What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

My hardware days are behind me, but I recently had the opportunity to use Agilent’s LTE test suite for our CPRI compression technology, and I was amazed at the capabilities.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

I still use MATLAB a bit.

What is on your bookshelf?

A friend recently gave me Inbound Marketing by Hannigan and Shah, and it really makes sense of how to combine outbound marketing with inbound marketing via Google and social networks.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

Yes, as you switch from engineering to marketing you have to learn that your job is now to define problems, not to provide solutions. Any company will have talented engineers who can come up with elegant technical solutions, but often times they fall into the trap of not having defined the right problem.

How did you get into electronics/engineering and when did you start?

My dad came home one day with a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 computer when I was in fifth grade. It had four kilobytes of RAM. I tell my kids that back in those days, when we wanted to play a game on the computer we had to actually type it in ourselves and save it on cassette. I was hooked on the computer. I remember when my dad went out and got a RAM update from four to 16 kilobytes, which at that time was more RAM than anyone could possibly need. It is neat how times have changed.

I went to college at the University of California, San Diego to study electrical engineering, and earned my Master’s degree. After working for a couple of years and recovering from graduate school, I decided to go back and get an MBA. I did the night school thing at Santa Clara University.

Where did you go to work out of school?

I went to work for a company called Stanford Telecom, which, among many other inventions, created GPS technology. It was acquired in the late 1990s by Newbridge Networks, which has since been acquired by Alcatel.

Right out of school I started as a hardware and DSP engineer. For eight years I worked at Stanford Telecom on satellite transponders for NASA. NASA would use them for high-altitude weather balloon experiments. This was interesting because about two years ago, a NASA employee stopped by our booth and talked about how they are still using these transponders. Thinking back to how many green wires there were going across the boards, and the difficult life of these transponders, I was amazed to see that 18 years after I worked on them, many of them are still being used. When the balloons come down they do not come down very gracefully, and can end up all over the place. I was just amazed to hear that they are still in operation.

The last project I worked on at Stanford Telecom was a broadband wireless system. This was really in the days of WiMAX, before WiMAX was WiMAX. That was ultimately the product line that Newbridge acquired from the company. I went on to another broadband wireless company called Netro. In 1998 Netro had a billion dollar IPO based on quarterly revenues of $18 million. It was perfect timing for me.

At Netro I was working on systems providing broadband wireless and T1 replacements for mostly small and medium-sized enterprises that only needed a couple of megabits per second internet access. Technology allowed us to do ATM over the years, but you do not hear much about that anymore. IP eventually took over all of this. This was really when I transitioned into marketing for the first time. When I joined Metro I was the director of product marketing for the broadband wireless product line. They just introduced a first-generation system. Typical of a startup, it kind of missed the mark in terms of what the market required. I came in and defined a couple of critical features that the wireless operators are looking for to make it truly a carrier class. At that point we signed a system integrator relationship with Lucent and that really paved the way for the IPO.

After Netro, where did you go?

I worked for Netro for five years, and then worked on my own start-ups. At the end of my tenure at Netro, I was doing business development, and that culminated in the acquisition of the project Angel Technology from AT&T Wireless. That was a fixed and mobile wireless technology, also before WiMAX was WiMAX. But at the time the market had crashed, Netro’s stock was trading below cash value. The investors wondered why we were making acquisitions in a financial position where we could not give any forward guidance. So after that, Netro sold itself to another company, SR Telecom. They are still carrying on with the technology.

In 2003, it was a challenging environment to try to launch a start-up company, especially one that relied heavily on semiconductor business models. So after a couple years of that, I went to work for a company in the RFID field, Savi Technology.

Savi specialized in active RFID, so these were battery-powered tags. The biggest market for this particular RFID technology was freight containers shipped through the global supply chains. Other applications are asset tracking and drive applications. It is a challenge to track items at pallet levels instead of containers. There are a whole bunch of issues, such as who bears the cost. Basically, if the wooden crate costs less than five dollars to build, the issue lies in who is going to pay for any electronics attached to the crate, and who pays for the rest of the infrastructure. These are the kinds of things that people are still working out. In terms of tracking freight containers, it turn out that the largest shipper of freight containers in the world is the U.S. Department of Defense. They use a combination of Navy ships for critical items, but also commercial shippers as well. Everything comes in through Navy-operated Port terminals. It is a supply chain where they have control over each of the checkpoints. It was a very good model to start with because it is an integrated supply chain that a customer can put together and control all the places where infrastructure can be installed.

In 2006, an RFID company down in Morgan Hill, California called Alien Technology filed for an IPO. When it put out its S1, its revenues were 50 percent of their cost of goods sold. When all of the financial analysts went through it, all of the press started saying “It’s 1999 all over again.” Evidently that has not stopped a lot of the social networking start ups these days but five years ago that pretty much killed IPO as an exit strategy for the RFID market. So Savi ended up being acquired by Lockheed Martin.

I worked at Lockheed Martin for a year, and now I work for Samplify Systems. So the joke at Samplify is that we hired our V.P. of Marketing away from Lockheed Martin. I have been at Samplify for just over four years. The company was launched in March of 2007 and I joined in May of 2007.

When Samplify first launched, what was the initial product line?

The core technology for the company is our prism signal compression technology. Trying to launch as an IP company is very challenging unless you have some real immediate attraction and a way to get to tens of millions of dollars in revenue very quickly. Because our compression technology operates on any signal that originates in the analog domain, it tends to provide more value to a system when you put more compression to the analog domain and decompression to the software domain. We thought of integrating the signal compression technology with data converters, and that was the business model that got the company our Series A funding back in March of 2007. But from March 2007 to October 2008 we were kind of a stealth-mode semiconductor company and presented ourselves as an intellectual property company around the compression technology. I remember we had a kick-off meeting in early June, just a couple of weeks after I arrived, and our analog designer said “I am going to build you this 12-bit, 65-megasample ADC. I think I will be able to pack 16 channels of this onto one die.” It sounded interesting but where were we going to use it? Everyone in the room looked at me and said, “Allan, don’t you realize that is why we hired you?” So it turns out that the ADC was really ideal for the medical ultrasound market. In the probe of an ultrasound machine there can be up to 256 individual ultrasound transducers that convert electrical waves to acoustic waves. Each one of those is connected via a micro coax cable back to an ADC channel sitting in the console. The ultrasound machines use a very large number of ADCs, so when we brought ours to market it had twice the number of channels and half the power of other solutions in the market. It also integrated our signal compression technology, which reduced the number of pins to get the data off the data converter by 60 percent. Routing all of that stuff into an FPGA is also a challenge.

What is the current business model that is doing better?

The IP sales are doing better. The compression technology is what I call a horizontal market. We announced an agreement about a year and a half ago with a company called Moog, which supplies slip ring devices to medical imaging companies, and we have found a lot of different applications with Moog. All of the x-ray detector technology rotates around the patient, and there can be 10 to 100,000 x-ray detectors spinning around the patient. Each one of those is connected to an ADC. By the time you aggregate all the data that is collected from the detectors, it amounts to 10 GB per second. So this was an easy thing for us to do with our compression IP, without having to integrate it fully with a data converter. By partnering with Moog, we were able to eventually wrap our IP in a couple hundred pounds of spinning aluminum. This gave us a great way to penetrate the market. About a year ago we announced a deal with Integrated Device Technology (IDP) around our compression technology for wireless infrastructure applications, particularly cellular base stations. Now with the deployment of LTE, the radio units are connected through fiber optic cables, and the capacity can be 10–20 GB per second. We can be anywhere between a 33 to 50 percent reduction in terms of capacity.

We are looking for new markets to get into lately. We have been getting a lot of interest from high-speed and high-resolution imaging applications. We also closed our Series B round of funding and one of the investors was Schlumberger, who does oil and gas exploration, and we just announced our Prism FP technology, which extends our compression from integer data types. This has been historically how it is used after it comes out of a data converter, but now we do floating point as well. This allows us to move out of the data acquisition side of these systems and into the data center and data processing. This opens up a lot of applications in terms of high-performance computing application, supercomputing, and cloud computing.

The ultrasound market, though, has really been our specialty over the last three years since the introduction of our SAM1600 family of ADCs. When you build a data converter, it gives you a unique insight into the entire signal chain on our system, and based on this we started working on ultrasound beamforming technology about three years ago.

Over the last few years we have found that the ultrasound market is very fragmented. Even the big three manufacturers, GE, Phillips, and Siemens, have almost a dozen different machines filling different niches in the market. Whether it is cardiology, general purpose radiology, OB/GYN, portable emergency rooms, or ambulance types of applications, there is really a wide range. And since announcing our beamforming development kit last October, we have been amazed at how much the market is fragmenting even further. We have lots of companies who want to combine ultrasounds with different technologies, like endoscopes or specialized cardiology stuff where their competitive advantage is in an algorithm and they really want to be able to buy the ultrasound technology off the shelf. We also sell it as a development kit to allow manufacturers to essentially rapidly develop new machines. So instead of taking three years to get to market for a new machine, they can get to market in 12 months because from day one they have a development kit that they can start developing their software on and not have to wait another six to nine months for their hardware guys to get every last piece of noise out of the analog signal chain.

Is the company going to be getting into the medical field?

Our intentions are to be a provider of components and subsystems of IP to Ultrasound system manufacturers, as well as other application areas. It is a horizontal technology. We are doing the heavy lifting on the analog side of the design to enable them to make ultrasounds cheaper and more effective. We have no intentions on become a supplier of medical equipment.

We learned a valuable lesson as a start-up company. When we closed our Series A in March of 2007, we closed our Series B in January of 2011. That means that we somehow survived the financial crisis in-between. We did so by not being solely focused on a particular business model. Sometimes when you are a start-up you are looking forward to your next round of funding, it is kind of like when you remodel your kitchen. You pick your appliances based on what the people who are going to buy your house from you will want, not what fits your own lifestyle necessarily and it is kind of the same way with start-up and their business models. For a long time we were trying to stick hard to a position of being a pure-play semiconductor company and as we started getting design in with our ultrasound customers we really began to realize that a lot of these OEM’s needed the technology provided to them with a higher level of integration, like in the form of modules or subsystems. We adapted to the needs of the market and we did not really stick dogmatically to “no we are only a semiconductor company, we can’t do that,” and that has turned out to be a very successful strategy for us in terms of engaging customers in this fragmented market.

What is involved in the design of ultrasound systems?

We have spent several weeks in our customers’ labs helping them bring up their analog designs around our components. So yes, it is very support intensive. But then you get the benefits afterwards of long product lifecycles because these machines stay in production for three to five years.

When you look at our website you see a lot of different product forms, from the chips to the modules to IP to subsystems. That is really what we pride ourselves in now, making our technology available to customers in whatever form they want to buy it.

When it comes to your IP for your compression, do you typically work with TI DSPs, or is it FPGA based, or basic hardware?

All of the above. The technology is available in software form, so it runs on Intel CPUs, DSPs, anything with a C Compiler, but we also make it available in RTL form to run on any FPGA family.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I have been lucky enough to have had two exits of projects/companies on which I had a major role. For the first I was in an engineering management role from the very beginning, and the product line was sold for over 300 million dollars. For the second, I came in to a Marketing role and defined the second generation of a product line, which enabled the company to have a successful IPO at over a one billion dollar market cap.

What are you currently working on?

We always have many exciting activities going on at Samplify. What I am most excited about right now is our ultrasound beamforming technology. We are introducing a second generation of our beamforming development kit which gives an OEM everything they need to start developing an ultrasound machine. We have received a lot of interest not just from our OEM customers, but also from other partners in the value chain who want to be a part of the ecosystems.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

Samplify will be strengthening its core intellectual property base and delivering solutions around it to customers.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

As a small company trying to sell into the medical equipment, wireless infrastructure, and computing markets, it is challenging to get the large suppliers to adopt our technology. We have addressed this by pursuing strategic partnerships with other companies in the value chain, like Moog who makes slip rings for CT machines, and IDT who is a leading provider of semiconductors for wireless infrastructure. If you are not a social networking start, then seeking strategic partnerships is a key strategy for a startup to get to market.