Management

Warren Savage • President & CEO

Prior to founding IPextreme, Mr. Savage created and ran the Star IP Program at Synopsys, where he provided an IP brokering function for major semiconductor companies. Prior to that, Mr. Savage was head of the Synopsys DesignWare engineering organization, where he introduced many design practices and quality measures, which eventually became part of the Reuse Methodology Manual, a seminal book on Intellectual Property design. From 1982-1995 he worked for Tandem Computers, and there developed an interest in advanced design methodologies around high reliability design. Mr. Savage began his career at Fairchild Semiconductor developing semiconductor test equipment. Mr. Savage is a well-known and published authority in the field of semiconductor intellectual property. Mr. Savage has a BS in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

Rick Browne • Vice President Finance & CFO

Rick Browne brings with him nearly three decades of senior financial executive experience from fast-paced global organizations. Prior to joining IPextreme, Rick was vice president of finance and administration at Agile Software, where he successfully drove the company's initial public offering, as well as a second offering, and also led the integration of several acquisitions. Previously, Rick was in finance management at Apple Computer and a financial consultant at Merrill Lynch and Company. Rick has a BS Business Administration and Accounting from San Jose State University and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Pierre-Xavier Thomas • Vice President of Engineering

Pierre-Xavier Thomas is an industry value chain expert with experience at semiconductor, EDA and system companies. Before joining IPextreme, Mr. Thomas managed teams and was an architect for the design of SGI supercomputer hub chips, following a similar role at Clearwater Networks. Previously, he managed development for Synopsys' DesignWare IP library, including leading the team that developed and commercialized the first Synopsys Multimedia IP. Mr. Thomas started his career with ST Microelectronics as part of the team who designed the first MPEG Video Encoder System. Mr. Thomas holds a Diplome d'ingenieur from the University of Technology of Compeigne (UTC-France) and a Diploma d'Etude Appronfondie in Signal, Image and Speech Processing from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INPG-France).

Rick Tomihiro • vice president of marketing

Rick Tomihiro brings nearly 30 years of semiconductor design and marketing experience to IPextreme. In the 12 years prior to joining IPextreme, Rick led the semiconductor IP marketing teams for Synopsys, IPCore and Mentor Graphics. Earlier in his career, 1978-1996, Rick was a CPU designer for Amdahl, STC Computer Research, Tandem Computers and Chips&Technologies. After which he was the Director of Marketing for NexGen Corporation which was later acquired by Advanced Micro Devices. Rick holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

Kazuhiro Ogawa • President • Japan Operations

Kazuhiro Ogawa has over 28 years experience in the Semiconductor and IP industries. Mr. Ogawa began his career at Tokyo Electron Limited, where he spent 17 years in sales and marketing for measurement instruments, microprocessor development systems, LSI/ board test systems and electronic design automation tools. Mr. Ogawa most recently worked at Fluent Inc., one of the leading computational fluid dynamics companies. Prior to Fluent, he managed business development, strategic solutions and worldwide global accounts for Nihon Synopsys Co. Ltd.

Michael Cizl • Director, Munich Design CenteR

Michael Cizl joined IPextreme from Synopsys, where he was most recently R&D manager, heading the development of a Bluetooth baseband controller IP core. Mr. Cizl held many positions at Synopsys, in Applications Engineering and in the Consulting group, where he became familiar with RTL-based design flows including design, verification, synthesis, static timing analysis, design for test, and design flow automation. One of his major projects was the redesign of the Infineon C166 microcontroller. Mr. Cizl started his career in 1992 as application engineer with Compiled Designs, a small start-up consulting company focused on VHDL modeling and simulation, which was later acquired by Synopsys. Mr. Cizl has a Diplom-Ingenieur in Electrical Engineering, from the Technical University of Munich.