2024 Asia Pacific Executive Forum

Sassine Ghazi

President & CEO

Synopsys

Sassine Ghazi is President and Chief Executive Officer of Synopsys and serves on the company’s board of directors. Named CEO in January 2024, Ghazi has held several leadership roles at Synopsys across applications engineering, product development, sales, and operations.
Known for his deep customer relationships and passion for innovation, Ghazi has been instrumental in driving the company’s growth during his tenure. Most recently as Chief Operating Officer and President, he steered Synopsys through record revenue growth and profitability by driving ambitious business strategies and fostering a culture of relentless customer focus and execution excellence.

Known for his deep customer relationships and passion for innovation, Ghazi has been instrumental in driving the company’s growth during his tenure. Most recently as Chief Operating Officer and President, he steered Synopsys through record revenue growth and profitability by driving ambitious business strategies and fostering a culture of relentless customer focus and execution excellence.

Previously, Ghazi led the EDA Design group, overseeing all digital and custom products that make up the company’s largest business. In that role, he spearheaded the launch of several groundbreaking solutions, including the flagship Fusion Design Platform™, Synopsys.ai which is the industry’s first AI-driven EDA solution, multi-die packaging, and the SiliconMAX™ Silicon Lifecycle Management Platform, all bolstering the company’s technological leadership and revenue expansion.

Before joining Synopsys in 1998 as an applications engineer, Ghazi began his career as a design engineer at Intel.

Ghazi earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration from the Lebanese American University, a B.S.E.E. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an M.S.E.E. from the University of Tennessee

Albert Liu

Founder & CEO

Kneron

Albert Liu is the founder and CEO of Kneron, a leading edge AI company specializing in full-stack AI solutions for edge devices. Under his leadership, Kneron has pioneered cutting-edge neural processing unit (NPU) technologies, enabling AI computation at the edge and revolutionizing industries such as automotive, IoT, and smart cities.

With a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UCLA, Albert has held key R&D and management roles at Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics R&D Center. In 2015, he founded Kneron to democratize AI, making it more efficient, secure, and accessible. Albert holds 30+ international patents and has published 70+ papers. His work on reconfigurable architectures for CNN accelerators earned him the IEEE Darlington Award in 2022. Driven by a vision to bring real-time AI processing to edge devices, Albert continues to push the boundaries of AI, empowering industries and communities worldwide as a key player in the AI revolution.

Balaji Baktha

Founder, President, CEO, and Chairman

Ventana Micro Systems

Balaji Baktha is founder and CEO of Ventana Micro Systems. He is an experienced semiconductor executive and serial technology entrepreneur and investor with a proven track record of over 30 years in Silicon Valley. Prior to Ventana, Balaji was founder and CEO of Veloce Technologies, the world’s first 64-bit ARM based high performance processor for cloud compute, networking, storage and embedded applications, which was subsequently acquired by AppliedMicro. Before Veloce, Balaji was the VP and GM of the Communications Business at Marvell Semiconductor. Before Marvell, Balaji co-founded Platys, a startup that pioneered iSCSI and was subsequently acquired by Adaptec (now Microsemi).

Balaji is a Board Member of several startups, and a Limited Partner and Senior Advisor at several PE and venture funds.

Claire Wang

Executive Vice President & COO, Power & Sensor Systems Division

Infineon

Claire Wang joined Infineon Technologies AG in April 2023 as the Chief Operation Officer and Board Member of the Power and Sensing Systems Division. She has more than 20 years of experience in semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing industries with various senior leadership positions in NXP, Nexperia and TE Connectivity with a strong focus on Supply Chain Management, Operations Planning and working with subcontracting manufacturers.

While based in Taiwan, the Netherlands, US, and Germany, she has managed global teams and gained a diversified view of how to establish and lead a productive team across different continents.

Danny Perng

Senior Vice President, PacRim

Siemens EDA

Denise Lee

Partner

McKinsey & Company

Farhat Jahangir

Founder, President and CEO

GSME

Farhat is the founder and CEO of GSME, where he brings over 25 years of hands-on experience in the semiconductor industry. Farhat is an expert in product, test, quality, reliability, and supply chain areas covering various hi-speed communication ICs, MEMS-based and CE System-based product lines. In 2016, Farhat led Quantenna to its IPO, which paved the way for the company’s acquisition by Onsemi for a staggering $1.1 billion in 2019.

As the General Manager/Vice President of Manufacturing at Onsemi, he successfully managed the 300mm EFK Fab as well as a revenue line exceeding $2 billion. Farhat is a recognized industry leader and uses his extensive experience to drive innovation in the field of semiconductor manufacturing. He began his career after graduating with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arkansas.

Hong Hao

Corporate Vice President, WW Business Development, Intel Foundry Services

Intel Corporation

Hong Hao is Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Business Development for Intel Foundry Service (IFS). In this role, Hong is responsible for leading the formulation of IFS’s business development strategies and execution of worldwide customer engagement plans to grow IFS revenue and customer base. Hong brings a combination of business expertise and track record, executive leadership, and strong technical background in the semiconductor industry.

Prior to joining Intel, Hong was Sr. Vice President and Head of North America Foundry Business at Samsung, Before joining Samsung in 2008, he started his career in 1992 in microprocessor design and test at Sun Microsystems, and expanded to ASIC, semiconductor IP, and systems engineering at Silicon Graphics, LSI Logic, as well as two Silicon Valley startup companies.

Hong received his PhD and MS degrees from Stanford University and his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China, all in electrical engineering. Hong holds 9 US patents and has 10 refereed technical publications.

Mandali Khalesi

Vice President, AI and Cloud Engineering

Renesas

Mandali Khalesi is Vice President for AI and Cloud Engineering at Renesas Electronics. He is focused on developing embedded and cloud-based artificial intelligence products for computer vision-heavy SOCs. Our team’s mission is to provide customers with the best tools and software for automotive self-driving, computer vision-centric datacenter and industrial automation applications. Prior to Renesas he was the General Manager and Head of Automated Driving Mobility at Toyota Motor Corporation HQ, helping ship their first self-driving Lexus LS flagship in 2021. He was also Vice President of Automated Driving at Woven by Toyota, Toyota’s self-driving software subsidiary, managing engineering organization growth to 1,700 software and AI engineers.

He is a software executive with over 20 years of experience in the automotive, consumer electronics and smartphone industries. Mandali has a Masters degree in Astrophysics from University College London.

Mario Morales

Global Vice President, Enabling Technologies & Semiconductors

IDC

Mario Morales is the group vice president of IDC’s enabling technologies, semiconductor, storage, and DataSphere research. He is responsible for in-depth analysis, evaluation of emerging markets and trends, forecasting, and research of major semiconductor industry segments such as embedded and intelligent systems, wireless, personal computing, networking and cloud infrastructure, automotive electronics, and AI semiconductors.

Mr. Morales is a trusted advisor to leading high tech company executives, financial investors, and bankers on market landscape and direction, product and technology positioning, competitive benchmarking, M&A, HW, and SW technology, and brand health and sustainability. Established relationships with technology suppliers including Intel, Samsung, TSMC, Qualcomm, Huawei, HP, AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Facebook, TI, Micron, UMC, SoftBank, ARM, NXP, and others.

His career includes past positions with NEC Electronics and Dataquest.

Mei May Soo

Chief of AI, Global Solutions Specialist

Dell Techonologies

Mei May is a highly accomplished AI leader with over two decades of experience in Data Science and AI, having been named as the Top 10 CAIO, #1 Top AI Leader in APAC, Top 10 Women in Tech APAC, Top 50 Women Tech Leader in APAC and many more. As the lead of Dell Technologies’ AI/ML initiatives for Global Presales, she works closely with customers to solve problems scientifically and objectively, exemplified by her team’s design and development of a Deep Learning model that recognizes and identifies different types of corals for the conservation of the Great Barrier Reef. Her leadership and innovation in this project were recognized in CIO World Asia. Another AI initiative with a Singapore university to develop a Smart Fundraising machine learning model led to the winning of two Circle of Excellence awards (Global Grand Gold and Best Asia Pacific).

Wei-han Lien

Chief Architect

Tenstorrent

Wei-Han Lien is a Chief Architect and Senior Fellow in Machine Learning hardware architecture. He is currently leading an architecture team in defining a high-performance RISC-V CPU, fabric, system caching, and high-performance memory subsystem for the Tenstorrent heterogeneous high-performance computation platform for AI and HPC computing. He is also leading the definition of Tenstorrent’s chiplet architecture for constructing scalable, configurable, and composable SiP with cohesive power management, security, and system management architectural definitions for compatibility.

Before joining Tenstorrent, Wei-Han joined Apple through the PA Semi acquisition. He led Apple design team on the microarchitectural definitions of two of the most transformative Apple iPhone/iPad application processors from scratch, the A6 and A7 CPU projects. The Apple A7 CPU core is a solid CPU microarchitecture substrate for future generations of A-series (A7-A14) iPhone/iPad mobile processors and M-series (M1) MacBookPro processors. Before Apple, he was a distinguished architect leading P.A.Semi’s PWRficient PA6T dual O-o-O triple-issue superscalar PowerPC CPU cores. At Raza Microelectronics, he led the microarchitectures of the single-chip 40Gb scalable shared-memory switching chip and distributed-shared-memory cache coherent Ethernet switch. He joined Nexgen and AMD after graduating from the University of Michigan; he was part of a team designing the Nx586 (AMD K6), the most competitive microprocessor product to the Intel Pentium processor from 1997-1999 in the market.