Dr. Naveed Sherwani is a world renowned chip expert, researcher, author of several books, serial entrepreneur and academician. He is most well known as a serial entrepreneur and his story is about forming and building companies.
He graduated from NED in 1983. After NED, he got PhD from university of Nebraska-Lincoln in computer engineering 1988. And served as a professor at Western Michigan University for six years before joining Intel in 1994. At Intel his worked was focused on design automation of some of the complex chips of that era. He left intel in 2003 and subsequently dedicated his career to entrepreneurship.
He started early and his first company at 18 years of age in Karachi, while he was student at NED, called simply The Coaching Center, went on to become a Technical training college with 225 students and 11 employees. He went on to found several companies including: CSTI, Intel Micro-electronics, Open-Silicon, Brite semiconductors, Anasage, HighSilicon, HighBitCoin, PeerNova, StarFive. LeapFive, ChinaFive, SemiFive, and Lampro Mellon.
He founded Intel Microelectronics Services, in 1999, raising funding from intel capital, where he pioneered Open methodology for EDA.
Later on he founded Open Silicon in 2003 and raised funding from leading VCs including Sequoia, Norwest and Interwest. It went to become a leader in chip Design services and sold it to PE in 2008.
He then founded Brite Semiconductor in China, in 2008, a leading solution provider in China / APAC where money was raised from leading VCs in China including Gobi ventures. It was sold to SMIC in 2012.
Subsequently in 2013, He started three companies: Anasage, an enterprise sales analytics company, Hisilicon, a Serdes Company and PeerNova, a blockchain based financial services company. In 2016, he raised funding for PeerNova from leading VCs include IVP, mosaic ventures among others.
For his last company, SiFive, he raised multiple rounds of funding from leading VCs including, Sutterhill, Osage, Spark, and strategics including Intel, Samsung, Hynix, Western Digital, and Xiomen.
More recently, he has cofounded five new companies in China, Korea and Pakistan: StarFive, LeapFive and ChinaFive in China, SemiFive in South Korea and Lampro Mellon in Lahore, Pakistan.
Earlier in his career, as a researcher and academic, his area of Research include VLSI, EDA, combinatorics, graph theory and parallel computation. He published several books including the text book on chip Design called “Algorithms for VLSI Physicsl Design Automation”. This book is a standard textbook in graduate classes in most leading universities in the world. He also published over 125 refereed Technical articles in leading publications, and conferences, several of them have received best paper awards.
For his services for Pakistan, Dr. Naveed Sherwani was awarded Sitara-e-Quaidazam in 2019, by President Alvi.
Farhat serves as the CEO at GS Microelectronics. Prior to joining GSME he was serving as VP & GM of Manufacturing at Onsemi, where he was managing ON Semiconductor’s largest 300mm Fab in East-Fishkill, New York for over two years. Farhat joined ON Semiconductor through Quantenna Communication acquisition in March 2019 where he was serving as SVP of Manufacturing, Operations & Quality for six plus years. Farhat played a pivotal role in making Quantenna successful through manufacturing optimization, process & yields improvements, cost reductions, & significant margins improvement. Farhat’s efforts enabled Quantenna’s successful IPO in October 2016.
Farhat has over 25 years of successful experience in global manufacturing, Fab & OSAT operations, supplier management, building partnerships, and the assurance of quality & reliability processes. Prior to joining ON Semi/Quantenna Communications, he headed semiconductor manufacturing operations and quality functions at Synerchip Corporation (acquired by Silicon Image) & SiTime (a MEMS based timing solution company). His contributions towards building and restructuring company’s lower margin product lines to higher margins, enabled market penetration and corporate margins growth in the companies he served. Farhat also held various engineering and management positions in the areas of semiconductor manufacturing in companies like Texas Instruments, Cypress Semiconductor, Silicon Image & IDT.
Farhat holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
