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New company, seasoned team

Kapik`s team members have been in the industry for an average of >10 years each. Kapik began operations in 2008 and many of the staff have worked together over in a number of projects over the past decade. We know how to work together to produce great silicon, the first time.

Martin Snelgrove

Martin followed a technology-focussed 16-year academic career (University of Toronto, sabbatical at Bell Labs, research chair at Carleton University) with a 1997 move into entrepreneurship (Chief Scientist at Philsar, CTO at Soma Networks, CEO at Dissonance Inc.) displaying a pattern of leading high-performance technical teams in aggressive developments of disruptive technologies.

His group at the University of Toronto did the first rigorous work on bandpass delta-sigma converters and on the design of continuous-time delta-sigma loops, which led to prototype converters clocking at GHz rates -- work done with James Cherry, jointly producing "the little black book" for high-speed delta-sigma. Commercial versions are now in radars, digital receivers and RF power amplifiers.

His academic groups advanced and modernized the theory of Hilbert-filter "complex analog" circuits to provide regular structures well suited to integration; as Chief Scientist at Philsar he then drove commercialization of self-trimming complex filter technology in receiver IF strips, and at Dissonance he took it into RF power amplifiers.

At Toronto his group also led the advance of adaptive analog filters; they invented a range of techniques, specifically adapted to integration, for controlling high-performance analog signal paths; this resulted in high-volume commercial products in wireline data and storage read channels, where Martin worked with Raymond Chik on software-trimmed gain, filtering and data conversion in chips now shipping more than 10 million/month.

Martin's group also pioneered "smart memory" technology, the most power-efficient way to do advanced video processing. Rob McKenzie took this to a record density of processing elements at IBM, and Raymond worked on an early commercialization; now smart memory runs collision avoidance algorithms in the latest Lexus.

Raymond Chik

Raymond is a co-founder at Kapik, coming in as a senior executive involved in business development and engineering research and development. He brings 20 years of design and management experience in the area of analog mixed-signal IC with focus on embedded analog front end designs in areas such as graphics&video display, image sensors, hard-disk drive read channels and Giga-bit SERDES.

Prior to founding Kapik, Raymond was Director of Mixed-Signal Engineering of InVisage Inc, and a founding member of its chip design team. In 1998 he was employee #1 at Snowbush Microelectronics, a high-end analog/mixed-signal design services/IP company (acquired by Gennum Corp in 2007).

At Snowbush, he led numerous successful projects ranging from high speed data coverters, video/graphics interfaces and disk drive electronics, and mentored many of the engineers who became very senior staff members within Snowbush. Raymond's tenure at Snowbush allowed him to gain deep experience in working with a wide spectrum of different engineering groups - clients (such as Agere, Intel, Fairchild, Conexant and Pixelworks).

He also held engineering positions in the early phase of his career at Mosaid Seminconductor, a CMOS memory design company, and Quantum Corporation, where he worked on disk-drive read channel chips.

Raymond holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto and is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Rob McKenzie

Robert McKenzie is a graduate of the Computer Engineering undergraduate program at the University of Toronto, and completed a Masters degree at Carleton University in 1997. His graduate school work focused on Computational RAM, a massively parallel processor built into conventional DRAMs for graphics processing and other applications which require high bandwidth parallel processing. His Masters dissertation was supervised by Martin Snelgrove.

Upon completion of his Masters degree, he started working as a design engineer at MOSAID Technologies in Kanata Ontario. In his nine years at MOSAID, he worked as a team designer, leader and manager on projects for graphics processing chips, Content Addressable Memories (CAMs), high speed on-chip memory BIST, high speed DRAMs, and DDR memory controllers. Before joining Kapik, he spent a year completing an MBA in the the United Kingdom and working as a technical advisor to a law firm in New York.

Imran Ahmed

Imran is a graduate from the University of Toronto, where he received the B.A.Sc degree (with honors) from the Division of Engineering Science in 2002, and the M.A.Sc and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2004, and 2008 respectively. He has held internship positions at Broadcom Netherlands and Snowbush Microelectronics, where he worked on various leading edge and low-power mixed signal circuits.

Imran has published a number of award winning papers in the area of pipelined ADCs. He received first place in the operational category and best overall submission in the 2005 DAC/ISSCC student design competition. His work in ADC calibration was awarded the 'Young Scientist Award' for ESSCIRC 2007. He was recipient of the 2008 Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award. He is also author of 'Pipelined ADC Design and Enhancement Techniques' (Springer, 2010)

David Halupka

David received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2010. His research and design work, specifically in the areas of MRAM and speech enhancement, has resulted in various publications in renowned conferences and journals. He presented the first non-destructive variation-tolerant read scheme and a power-saving write scheme for MRAM at the IEEE Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). He also described the implementation of the lowest power sound localization chip in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

David brings in a wide and diverse range of experience spanning digital/mixed-signal and analog IC design to signal processing algorithms. His real-world experiences include a 16-month internship at Motorola's Multiservice Network Division, where designed PCBs for network edge routers and video-over-IP devices.

James Cherry

James graduated at the top of his 1992 U. of Waterloo computer engineering class. His 1994 M.Eng. dissertation was on intermodulation distortion products in analog filters for radio. His 1998 Ph.D. dissertation was on the design and performance limits of continuous-time delta sigma modulators, which led to the publication of a monograph on the same subject. Both were completed at Carleton University and supervised by Martin Snelgrove.

Since then, he has worked for two successful startups. In 1998, he joined Philsar Semiconductor in Ottawa, which was bought in 2001 by Conexant. There, he modeled and designed mixed mode circuits for radio ICs. In 2001, he joined Sandvine in Waterloo, which went public in 2006. There, he wrote Internet traffic simulation software and analyzed the performance of Sandvine's networking products. He has consulted for numerous companies in the design and modeling of delta sigma-based systems, in the process working again with Martin through Dissonance. He has competed at the World Scrabble(R) Championships, both in 1999 and 2001, as part of team Canada.

Bob Stratton

Bob has a Diploma of Engineering From Dalhousie University and a BSc EE (with a Minor in Computer Engineering) from the University of Calgary. He spent twelve years working in the Intellectual Property Departments of two major Canadian law firms as a Canadian and US registered Patent Agent.

Bob next moved in-house as VP Intellectual Property with Soma Networks, where he and Martin learned how to work together on building a patent portfolio. Since 2001 he has been running Woodview Patent Services.

Bob has extensive experience in protecting and licensing high tech innovations and in technology transfer.

Doug Kneebone

Doug is a director at Kapik, and in his day job responsible for all legal matters at Soma Networks. With over 21 years in private legal practice before joining Soma, Doug has worked with and advised numerous technology companies, venture capital firms and financial institutions. As a senior partner with Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, one of Canada's largest law firms, Doug provided advice and counsel in connection with mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, insolvency and corporate restructuring, both in Canada and the United States. Doug holds a Bachelor's degree from McMaster University and an LLB from the University of Toronto Law School.