Executive Team
Sunit Saxena
Chairman, CEO & President
Sunit has over 27 years of extensive and wide-ranging experience in the silicon chip and other industries. Prior to co-founding Altierre in 2002, he was an Exec. Officer/COO/Exec VP of various companies including Alliance Semiconductor and Sandcraft Inc and has managed very large P&L’s in the most competitive sectors of the silicon industry. He has run far flung high volume Worldwide Operations & Engineering shipping over 150 million chips and modules annually out of several countries. He has set up several satellite centers on tightly managed budgets. He has successfully engineered and delivered product to most Tier 1 companies, including IBM, AT&T, HP, Cisco, Siemens, etc. and the Dept of Defense. Sunit has close top level relationships with manufacturing partners across Asia, including Taiwan, China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Korea, etc. He was key in the growth of Altera from its early days to a highly profitable, several hundred million dollar business. He has been instrumental in several startup companies ranging from the biotech to medical and defense industries and has designed complex projects like tank gunner training systems and 3-D medical image scanning platforms. He has worked with a vast array of silicon product types and technologies ranging across wireless, memories, microprocessors, networking chipsets, PLD's, etc. He holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University & an M.S. in Solid State Physics from IIT Delhi, India. Sunit was selected for the National Science Talent scholarship and was ranked in the top 30 in the nation.
_______________________________________________________________________
Anurag Goel
CTO & VP Software Development
Anurag Goel has over 26 years experience in systems engineering, product design, development, product management, product evangelism and marketing of robust enterprise scale software products. His technology experience ranges from computer image processing & pattern recognition, hardware interfaces, CAD/PLM and enterprise software. Prior to co-founding Altierre in 2002, he worked as product architect and group manager for EDS /PLM, McDonnell Douglas, Medstone and Amada. Early in his career at EDS/PLM, he was the Technical Manager of the Geometric Modeling and Feature Modeling products, managing local software teams as well as extended offshore teams in Israel and India. Later, he was one of the chief architects of EDS/PLM’s KBE products where he single-handedly designed & developed a Java-based interpretive KBE language, a remote KBE client and framework for the KBE Engine application server. This work was adopted later as the next generation KBE/CAD product. At EDS/PLM, several products were designed under his stewardship and are currently in use at companies such as GEAE, Pratt & Whitney and GM. He later founded Afferent Technologies to build the next generation KBE/PLM product. At Medstone, he developed a Stereoscopic Vision System that was key in the success of the company’s lithotripter product. At Amada, he developed a prototype six-axis YAG-laser machining center, worked extensively on a linear-motor platform based CO2-laser machining system, developed CO2-laser welding system and developed a large library of pattern recognition software for punch-press and laser-cut parts. He holds an MS Mechanical Engineering/Mathematics from UC Irvine and a BS from IIT Kanpur, India. A compulsive inventor, he has, taken up the NASA challenge to create the space-warp drive.
_______________________________________________________________________
Shan Kumar
CFO & VP Marketing
Shan Kumar has over 24 years of experience in finance and marketing strategy with top
tier US retailers. He was most recently the VP of Category Marketing and Planning at
Albertsons. He initiated the company's first ever collaborative marketing planning with
suppliers (came to be known as ACBP)and develop multi-year product segment business
plans. He led the company's efforts to streamline category management with changes to
organizational structure, incentives and new pricing & promotional planning tools. He
also led the centralization of the pricing function and establishing pricing strategies. He
deployed the Khimetrics price optimization tool successfully in two divisions. Prior to
Albertsons he was at Safeway for 16 years where he successfully led their SCOP category
management efforts to establish marketing strategies by product lines and growing
identical store sales. He has held progressively senior positions in Corporate Marketing
Planning, Financial Planning and Analysis and Corporate Strategy divisions. He has an
MBA in Finance from the Wharton Business School.
_______________________________________________________________________
Ravi Bhatnagar
VP Digital Systems and Digital IC Development
Ravi has over 30 years of experience in designing integrated circuits. In the 80’s he led the development of the PC AT chipset at Chips and Technologies (acquired by Intel) that gave birth to the IBM PC clone market. This enabled the widespread use of the IBM PC. At Chips and Technologies he was Vice President of the $190M personal computer division at where he successfully led a team of 150 developers to develop the first clean-room 486 class microprocessor outside Intel. This was fully compatible with the Intel instruction set as well as Windows applications software. Later, he was the Vice President of the Personal Systems division at Cirrus Logic, where he successfully designed and put into production several products including an ARM based network computer, ARM based Smart phone, ARM based PDA, and an ARM based ATM SOC. These products had successful design wins at Apple and Motorola. Ravi later started LinkUp, a Smartphone and PDA applications processor company, which he successfully merged into Neomagic Corp. At LinkUp, Ravi developed close working relationships with Intel and several offshore companies from whom he successfully raised 3 rounds of funding for the company. After the merger, he was Senior VP at Neomagic, where led the joint program development with Analog Devices for the final form factor GPRS smart phone. He also led the Windows CE strategy for Neomagic with Microsoft. Most recently Ravi was the Senior Vice President of development at Nethra Imaging. At Nethra, he led the design of several high performance, low power and low cost image processing chips to enable high quality images on inexpensive cell phone cameras. Ravi has a BSEE from IIT Kharagpur in India and an MSEE and Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley.
_______________________________________________________________________
Ken Cioffi
VP RF Systems and RFIC Development
Dr. Ken Cioffi has been in the wireless communications area for over 20 years holding numerous engineering, management and executive positions and has successfully designed over 40 RF integrated chips. He was previously VP of Product Development at Discera where he developed the first MEMS-based clock oscillator product for RF systems. Prior to that, he was in charge of IC development at Tropian where he worked on polar transmitter and receiver IC’s, servicing the cellular standards GSM, EDGE, and UMTS. He was VP of hardware engineering at Movi7 working on multi-protocol radios. Dr. Cioffi was the CTO and VP of research and Development at Wireless Access (acquired by Glenayre Corp.). At Wireless Access, he was in charge of systems development, RF, analog and digital IC design as well as all operational activity related to ICs for all 2-way paging products. He started his career designing ICs for wireless communications at Rockwell. He is the author of several papers and patents in RF systems and IC’s. Dr. Cioffi has BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
_______________________________________________________________________
David Kumar
VP of Operations
David has over 18 years of experience in operations. He was the Vice President of Operations for Zowie Entertainment where he had complete responsibility of all aspects of operations from the startup stage to mass production of a set of Smart Toys. This included supply chain selection management of ASIC device manufacturing (wafer foundries, assembly and test), plastics, PCB assembly, RF Antenna, RFTAG manufacture, final product assembly, packaging, shipping, import and distribution to major retailers in such as Walmart, Toys-R-Us and Amazon. He achieved aggressive cost targets and time to market goals to position the company as a viable electronic toy manufacturer in the fiercely competitive toy industry. He has setup supply chains involving top tier manufacturers such as TSMC, ASE, Jetta Manufacturing, SIIX Corp. etc. David has been Director of Operations for several companies including Electric Planet where he managed the manufacturing for a PC Camera based video game platform and set up the manufacturing process for a CMOS image sensor toy camera. Most recently he was wholly responsible for day-to-day operations at WI2WI to ramp a set of new WiFi and GPS products to market using SIP (System-In-Package) manufacturing technology. He was responsible for supply chain management, production planning, quality control, budgeting, revenue forecasting and order fulfillment for five product lines with 100K+ unit shipments per month to top tier customers. (IBM Lenovo, Intermec). David started his career at Actel where he managed all aspects of offshore contract manufacturing, purchasing and facilities from startup stage through IPO and subsequent growth. He managed the construction and operation of a 50K Sq Feet Class 10,000 test floor for IC devices and programming services David has an MBA from Washington State University.
_______________________________________________________________________
Sales
Altierre has a strategic agreement with Encore Associates.
Gary Smith
President and CEO, Encore Associates Inc. and Encore Sales Co.
Former Chief Marketing Officer of Safeway Inc. reporting to CEO.
Encore Associates
("Encore") is a national sales & marketing and strategic advisory firm to the food industry. Encore provides retail sales & marketing solutions as well as supply chain management, centralized procurement, category management, information technology, and warehouse and transportation management advisory services. By utilizing Encore's services, clients access the firm's unparalleled customer connectivity to the Top 10 Food and Drug Retailers in the U.S. and its professionals' experience developing solutions and disciplines that are at the forefront of the industry today. Encore's professionals include ExecuForce, the firm's proprietary network of more than 70 nationally recognized subject matter experts within the food industry. See more of Encore's team background at
www.encoreassociates.com