EDA vet DeMaria to head packaging-tool firm
By Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- EDN, January 25, 2006
Optimal, a vendor of tools for signal and power-integrity in packaging design, has appointed EDA industry veteran Dave DeMaria as its new president and CEO.
DeMaria (left) takes those titles from Len Perham, who was previously splitting his time between heading up Optimal and overseeing his venture-capital endeavors. Perham will now serve as the company's chairman.
Perham helped Optimal transition from a few-person design-consulting business into a viable EDA startup that has secured an OEM deal with Cadence Design Systems and is the only one of three privately held EDA companies recommended in TSMC 's 5.0 and 6.0 reference flows, DeMaria said.
As president and CEO, DeMaria plans to take the 25-person company to its next phase of growth by tailoring Optimal's tools, which are already popular with package designers, to suit advanced packaging issues that pop up with SIP (system in package) and POP (package on package) design.
"There are a lot of companies that specialize in building packages, but there are also a lot of companies like Intel, Broadcom, and LSI Logic that have their own packaging design teams," DeMaria said. "What's starting to happen is that IC guys are having to consider packaging, and on the other side of the spectrum, the board designers have to think of packaging as well. Certainly one of the growth opportunities is to move further into chip-to-package codesign as well as package-to-PCB codesign."
The company also plans to strengthen its partnerships with Cadence and TSMC and look for new partnership opportunities, DeMaria said.
Prior to joining Optimal, DeMaria was a consult and a vice president at MatrixOne. Before that he served for many years as a top executive at Cadence, where he held the titles of executive vice president of the systems division and senior vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy. Before joining Cadence, DeMaria was a group vice president for Viewlogic's systems division and served as a managing director of Zuken-Redac.
