Executive Team Biographies
Dr. Yunshan Zhu
President and CEO
Yunshan Zhu co-founded NextOp Software and has led the company through the development, delivery and production implementation of its flagship assertion synthesis product by multiple semiconductor companies. Prior to NextOp, Dr. Zhu was a member of the Advanced Technology Group at Synopsys. Dr. Zhu also worked as a visiting scientist and a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University where he co-invented the bounded model checking algorithm. Dr. Zhu did his undergraduate study at University of Science and Technology of China and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Yuan Lu
Chief Technology Officer
Yuan Lu co-founded NextOp Software and is responsible for the company's technical vision and methodology development based on its core technologies. Prior to NextOp, Dr. Lu was a Principle Scientist in Enterprise Switching Group at Broadcom. Dr. Lu received his BS from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Craig Shirley
Vice President, Worldwide Sales
Prior to NextOp, Craig Shirley served as Apache Design Solutions' vice president of worldwide sales, achieving a compound annual revenue growth rate of over 25%. Prior to Apache, Mr. Shirley was VP of worldwide sales and support at Jasper-DA. Mr. Shirley also served as vice president of North American sales at Verisity Ltd., where he scaled the worldwide sales process to drive the startup to become a $70 million company and the best performing IPO of 2001. Mr. Shirley graduated with honors from Auburn University with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering.
Advisory Board Biographies
Harry Foster
Harry Foster is Mentor Graphics' Chief Scientist for verification. He is co-author of six books on verification, and holds multiple patents in functional verification. Harry serves as chair of the IEEE 1850 Property Specification Language (PSL) working group, and was the original creator of the Accellera Open Verification Library (OVL) assertion library standard.
Dr. John Sanguinetti
John Sanguinetti is founder and CTO of Forte Design System. He was the founder of Chronologic Simulation in 1991 and was the principal architect of VCS, the Verilog Compiled Simulator. Dr. Sanguinetti received his Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from University of Michigan.
Dr. David Overhauser
David Overhauser is founder of Simplex Solutions (now Cadence). Dr. Overhauser founded Simplex Solutions in 1995 and helped grow the company to become a public company. Dr. Overhauser has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and also has degrees in Math and Computer Science.
Dr. Randy Bryant
Randy Bryant is a Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Melon University, and serves as the Dean of School of Computer Science. Prof. Bryant is the recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award by Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) and IEEE Council for Electronic Design Automation for his seminal breakthroughs in the area of formal verification.
Dr. Edmund Clarke
Edmund Clarke, University Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Melon University. Prof. Clarke has received numerous awards, including the 2007 ACM Turing award, for his pioneering work in software and hardware verification. Prof. Clarke is a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Masahiro Fujita
Prof. Masahiro Fujita received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1985 and soon joined Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. From 1993 to 2000, he was assigned to Fujitsu's US research office where he directed the CAD research group. In March 2000, he joined the department of Electronic Engineering in the University of Tokyo as a professor. He has written over 150 technical papers on all aspects of logic design CAD and received several awards from major Japanese scientific societies on his works in formal verification and logic synthesis.
