Management Team
For over 20 years, the founding team and initial employees have been involved in key developments of integrated circuit (IC) fabrication processes, memory design, logic design, electronic design automation (EDA), reconfigurable computing, and IC manufacturing. They have invented and commercialized new fabrication processes, IC architectures, design tools, system OSs, RTOS kernels, and software control of real-time dynamic logic. The team has over 150 years of combined experience in high technology engineering and management, including the design, development, commercialization, marketing, sales, and product introductions of advanced electronic products and services.

John Watson
Vice President and Founder
John Watson is the Vice Presdient and Founder of Element CXI. Mr. Watson has more than twenty years marketing, sales, and senior management experience at Intel, Fairchild, National Semiconductor, Data I/O, and Xilinx, as well as a strong engineering background that dates back to the formative days of Intel. He was most recently a Co-Founder and Vice President Marketing of QuickSilver Technology, the pioneering company of adaptive computing technology. Mr. Watson’s focus is on innovating and delivering industry-first, leading-edge products throughout United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia/Japan geographies. While at QuickSilver, Mr. Watson was a co-developer of the Adaptive Computing Machine (ACM), a new class of high performance/low power IC, and developed the market for this technology. At Xilinx, he was responsible for developing and establishing the market category of reconfigurable computing, using Xilinx FPGA-based technologies. During is career at Data I/O, he played a key role in developing the market for and acceptance of FPGA technologies in 1989, as well as developing the world’s first FPGA emulator and software design tools Mr. Watson has been a co-founder of several industry tradeshows, magazines, and trade associations, promoting the advancement of IC technologies. He holds a BSEE from the University of Portland.

Robert (Bob) Barker
Director of Business Development
Robert Barker heads Business Development at Element CXI. Mr. Barker has over 20 years experience as a senior-level manager in the semiconductor, software and distribution industry. He held the position of Vice President of Marketing at Exemplar Logic, where he was responsible for the successful repositioning of the company from an OEM niche technology supplier to a mainstream FPGA synthesis end-user supplier. At Exemplar Logic, he introduced the highly successful Leonardo series of synthesis tools to the market, which contributed year-to-year revenue growth rates of 70 to 100 percent over a four-year period of time. Market valuation of Exemplar increased from $25M to $120M in two years. Prior to this, Mr. Barker was the Director of Marketing for the PLD Products Business Unit for Xilinx. At Plus Logic, an FPGA start-up, Mr. Barker participated in the initial funding of the company as a member of the management team that raised $5M in initial capital. He went on to found Plus Logic’s European subsidiary in Munich, Germany. Early in his career, Mr. Barker held marketing and sales positions at Hamilton/Avnet, Signetics, Intersil, and Mesa Engineering. He holds a BSEE from California Polytechnic State University.

Chris Phillips
VP of Engineering
Mr. Phillips has an extensive 20 year expertise in systems applications, micro-architectures, logic design, silicon level circuit design, algorithm invention, high level/assembly language programming, and code scripts. He has brought to market 20 fully-functional-at-first-silicon device tape outs and has 23 patents in the design of microcontrollers, microprocessors, FPGAs, ASICs, reconfigurable computing systems and CAD EDA tools. Previous to ElementCXI, he co-founded Tiger Semiconductor, Leopard Logic, and Chameleon Systems . At Summitt Design, Mr Phillips was Director of High Level Synthesis and at DaSys Inc. he pioneering behavioral synthesis. At Crosspoint Solutions, Mr. Phillips served as Director of Advanced Architecture for the CrossFire FPGA family and at National Semiconductor he designed and delivered the control and decode logic for a fully compatible, clean room 486 processor producing functional silicon and 8 patents in 15 months. Earlier, he was the designer responsible for the COP444C micro-controller which then averaged $80M/year revenue for 17 years so that, on average, every person in the US owns at least three of these devices. Chris Phillips graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in Ithaca , New York ; McMullen Scholar.

Dale Wong
Director of Software development
Prior to Element CXI, Dale Wong was a founder, V.P. of Technology for Leopard Logic, a
start-up company dedicated to the realization of data intensive algorithms in silicon. There he was responsible for global technology strategy and achievement of commercial quality results. Dale was also a founding member of Chameleon Systems from 1997-2000, where he was VP of Software development for ground-breaking development of the world’s first commercial reconfigurable communications platform. Mr. Wong received key seminal patents in the application of dynamic adaptive reconfigurability for algorithm acceleration. Dale has written and directed key platforms in both start-up and large corporate development environments at companies such as VLSI Technology, Crosspoint Solutions, and Cadence Design Automation in senior contributory roles. Mr. Wong has received 16 USPTO patents in area's of advanced algorithm application and design.

Dr. Steve Kelem
Chief Architect
Dr. Kelem has over 26 years of experience with digital design, software design, and CAD software design. Previous to ElementCXI, he was Chief Scientist at Adaptive Silicon, designing and overseeing the entire software flow for in-house developed design tools. At Xilinx he was the architect for novel reconfigurable architectures. Dr. Kelem also developed and published the methodology for partial run-time reconfiguration for Xilinx FPGAs. And, he managed the software group for reconfigurable computing and participated in the design of a reconfigurable, multi-context FPGA. Dr. Kelem has published many journal papers, participated on conference panels and lectured at several universities. He has nine patents in the areas of digital circuits, high-level CAD tools, and encryption. Dr. Kelem holds BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE professional societies.

Dr. Joseph Hassoun
Director - Hardware Design
Joseph Hassoun has more than 20 years experience solving complex engineering issues in both the architectural and implementation levels. Prior to joining ElementCXI, Mr. Hassoun held various architectural, IC development and hardware management positions at Stretch, Adaptive Silicon, Xilinx, and Hewlett Packard. At Stretch, he was a main contributor to the architecture and design of their S5000 and S6000 families. At Xilinx, he was a key architectural contributor to the first Virtex FPGA family and managed the engineering development team for the system features; which enabled Xilinx to grow from a private company into the industry FPGA leader. At HP, Mr. Hassoun managed the design of IC testers and contributed to the architecture, chip set designs and PA-RISC processors used in their server, workstation and mini computer lines.

Mr. Hassoun holds 13 patents in the areas of Computer hardware and Integrated Circuit design. He received his Electrical Engineering BS degree from the University of Michigan and MS degree from Stanford University.