About Us : Management Team |
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Cary Ussery - President & CEO
Cary has a strong, successful engineering and management background. Cary is President & CEO of Improv Systems, Inc. He has worked in a government contractor (Intermetrics, Inc.), a startup company (Vantage Analysis Systems subsequently purchased by Viewlogic Systems), and an established EDA software company (Cadence Design Systems). He is a founder and President & CEO of Improv Systems, Inc., a startup company delivering configurable DSP processor IP for multimedia and communications chips. Prior to Improv Systems, Cary was the Group Director of Core Technology for Cadence's Alta Business Unit, which includes system specification, language processing, system simulation and high-level synthesis. He has managed teams of up to 75 engineers and has broad experience in new product development and managing existing product lines with revenues of up to $80 million. He has written numerous papers and is co-author of the textbook "VHDL: Hardware Description and Design". He received a BA in Music and a BA in Math from Bard College. |
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Weixin Ni – Sr. VP of Operations
With his rich China domestic industrial and marketing experiences and connections, Weixin is the key contributor for facilitating Vivace Semiconductor’s entering into China’s fast-growth and dynamic consumer electronics market. He started his career right in the core of China’s semiconductor industry in 1992, when he was a key executor for planning and construction of China’s first 6” wafer CMOS fabrication line (SGNEC a joint venture between Capital Steel and Nippon Electronic Co.). He later grew into significant management roles in the company, till the top executive. In 2000, he lead Capital Steels 8” wafer fab line initiative, worked closely with international investors and China government administrations. He participated in initial planning of China’s first 12” wafer fab in 2002; worked as a key executive of a Hong Kong based mask shop; later managed Capital Steel’s investment portfolio operations (including SGNEC). Weixin co-founded General Circuits (Beijing), Ltd. in 2005. It became a very visible IC design company in Beijing. In 2006, General Circuits (Beijing), Ltd. was successfully merged with Vivace Semiconductor, Inc. (Beverly, MA), building up a high-potential international media processor semiconductor company with its signature market approaches. Weixin received his BS in Computer Engineering in 1983 from Beijing Institute of Technology. While being an executive officer at SG-NEC, he completed his graduate study in Economics at China Central University of Finance and Economics. |
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Bryan Greear – Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Bryan Greear brings a wealth of semiconductor industry experience and is focused on building Vivace Semiconductor’s market share in the emerging video processor marketplace. Prior to joining Vivace, Mr. Greear served as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing with NS8 Corporation, provider of high performance video on demand technology. Greear has an extensive sales and marketing background within the electronics industry including senior management roles at Improv Systems, Philips Semiconductor and Siemens (now Infineon). Mr. Greear earned his bachelor of science in Industrial Engineering from Seattle Pacific University. |
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Mark Indovina - CTO
Mark is an R&D engineer/manager with almost 20 years of successful engineering experience. He is Vice President of Engineering at Improv Systems, Inc. and is responsible for the configurable Jazz DSP IP, macro-level and micro-level compilers, the complete software tool chain and implementations in 0.18um and 0.13um technologies. Prior to joining Improv Systems, Mark was the Director of Engineering for the Digital IC Design Group of Cadence Design Systems. Before Cadence, Mark spent over 5 years in the Applied Research department of Motorola working on strategic semiconductor devices. Prior to Motorola, Mark spent 9 years at Computer Consoles researching and developing various digital signaling processing based sub-systems as part of a novel digital switch architecture. He started his engineering career at Ashly Audio designing various products used in professional sound reinforcement. Mark received his MS, BS, and AS degrees in Electrical Engineering, with a concentration in DSP and semiconductors, from Rochester Institute of Technology. |
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Jin Luo - VP of China Engineering
Jin is an experienced team manager of IC design and system team engineering, with hands-on skills in IC product development, EDA, circuit and library development and IP applications. He has 20 years experiences in mixed-signal circuit R&D, elementary circuit design, and IP development. His US career started in 1987, at Caltech as a Staff Researcher in mixed-signal processing SoC designs for the Computation & Neural Systems program. He was an early member of Tanner Research (Pasadena, CA), a IC design and EDA company. Jin was a Staff Scientist in IC design R&D for government and commercial contracts. He founded and fmanaged Tanner Consulting & Engineering Services, a divisional business in 1997, in the meantime contributed to product development of Tanner Tools (a PC-based IC design tool suite). Jin was Tanner EDA’s Technical Director in 2002. Based on his private consulting practice in California (started in 1990’s), Jin founded General Circuits, LLC (Pasadena, CA), a design consulting company in 2002, and further co-founded General Circuits Ltd. (Beijing, China) in 2005. General Circuits developed silicon IPs, performed contracted IC development and served to develop foundry-oriented design infrastructures. It leveraged complement IC design resources in China and US, built a scalable engineering team in China through 16 months. In 2006, General Circuits (Beijing), Ltd. merged with Vivace Semiconductor, Inc. (Beverly, MA). Jin received his BS degree in Computer Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in 1983; received his MS degree in Computer Science in 1987 from Caltech. His MS research (under the guidance of Carver A. Mead, a Gordon & Betty Moore Professor in Computer Science) was in measurement of MOSFET sub-threshold characteristics, which contributed as a key reference supporting integrated system designs on low-power and real-time analog computation ICs. Jin is a co-inventor of patented Shared-wafer Gate Array technology, developed at Tanner Research. |
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Richard Wanzenried - VP of US Engineering
Rick is an expert in digital systems design and implementation. He has over 15 years experience with digital development and has been a key contributor and leader in all phases of product development from concept refinement, product definition, system design and then implementation through to product launch. He started his professional career at Eastman Kodak Company working as a major player on several products including intimate involvement with the definition of the digital logic used in thermal dye sublimation printers. Following his work at Kodak, Rick joined Cadence Design Systems as a senior engineer. After Cadence, he joined Improv Systems to define and develop the implementation process of their configurable DSP technology. This work included all phases of design, from concept to working systems. Rick has also played a major role in the development of Improv's DSP tools, including assembler, simulator, debugger and RTL generators. Rick received his BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology. |
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