CASPA 2023 Annual Conference: Empower AI – How Semiconductors Shape the Future of the World

Dipti Vachani

Senior Vice President & General Manager, Automotive Business, Arm

Dipti leads the organization responsible for delivering Arm-based solutions in the transformational opportunities of automotive. Previously, Dipti served as Vice President and General Manager of the Product Management and Customer Enablement division in the IoT Group at Intel. Before that, Dipti held several leadership positions at Texas Instruments and led the creation of the company’s Sitara brand of Arm MPUs.

Dipti is on the Women’s Leadership Council for the Global Semiconductor Association. She holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M, an Executive MBA degree from the University of Texas, and is a graduate of the Executive Education programs at Stanford, Harvard, and Cambridge business schools

Kunle Olukotun

Co-Founder and Chief Technologist

SambaNova Systems

Kunle Olukotun is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. Olukotun is a renowned pioneer in multi-core processor design and the leader of the Stanford Hydra chip multiprocessor (CMP) research project.

As co-founder of SambaNova Systems, Olukoton has developed an AI innovation company that empowers organizations to rapidly deploy best-in-class AI solutions in days to unlock new revenue and boost operational efficiency. Prior to SambaNova Systems, Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop high throughput, low-power multi-core processors for server systems. The Afara multi-core processor, called Niagara, was acquired by Sun Microsystems and now powers Oracle’s SPARC-based servers.

Olukotun is the Director of the Pervasive Parallel Lab and a member of the Data Analytics for What’s Next (DAWN) Lab, developing infrastructure for usable machine learning. Olukotun is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow for contributions to multiprocessors on a chip and multi-threaded processor design. Olukotun recently won the prestigious IEEE Computer Society’s Harry H. Goode Memorial Award and was also elected to the National Academy of Engineering—one of the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.

Kunle received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.

Steven Woo

Fellow and Distinguished Inventor at Rambus Inc

Steve Woo is a Fellow and Distinguished Inventor at Rambus Inc., working on technology and business development efforts across the company. He is currently leading research work within Rambus Labs on advanced memory systems for accelerators and computing infrastructure, and manages a team of senior architects. Since joining Rambus, Steve has worked in various roles leading architecture, technology, and performance analysis efforts, and in marketing and product planning roles leading strategy and customer programs.  Steve received his PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and Master of Engineering and BS Engineering degrees from Harvey Mudd College.

Cliff Young

Google / Software Engineer

Cliff Young is a software engineer in Google Research, where he works on codesign for deep learning accelerators. He is one of the designers of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and one of the founders of the MLPerf benchmark.

Previously, Cliff built special-purpose supercomputers for molecular dynamics at D. E. Shaw Research and was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. Cliff holds AB, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science from Harvard University. Cliff is a member of ACM and IEEE.

JOHN Y. CHEN

Corporate Vice President of Technology and Foundry Management at NVIDIA

John Y. Chen has been the Corporate Vice President of Technology and Foundry Management at NVIDIA since 2004. He has been responsible for working with TSMC and other foundries to get NVIDIA’s new products manufactured by most advanced process technology.

Prior to that, Dr. Chen spent 10 years at TSMC, first in charge of company-wide yield improvement, and testing/packaging operation, then he created and ran the R&D at TSMC, Taiwan. Subsequently, he built and ran the Fab Operations of WaferTech in Camas, WA, the 1st TSMC wafer fab in USA. Lastly, he served as the Vice President of Business Development for TSMC.

Earlier in his career at Hughes Research Lab and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he has contributed more than 100 journal articles, most published by IEEE.  He wrote a textbook on “CMOS Devices and Technology for VLSI,” published by Prentice Hall (a part of Simon & Schuster now) in 1990. He was elected to the IEEE Fellow in 1992 for “leadership in and contributions to CMOS device and process technology”.

In the 80’s, he has served on the Technical Advisory Board of ITRI/ERSO, the incubator of Taiwan semiconductor industry including TSMC. In 2001, he became the board director of Cascade Inc. (Nasdaq:CSCD) for six years until the company was acquired by FormFactor. Also, he has served as a director on Monte Jade board and as technical advisors for three private companies in Silicon Valley. He is now on the advisory board of D2S.

Dr. Chen holds a B.S. in E.E. from National Taiwan University, an M.S. in E.E. from University of Maine, a Ph.D. in E.E. from UCLA, and a master’s degree from the UCLA Executive Engineering Management Program. He has taught and given lectures at serveral universities and has been invited to give many speeches around the world.

Dr. Chen recently authored a book on “Leadership in Management,” published by Nova Science Publishers, N.Y., February 2022.

Zheng Li

Director of Board, Chief Executive Officer

JCET Group Co., Ltd.

STATS ChipPAC Pte. Ltd.

Mr. Zheng Li joined the company as Chief Executive Officer on September 9, 2019. He was appointed as a Director of the Board for JCET and certain subsidiaries of the Company on September 26, 2019.

Mr. Zheng received his Master’s degree in Financial Economic Management from the University of Tokyo and Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Management Engineering, Tianjin University. He has close to 30 years of experience working in IC companies in the United States, Japan, Europe and China. Prior to his current position, Mr. Zheng served as Global Senior Vice President of NXP, President of NXP Greater China, CEO of Renesas Greater China and GM of Tomen America ( a Toyota group subsidiary) Santa Clara office.

Currently, Mr. Zheng also serves as Vice Chairman of China Semiconductor Industry Association, Rotating Chairman of Packaging and Testing Branch of China Semiconductor Industry Association, Chairman on duty of National Technology Innovation Strategic Alliance for IC Assembly and Testing, and SEMI Global Board of Director. In 2022, “Institutional Investor”, the leading financial rating agency in U.S., ranked Mr. Zheng as the second best CEO in the semiconductor industry in Asia (excluding Japan).

Weifeng Zhang

Chief Architect and VP of Software at Lightelligence Inc

Dr. Weifeng Zhang is the Chief Architect and VP of Software at Lightelligence Inc, responsible for system architecture, hardware software co-design, and software infrastructure to empower optical computing and interconnect technologies. Prior to joining Lightelligence, Weifeng was a Sr. Director of Alibaba Group and the Chief Scientist of Heterogeneous Computing at Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors at MLCommons™ (MLPerf™) and currently serves as the Tech Chair of AI Co-Design Workgroup at Open Computing Project Foundation (OCP). He co-founded the HiPChips organization and co-chaired the International Workshop of High Performance Chiplet and Interconnect Architectures (HiPChips) at ISCA-2022 in New York, HPCA-2023 in Montreal, and ISCA-2023 in Orlando, respectively. Weifeng received his PhD in Computer Science from University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Hao Zhong

CEO, CO-FOUNDER of ScaleFlux

Dr. Hao Zhong is a passionate technology innovator and entrepreneur that has been contributing numerous cutting edge technology and product in data storage and computing industry. Since Oct 2014, Hao, as the CEO, co-founded ScaleFlux that is leading the computational storage subsystem development in the industry.

Prior to ScaleFlux, Hao was a Sr. Director at Fusion-io where he led the flash memory technology team and enabled LDPC technology in industry leading PCIe SSDs. Prior to Fusion-io, Hao was with SandForce as an engineering director working on SSD controller chips. Prior to SandForce, Hao was an architect at LSI working on hard disk drive read channel product and the key contributor to the industry first 40nm LDPC read channel chip in 2008. Hao received his Ph.D degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Chloe Jian Ma

Vice President, China GTM, ARM

Chloe Jian Ma is VP of China Go-To-Market for the IOT and Embedded Line of Business at Arm. In this role, Chloe is responsible for strengthening and expanding Arm products, solutions and ecosystem for the China market so that the next wave of innovations in AIoT and embedded intelligence happen on the Arm platform. She joined Arm from the RISC-V world, where she worked for both SiFive and StarFive (SiFive’s China JV) and had her hands full with many aspects of the business from global technology partnership/ecosystem building, to GTM strategy, to fundraising and running a regional subsidiary.

Chloe’s experience in the semiconductor industry also included Mellanox and Intel, where she led the GTM of cloud networking and compute solutions into the hyperscale Internet and Cloud service provider segment. Prior to entering the semiconductor industry, Chloe assumed engineering and marketing leadership roles in the networking industry at Juniper Networks, Huawei and Cisco Systems. To close the full loop, her 1st job was with Wind River in real-time embedded OS with a vision to make everything smart! Chloe received an MBA degree from Wharton, an MSEE from University of Southern California, and a BS in Electronics from Peking University in China.

Glenn Ge

CEO and co-founder of TetraMem Inc

Dr. Glenn Ge is the CEO and co-founder of TetraMem Inc., a leading Silicon Valley startup in AI acceleration. With a decade of experience in the semiconductor sector, he has contributed to numerous product innovations. He boasts around 800 global patent filings, stemming from over 300 US/PCT patent families, many of which are now in mass production. Dr. Ge holds three Master’s degrees, including an MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.