2026 U.S. Executive Forum

Chris Allexandre

President & CEO

Navitas

Before joining Navitas, Chris served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Power Division at Renesas, overseeing the company’s power management and discrete product lines ($2.5B revenue). Prior to that, he was Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, leading Renesas’ global sales and marketing transformation. His earlier roles include SVP & Chief Sales, Marketing and business operations at IDT, NXP and Fairchild. He began his career at Texas Instruments, rising to VP of EMEA Regional Sales & Applications. Chris has worked across France, Germany, China, and the U.S., and has led global teams serving markets such as automotive, industrial, telecom, mobile, and cloud infrastructures. He has extensive experience in analog and power technologies. Known for driving strategic pivots and operational transformation, he brings a strong track record of financial performance and market expansion. He holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from ISEN (Institut Supérieur de l’Électronique et du Numérique) in France and has been based in the Bay Area since 2013. He holds France and United States dual citizenship.

Thar Casey

Founder, President & CEO

Amber Semi

CEO Thar Casey: A serial entrepreneur focused on disruptive, game-changing technology
architectures, Thar brings deep expertise in operations and finance, with a track record of
building technology companies from product concept through high-volume manufacturing to
successful acquisition.

Today, he is CEO of AmberSemi, a California based fabless semiconductor company pioneering
advanced power management for AI data centers. With its breakthrough PowerTile™
technology, Amber’s innovative Vertical Power Delivery (VPD) architecture delivers
unprecedented power density and efficiency to high-performance processors, including AI
accelerators, servers, and FPGAs in space-constrained applications.

Previously, he served as President of IDEX America following IDEX’s acquisition of PicoField
Technologies, which he co-founded. He also co-founded Insound Medical, scaling it to a $169M
acquisition by Sonova-Phonak, and led Prenateck as CEO. Thar serves on multiple boards and
holds a B.S. in Business from CSU Hayward.

Paul Cho

President of Samsung Semiconductor & Corporate EVP of Samsung Electronics

Samsung

Sangyeun “Paul” Cho serves as President of Samsung Semiconductor and Corporate EVP of Samsung Electronics, responsible for Samsung’s U.S. semiconductor business, which includes Memory, Foundry, and System LSI.

With over 18 years at Samsung, Cho has held leadership roles in Korea and the US. He founded the Memory Solutions Lab, pioneering innovations like in-storage computing and multi-streamed solid-state drives, which are now industry standards. Cho also led server-class SSD software engineering and security initiatives. Previously, he spent nearly a decade in academia as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on computer architecture.

Cho holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. from Seoul National University.

Dan Christman

Co-Founder

Stealth Startup

Dan Christman is a semiconductor and technology executive with more than 25 years of experience building, leading, and scaling businesses across analog, mixed-signal, and digital semiconductor technologies. Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of technology, product strategy, and business leadership, bringing new products and technologies to market and building businesses around them.

At Maxim Integrated, Dan held senior leadership roles serving the automotive, human interface, multimedia, and wireless markets. His responsibilities spanned product and business strategy, product development, and commercialization across a broad portfolio of semiconductor products and applications.

Dan later joined Marvell, where he led a more than $1 billion business focused on storage and memory technologies for the global data infrastructure market. His work included defining product and business strategy, developing new market opportunities, and working closely with leading technology companies as data center architectures and storage requirements evolved.

More recently, Dan has focused on product and business strategy for next-generation data infrastructure. He is currently working on a stealth technology project at the intersection of semiconductors, AI, and advanced memory technology.

John DeBoer

Head of Data Center Vertical

Siemens

John DeBoer, Head of Data Center Vertical for Siemens USA, is responsible for the strategy and growth of data center products, solutions, and services across North America. With more than 20 years of industry experience, John is instrumental in driving innovation within Siemens and building an ecosystem of collaboration that shapes the future of data center infrastructure. He leads a team of Siemens experts who are focused on the current and future needs of clients around electrification, automation, digital twins, energy management, fire, safety, and decarbonization.

Anirudh Devgan

President & CEO

Cadence

Dr. Anirudh Devgan is president and chief executive officer of Cadence and a globally recognized technology and business leader. A pioneering computer scientist, IEEE Fellow, and member of the National Academy of Engineering, he has helped redefine how AI accelerates engineering innovation. Under his leadership, Cadence has expanded beyond electronic design automation into AI-driven computational software, delivering sustained growth while advancing the future of semiconductors, systems, and intelligent design.

Zak Dychtwald

Founder & CEO

BridgeWorks Global

Zak Dychtwald is the author of the critically acclaimed Young China, a study of the generation now driving the country’s consumer and innovation economy, and founder of BridgeWorks Global, a cross-geography collaboration lab.

He helps companies like Microsoft, Google, Walmart, Qualcomm, Medtronic, and Ant International bridge opportunity between China and global HQ. That work centers on a problem most multinationals feel but few can name: collaborative drag, the compounding cost of teams that are technically aligned and practically out of sync. Rather than treating it as a culture problem to be smoothed over, BridgeWorks maps where the friction actually sits and builds the capability to close it.

With fifteen years in China and fluent Mandarin, Zak is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review on Chinese innovation, China strategy, and global competition. He has delivered keynotes on six continents and lives in Shanghai, where he continues to report firsthand on the companies and cities shaping China’s next decade.

Nick Harris

Founder & CEO

Lightmatter

Nick Harris is the Founder and CEO of Lightmatter, a pioneering photonic-computing company that is redefining AI infrastructure. An MIT-trained engineer and scientist, he is a Fellow of the Optical Society, has won the MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award, and holds numerous patents on revolutionary photonic technologies. His prolific research—published in top-tier journals such as Nature—has seeded new fields in photonic AI interconnects, processor design, and quantum computing. Under his leadership, Lightmatter has rapidly become the industry benchmark for ultra-fast photonics for connecting AI supercomputers.

Richard Ho

VP of Hardware

OpenAI

Richard Ho is the Vice President of Hardware at OpenAI, where he focuses on co-optimizing large-scale compute systems with the machine-learning models that power modern AI. Previously, he helped start and then led Google’s TPU program across multiple generations and was a core contributor to D. E. Shaw Research’s Anton supercomputers for molecular dynamics simulation. Earlier in his career, he co-founded 0-In Design Automation, a pioneer in chip-verification tools later acquired by Mentor Graphics (now Siemens). Richard holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and M.Eng. and B.Sc. degrees in Microelectronic Systems Engineering from the University of Manchester.

Hong Hou

President & CEO

Semtech

Dr. Hou has served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Semtech (Nasdaq: SMTC) since June 2024 and as a member of the Semtech Board of Directors since July 2023. He also serves as an independent board member of Wolfspeed (NYSE: WOLF) since September 2025. An accomplished multinational technology executive, Dr. Hou is recognized as a global enterprise leader with a strong track record of technical and business transformation in dynamic, ultra-competitive markets. He most recently served as President of the Semiconductor Group at Brooks Automation, and prior to that as Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Cloud and Edge Networking Group at Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC). He has also held executive leadership positions at Fabrinet (NYSE: FN), AXT (Nasdaq: AXTI), and Emcore (Nasdaq: EMKR), and earlier in his career held technical roles at Bell Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories. Dr. Hou holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego.

Raghib Hussain

President & CEO

Altera

Raghib Hussain is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Altera. He leads the company’s global strategy, business operations, engineering execution, and R&D, driving Altera’s growth as a leader in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions. With deep technical expertise and a focus on execution, he is focused on accelerating the development of next-generation technologies for multiple target market applications, reinforcing Altera’s position as a high-performance, customer-driven semiconductor innovator.

A seasoned technology executive with more than 30 years in semiconductors and systems, Raghib has a strong track record of delivering breakthrough innovation, spearheading large-scale transformation, and building cultures rooted in execution excellence, accountability, and customer obsession.

Before joining Altera, he served as President of Products and Technologies at Marvell, where he played a central role in repositioning the company as a leader in AI infrastructure silicon. He led strategy, product development, and R&D investments that fueled growth across key markets, helping the company more than double its revenue during his tenure.

Earlier in his career, Raghib co-founded Cavium and served as Chief Operating Officer, scaling the company into a billion-dollar business and a key player in data-centric processing before its acquisition by Marvell, a leading semiconductor solutions provider. He also held engineering and leadership roles at Cisco, Cadence, and the enterprise security startup VPNet.

Raghib holds a B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from NED University in Karachi, Pakistan, and an M.S. in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University. He is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program and holds more than 40 patents in networking and security technologies.

He has served on the Board of Directors of Cirrus Logic, Inc. since 2021.

Charlie Kawwas

President, Semiconductor Solutions Group

Broadcom

Charlie Kawwas is President of the Semiconductor Solutions Group at Broadcom, responsible for the company’s 15 Semiconductor Divisions and the Brocade Storage Networking Division. In addition, Dr. Kawwas leads Global Operations and Intellectual Property for all Broadcom. Prior to this role, Dr. Kawwas served as Chief Operating Officer from December 2020 during which he drove the Global Operations, Sales and Corporate Marketing. He was also the Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at Broadcom from May 2014. During his tenure at Broadcom, Dr. Kawwas oversaw the strategic growth of the hardware businesses from $4B to $30B+, driving strategic technology investments and operational excellence.

Dr. Kawwas joined the company through the LSI acquisition where he was head of Worldwide Sales. Previous positions at LSI include Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the networking division and Vice President of Marketing for the networking and storage products group. Before joining LSI, Dr. Kawwas held several senior management and engineering positions at Nortel.

Dr. Kawwas received a B.Eng. with Great Distinction in Computer Engineering as the highest graduating engineering student, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Dr. Kawwas was awarded Alumnus of the Year for 2020 by Concordia University.

Rodrigo Liang

Co-Founder & CEO

SambaNova Systems

Rodrigo Liang is Co-Founder and CEO of SambaNova. In 2017, he bet big on a radical vision: ditch legacy computing and rebuild exclusively for AI. While others tweaked existing hardware, Liang and his team pioneered a full-stack revolution – designing custom chips, systems, and software from the ground up to conquer AI’s most demanding challenges. At the heart of this is the revolutionary
Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) chip.

Under Liang’s leadership, SambaNova has earned prestigious accolades (including Fortune Future 50, TIME Best Inventions, Forbes AI 50) and partnered with companies like Accenture to accelerate enterprise AI.

Prior to SambaNova, Liang served as Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation, where he oversaw SPARC Processor and ASIC development for
enterprise servers. Earlier in his career, he played a key role at Sun Microsystems in the development of the world’s first multi-core processors.

Patrick Moorhead

Founder, CEO & Chief Analyst

Moor Insights & Strategy

Patrick Moorhead founded Moor Insights & Strategy to deliver the real-world, experience-based insights and advice he didn’t get from traditional analyst firms during his decades as a technology executive — and this is what makes MI&S unique. More than a dozen years later, he’s a top-ranked tech analyst with more than 100 active CXO-level clients who delivers 1,000-plus hours of advisory per year. Taking a big-picture view grounded in 35 years in high tech, Moorhead also has specific expertise ranging from silicon to infrastructure to enterprise SaaS and everything in-between, and in strategic areas including M&A, roadmaps, market positioning, messaging, and antitrust.

Moorhead has shared his expertise in more than 1,000 broadcast appearances on CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, and other outlets, and he has been quoted many times in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Computerworld, The Information, and CNET. He is often ranked #1 among thousands of technology industry analysts by ARInsights. A longtime Forbes contributor, he has published thousands of articles and research-based analyses, along with thousands of podcast episodes and video interviews. His regular online commentary has brought him 50,000 followers on X and 33,000 on LinkedIn.

Before founding MI&S, Moorhead spent more than 20 years as an executive leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing functions addressing the PC, mobile, graphics, and server ecosystems. He is grounded in reality because he led the real-world planning and execution of products and strategies at NCR, AT&T, Compaq, and AMD — and had to live with the outcomes. Moorhead also served on the boards of the Consumer Electronics Association and the American Electronics Association, and for five years chaired the board of the St. David’s Medical Center in Austin. He is also the co-founder of Six Five Media and Signal65. Besides spending time with his family, reading history, and keeping up with Formula 1, in the past two years he has pursued a new commitment to improving healthspan through better diet, supplements, sleep, exercise, and relationships.

Adit Narasimha

SVP & GM, Signal Connectivity Group

Astera Labs

Adit Narasimha is SVP & GM, Signal Connectivity Group at Astera Labs, where he oversees strategy and roadmaps, product development, partnerships, customer relations and revenue generation for his group. Prior to Astera Labs, Adit served as VP/GM of Molex’s Optoelectronics business, which he started and led through extraordinary market growth into hyperscale, wireless and long-haul markets.  He also co-founded and served as Chief Operating Officer at Abtum, which developed high performance RF front ends for mobile handsets and small cells and was acquired by Qorvo in 2018. Adit began his career at Luxtera (now a Cisco company), where he held multiple leadership roles in IC design, systems engineering, product integration, manufacturing operations and applications. He was co-recipient of the 2006 IEEE Lewis Winner award. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from BITS Pilani, India, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. Beyond work, Adit enjoys hiking with his kids, flying airplanes, sailing small boats, and playing classical piano.

Mark Papermaster

CTO & EVP

AMD

Mark Papermaster is Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology and Engineering at AMD and is responsible for corporate technical direction, product development including system-on-chip (SOC) methodology, microprocessor design, I/O and memory and advanced research. He led the re-design of engineering processes at AMD and the development of the award-winning “Zen” high-performance x86 CPU family, high-performance GPUs and the company’s modular design approach, Infinity Fabric. He also oversees Information Technology that delivers AMD’s compute infrastructure and services.

His more than 35 years of engineering experience includes significant leadership roles managing the development of a wide range of products, from microprocessors to mobile devices and high-performance servers. Before joining AMD in October 2011 as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Papermaster was the leader of Cisco’s Silicon Engineering Group, the organization responsible for silicon strategy, architecture, and development for the company’s switching and routing businesses. He served as Apple Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering, where he was responsible for iPod and iPhone hardware development. He also held a number of senior leadership positions at IBM overseeing development of the company’s key microprocessor and server technologies.

Papermaster received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and master’s degree from the University of Vermont, both in Electrical Engineering. He is a long-term member of the University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering Advisory Board, Olin College Presidents Council and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Most recently, he was appointed to the CTO Forum Advisory Board and IEEE Industry Advisory Board.

Ramiro Palma

Managing Director & Partner and Global Co-lead of Semiconductor Practice

BCG

Ramiro Palma is a Managing Director and Partner at BCG where he is the Global Co-lead for the Semiconductor Practice. In his role, Ramiro works along the entire value chain, but most often at the intersection of engineering, operations, and strategy. He leads large-scale transformations with clients, with a particular focus on using AI to reshape core workflows and operating models and realize measurable value.

Prior to BCG, Ramiro co-founded a startup accelerator that facilitated >$300M in equity funding for Texas startups. Ramiro received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Ramiro also holds a BSChE with high honors in Chemical Engineering and a BS with highest honors in Chemistry from the University of Florida.

Dylan Patel

Founder, CEO & Chief Analyst

SemiAnalysis

Dylan is the Founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst of SemiAnalysis – the preeminent authority on all things AI and semiconductors. Through Dylan’s unwavering commitment to excellence, he has built the firm from the ground up as the recognized authority on the semiconductor supply chain to the cloud ecosystem, machine learning models, and all things in between. Since 2020, SemiAnalysis has transformed its business from a solo venture into a cohesive and focused team to provide breaking news and in-depth analysis for the most strategic, complex, and escalating challenges in the semiconductor industry.

Jodi Shelton

Co-Founder & CEO

GSA

Jodi Shelton is the Co-Founder and CEO of GSA. A pioneer within the technology space, Shelton was instrumental in the creation of the Alliance and has continuously addressed global issues in the industry as the voice of its members. Under her leadership, GSA has grown its membership to include companies throughout the supply chain representing 30 countries across the globe. In her role as president, Shelton oversees GSA daily operations, ensuring that the Alliance remains focused on achieving its defined mission and goal to foster a more effective ecosystem through collaboration, integration and innovation. She is the key liaison between GSA and the business community at high-level financial and industry conferences, providing insight on key topics pertaining to the global fabless supply chain.

Shelton earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from San Diego State University and her master’s degree in political science from the University of Houston.

Sid Sheth

Founder & CEO

d-Matrix

Sid Sheth is the founder and CEO of d-Matrix, founded in 2019 to create a new class of accelerated computing platforms for scalable AI inference. Under his leadership, the company has built a first-of-its-kind AI inference solution using in-memory compute chiplet architectures—a breakthrough that is reshaping the trajectory of commercially viable AI.

With over two decades of experience, Sid has led both startups and public companies through transformative growth. As SVP & GM at Inphi, he built the Networking Business Unit into a $1B+ enterprise focused on cloud and data center markets, which was later acquired by Marvell for $10B. Earlier in his career, Sid held leadership roles at NetLogic Microsystems (now Broadcom), where he created the company’s 100G product portfolio and expanded into mobile and cloud markets, helping grow the business beyond $100M. Prior to that, he was at Intel, where he drove innovation for networking and processor technologies.

Sid holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, where he serves on the ECE Advisory Board. He is a frequent speaker at industry events, a published author at ISSCC, and holds several patents.

Yu Yang

Principal Lead Analyst, Automotives & Robotics

Yole Group

Yu Yang, PhD is Principal Lead Analyst, Automotives & Robotics at Yole Group.

Based in Belgium, he is responsible for technology and market products, dedicated to the automotive industry and extending to humanoid robotics.

Prior to Yole Group, Dr Yang worked as a business development partner and R&D project leader at Punch Powertrain (Belgium), R&D project manager at Bekaert (Belgium), and doctorate researcher at IMEC (Belgium).

Dr Yang holds a PhD in materials engineering from Leuven University (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) in Belgium and a master in electrical engineering and a bachelor in materials science & engineering both from Tsinghua University (China).

Dr Yang serves in technical committees and advisory boards in multiple international conferences and events.

Athar Zaidi

SVP & GM, Core Power Systems

Infineon

Athar Zaidi is an accomplished technology executive with hands-on experience in developing and marketing engineering solutions. He is currently a Senior Vice President and General Manager of Infineon’s Core Power Systems Business Line in the Power Systems Division, and oversees power management products for AI Datacenters, Datacom, Telecom, ADAS Power, High End Consumer, Gaming PCs, Storage.