received his BSEE at Indian Institute of Technology India, his MSEE at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland and his Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In addition, he has pubished several patents and papers especially in the area of logic synthesis.

Dr. Pan has 15+ years of research and product development experience in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Prior to joining AutoESL, he was a Director of Product Development at Magma Design Automation, Inc, working on RTL and physical synthesis for FPGA and ASIC. Before that, Dr. Pan was a founding member and the Director of Engineering at Aplus Design Technologies, Inc, an FPGA physical synthesis startup, which was later acquired by Magma. He also worked at Strategic CAD Labs, Intel Corporation and spent over two years as a tenure-track professor at Clarkson University.

Dr. Pan has a Ph. D. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has over 30 technical publications in algorithm design and EDA.

Mr. Seynhaeve has more than 20 years of experience in ASIC design, FPGA design, and EDA industry experience spanning the entire design flow. Mr. Seynhaeve started his career with Philips and Signetics where he developed his strong DSP and processor design background. Most recently he was at Mentor Graphics where he was involved with Place & Route and DFM with Mentor's formidable Calibre product line. Prior to Mentor, Mr. Seynhaeve was at Blaze DFM, where he managed multiple customer tape-outs of bleeding edge designs, focused on leakage power and timing closure issues.

Mr. Seynhaeve feels his real calling is ESL/DSP. At Synplicity, he architected the company's DSP solutions and built them out single-handedly to an independent product line in the Synplicity product portfolio. Prior to Synplicity, Mr. Seynhaeve was Director of Technical Marketing at Tera Systems where he focused on defining the product line and implementation strategies for RTL hand-off. In addition, Mr. Seynhaeve also held Director of Applications/Technical-Marketing positions at Tharas Systems and Escalade. In both companies, he was instrumental in building the complete team and infrastructure for world-wide application and customer support. Prior to that, at Compass Design Automation, Mr. Seynhaeve was responsible for applications, design and support activities with multiple large customers worldwide.

Mr. Seynhaeve holds an MSEE from the KU Louvain University, Belgium.

Dr. Cong received his B.S. degree in computer science from Peking University in 1985, his M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Currently, he is a Chancellor's Professor at the Computer Science Department of University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-director of the VLSI CAD Laboratory. He also served as the department chair from 2005 to 2008.

Dr. Cong co-founded AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. in Jan. 2006, which licensed research results on high-level and system-level synthesis from the UCLA VLSI CAD Lab for commercialization. He serves as the Chief Technology Advisor and Chairman of the Board of AutoESL. Dr. Cong was also the founder and president of Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. (founded in 1998), until it was acquired by Magma Design Automation in 2003. In addition, Dr. Cong has served on the Technical Advisory Board of a number of EDA and silicon IP companies, including Atrenta, eASIC, Get2Chip, and Magma Design Automation.

Dr. Cong's research interests include computer-aided design of VLSI circuits and systems, design and synthesis of system-on-a-chip, programmable systems, novel computer architectures, nano-systems, and highly scalable algorithms. He has published over 300 research papers and led over 30 research projects in these areas. Dr. Cong received a number of awards and recognitions, including t the Ross J. Martin Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993, the Northrop Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award from UCLA in 1993, the ACM/SIGDA Meritorious Service Award in 1998, and the SRC Technical Excellence Award in 2000. He also received four Best Paper Awards selected for the 1995 IEEE Trans. on CAD, the 2005 International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), the 2005 ACM Transaction on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, and the 2008 International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), respectively. He was elected to an IEEE Fellow in 2000 and ACM Fellow in 2008.

Dr. Cong has graduated 24 PhD students. A number of them are now faculty members in major research universities, including Georgia Tech., Purdue, SUNY Binghamton, UCLA, UIUC, and UT Austin. Others are taking key R&D or management positions in major EDA/computer/semiconductor companies (such as Broadcom, Cadence, IBM, Intel, Magma, and Synopsys) or being founding members of high-tech startups (including Aplus and AutoESL).

Prior to co-founding AutoESL, Dr. Fan was at the VLSI CAD laboratory in the Computer Science Department at UCLA (2001-2006), and also at Magma Design Automation (2004). During his Ph.D. research work at UCLA he co-developed, along with other AutoESL co-founders, an innovative high-level-synthesis system, xPilot, that solved heretofore unaddressed problems in system- and behavior-level synthesis problems. Dr. Fan has one patent over 17 publications in the area of electronic design automation. His expertise includes large CAD software architect and development, and electronic system design and verification.

In addition to his Ph. D. from UCLA, Dr. Fan also received M.S. & B.S. degrees in Computer Science with honors in from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Dr. Zhang worked for the VLSI CAD laboratory at the Computer Science Department at UCLA (2001-2006) and also at Altera Corporation (2004), where he has gained deep circuit and algorithm design knowledge and experience. During his Ph.D. research work at UCLA, he co-developed the innovative xPilot synthesis system that solved heretofore unaddressed problems in system- and behavior-level synthesis problems. Dr. Zhang has over 20 publications in the area of Electronic Design Automation.

Dr. Zhang holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA. He has received the Outstanding Ph.D. Award - the highest honor - from UCLA for the year of his graduation.