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Dr. Walden Rhines Joins Cornami as President and CEO
Sees Opportunities in Cloud Security for Compute Intensive Machine Learning Analytics on Encrypted Datasets
Campbell, CA. July 8, 2020 – Cornami is pleased to announce that Dr. Walden Rhines has joined the company as president and chief executive officer (CEO). Dr. Rhines is responsible for the technology development and deployment of its unique real-time scalable compute technology, as well as day-to-day operations.
In addition, Cornami co-founder and chairman of the board Gordon “Gordie” Campbell has moved from the CEO position to executive chairman. He will remain actively engaged in assisting Rhines in shaping the technology and product direction for the company as it moves to its outbound market phase.
“Dr. Rhines, known to most as Wally, doesn’t need much of an introduction. Most semiconductor or EDA professionals know who he is and what he has accomplished,” stated Gordon Campbell. “He is widely recognized as an expert in business value creation and technology for the semiconductor and electronic design automation (EDA) industries. Upon introducing him to our technology and compute architecture, he became intrigued and ultimately excited about what we are doing. In fact, he had been researching the market to determine whether there were any silicon companies capable of delivering the performance and scale to meet the requirements for the complex computing requirements of cloud security applications which, to date, have not been commercially viable due to being computationally expensive.”
Dr. Rhines holds the position CEO Emeritus at Mentor, a Siemens Business. During his tenure as CEO and chairman of the board for Mentor Graphics, the company’s revenue nearly quadrupled, enterprise value increased by 10X and the company has grown to be the industry’s number one market share solutions in four of the ten largest product segments of the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. Rhines is accredited with building leading industry positions in areas outside of traditional EDA, including system design, embedded software and automotive electronics. This has led to innovation and growth of the entire EDA industry.
Prior to joining Mentor Graphics, Rhines was executive vice president of Texas Instruments (TI) Semiconductor Group, sharing responsibility for TI’s Components Sector, and having direct responsibility for the entire semiconductor business with more than $5 billion of revenue and over 30,000 people. During his 21 years at TI, Rhines managed TI’s thrust into digital signal processing and supervised that business from inception with the TMS 320 family of DSPs through growth to become the cornerstone of TI’s semiconductor technology. He is also co-inventor and supervised the development of the GaN blue-violet light emitting diode (important for DVD players and low energy lighting).
“AI (Artificial Intelligence) is not a new technology”, stated Wally Rhines. “ I was active in this industry in 1986. We tried hard in those days, but the infrastructure had not developed to a level where AI would provide profitable opportunities. Today we have a number of AI accelerator chip entrants, all trying to solve a piece of the puzzle. However, the reality is that we are shifting to a data-driven computing era and traditional von Neumann computing architectures are inadequate to handle these complex AI and ML algorithms. Our connected world is delivering exploding data workloads that require a new architecture from the ground up – which is not an easy endeavor. I have to admit, I was initially a skeptic when introduced to Cornami. As I dug in, I became intrigued as the team started in software with a successful multicore programming model followed by adding a unique scalable computational fabric as its extension. Completely the opposite of most chip companies. Therefore, it has inherent advantages in addressing evolving high-growth markets as it can be reconfigured and optimized to map to the algorithm delivering the highest efficiency in terms of performance, power, latency and cost.”
“Ultimately, what got me extremely excited is in an area that I have been researching with regards to taking on cloud security for these ever-growing massive data sets,” Wally added. “I have been actively involved with the government in seeking silicon solutions that could deliver the performance required to process Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), an encryption scheme that enables analytical functions to be run directly on encrypted data, yielding encrypted results, all while keeping the underlying critical information secure – whether it is sensitive intellectual property (IP), financial information, personally identifiable information (PII), intelligence insight, or beyond. In other words, assume compromised environments, so secure the data. This is a game changer for data centers and cloud computing.
The challenge has been that commercial deployment has been impractical as these approaches are extremely computationally expensive. I had become convinced in my research that included new chip market entrants as well as large silicon companies that at best this capability is a decade away. To my surprise, Cornami had already partnered with a large enterprise company in fintech and demonstrated that it can deliver the performance required to make this commercially viable. This convinced me that I wanted to be a part of the Cornami journey and therefore I am very pleased that Gordie invited me to join the company.”
“Wally’s business and technical expertise is a great asset to the company,” stated Paul Master, CTO and co-founder of Cornami. The combination of a Wally and Gordie collaboration delivers a formidable industry-changing duo. The team is very excited about having their collective experience, as they have both had a profound impact on the semiconductor industry.”
Additional background on Dr. Rhines
Dr. Rhines received the 2015 Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to EDA, presented by the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESDA), and the IEEE Council on EDA (CEDA). The award honors individuals who have had demonstrable impact on the field of EDA through technology innovations, education/mentoring, or business or industry leadership. Dr. Rhines was recognized for growing the EDA and integrated circuit (IC) design industries through his efforts including pioneering the evolution of IC design to system-on-chip (SoC) design. Rhines has served five terms as ESDA chairman. He is also a board member of the Semiconductor Research Corporation and a Life Fellow of the IEEE.
Dr. Rhines holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, a Master of Science and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, an MBA from Southern Methodist University and Honorary Doctor of Technology degrees from the University of Florida and Nottingham Trent University.
About CORNAMI
Cornami is focused on the deployment of intelligent computing in real-time environments. The company has developed a scalable and massively parallel processor architecture addressing the shift in computing needs for today’s ever-increasing massive data sets. This game-changing, software-defined technology delivers unprecedented scalability from thousands of cores on a single chip to millions across a system. All individually programmable.
Cornami empowers developers, large enterprise, IoT, and edge-to-cloud computing to deliver high performance anywhere and on any device at the lowest power and latency. www.cornami.com
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