Warren Savage joined ARLIS in 2019 supporting the DARPA Microelectronics Technology Office (MTO) as a subject matter expert on a variety of semiconductor topics including chip design, security, and supply chain dynamics. He has resided in the heart of Silicon Valley in San Jose, California since 1979 and has borne witness to its evolution as an international technology center since then.
Early in his career at fault-tolerant computing pioneer, Tandem Computers, he was involved with the development of advanced manufacturing equipment based on applying signature analysis techniques to system test. He later went on to focus on the design of fault-tolerant disk and tape subsystems for the Tandem systems which were used extensively in online transaction processing applications such as banking and high-reliability applications such as air traffic control.
In 1995 he was recruited by Synopsys to lead its nascent semiconductor intellectual property (IP) business, DesignWare, and helped establish business models and design methodologies that have built that business from $1M in 1995 to over a half-billion dollars today. He was a key contributor to the seminal book on IP design, Reuse Methodology Manual in 1997. It was at Synopsys where he led a team to develop the first synthesizable ARM 7DTMI core in 1998 and various ARM 9 cores in the years after. As a result of the success of those efforts, he began working with large semiconductor companies all over the world to create modern implementations of key technology for clients including IBM, Philips Semiconductor (now NXP), Siemens Semiconductor (now Infineon), NEC, MIPS, and Panasonic.
In 2004 he founded the venture-backed company, IPextreme, which employed agile software development practices to hardware design and applied that approach to the commercialization of captive technology within the semiconductor community with clients such as Infineon, Freescale (formerly Motorola Semiconductor), Cypress, NXP, and Texas Instruments. In addition, he was instrumental in the development of the first SaaS-based IP repository for transacting semiconductor IP business and a co-inventor of “IP fingerprinting and DNA analysis” technology to allow companies to analyze their chip designs to reveal unlicensed and possibly malware-infected IP cores. IPextreme was sold in 2016 to Silvaco where he stayed on for two years as the general manager of its new IP business unit.
Warren received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University and his MBA from Pepperdine University. He has been awarded 4 patents in a variety of subjects from his time at Tandem (2, system design), Synopsys (design methodology), and IPextreme (IP fingerprinting.)