EDA Startup Pyxis Technology Appoints New CEO, Opens Corporate Office in Silicon Valley

Company to develop physical design software for nanometer chip design

Santa Clara, Calif., May 12, 2005 -- Pyxis Technology, an electronic design automation (EDA) company founded in 2004, has named EDA veteran Naeem Zafar as president and CEO. In addition, the company is opening an office in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. Pyxis is developing software that addresses the problems that chip designers and foundries face in the physical design, layout, and routing of nanometer-scale integrated circuits and systems on a chip.

Pyxis was founded 14 months ago by three industry veterans with extensive experience in semiconductor IC design and EDA software development. P.T. Patel, now executive vice president and chief technology officer at Pyxis, drove the design implementation of the PowerPC family of chips at IBM and led 65nm design methodologies at Sun Microsystems. Both co-founders Sharad Mehrotra, and Joe Rahmeh, have extensive experience as a team in software development at IBM and Sun, with expertise in routing, extraction, timing and noise analysis, and clock synthesis.

The company has attracted industry luminaries Jim Solomon, founder of Cadence Design Systems; and Joe Hutt, formerly vice president of engineering at Magma, vice president of advanced technology at Synopsys, and 30-year IBM veteran; to serve on its Board of Directors. The company has raised Series A funding from Austin Ventures and CMEA Ventures.

"We were looking to supplement this talented team with an EDA industry veteran, and we found a visionary leader in Naeem," said Jim Solomon. "He brings fresh knowledge of physical design issues and a wealth of industry relationships that will be essential to making Pyxis a vital supplier to the semiconductor design industry."

"In my long career as a user and developer of EDA tools, I’ve rarely seen a team of the caliber of Pyxis," said Joe Hutt. "The technical team has developed on of the best approaches I have seen for addressing the enormous challenges of nanometer design."

"Pyxis’ technology is compelling, and its founding team is a unique blend of ace chip designers and EDA developers that have worked together in physical chip design for many years," said Zafar. "Their frustration at seeing a fundamental lack of architecture that can address and scale with the new challenges of nanometer IC design enticed them to start Pyxis, and the results are very encouraging."

Zafar was most recently president and CEO at Silicon Design Systems, where he turned the company from an ASIC and design services company to a pure play EDA company in the physical design space. Prior to Silicon Design Systems, he was CEO at Veridicom, a Lucent/Bell Labs spin off that designed and manufactured silicon fingerprint sensors for PC OEMs and mobile phone makers for added personal security. Before that, he spent 11 years at Quickturn Design Systems as the vice president of worldwide marketing. He holds a Sc.B. degree (Magna cum Laude) from Brown University and a MSEE from the University of Minnesota.

The new Silicon Valley office is located at 3211 Scott Boulevard, Suite 203, Santa Clara, Calif. 95054.