Doug gained an honors degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Bath, England in 1980.
He did his first programmable logic design in the mid-80’s, when FPGAs were still called Logic Cell Arrays. Since then, Doug has designed or supported countless FPGA and ASIC designs either as an independent consultant or working with the leading vendors. Doug became Synplicity’s first engineer and Technical Director in Europe (Synplicity was acquired by Synopsys in 2008) and has presented widely on FPGA design and FPGA-based prototyping since that time.
Austin graduated from UC Berkeley in 1974 with his BS EECS in Electromagnetic (E&M) Theory and in 1975 added an MS EECS in Communications and Information Theory.
He has worked in the telecommunications field for 20 years designing optical, microwave, and copper- based transmission system and developing SONET/SDH GPS-based Timing Systems. For the last ten years at Xilinx, Austin was in the IC Design department for the Virtex product line and for the last two years, he has been working for Xilinx Research Labs, where he is looking beyond the present technology issues.
René holds an MSEE degree, the Dipl.-Ing. der Elektrotechnik, from the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany in 1999.
He has worked 11 years in the area of FPGA-based Prototyping, first at ISYTEC, then Pro Design and now at Synopsys; each transition as a result of an acquisition. René managed the development of the CHIPit hardware platforms before moving on to become Director of Applications. During this time he developed co-simulation interfaces and prototyping hardware and has implemented many ASIC designs in FPGA. René has also developed prototyping concepts and solutions for customers and he is one of the inventors of the UMRBus and CHIPit product line.