IESF 2013: Featured Presenters

Wally Rhines, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mentor Graphics

Walden C. Rhines is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mentor Graphics, a leader in worldwide electronic design automation with revenue of $1,015 million in FY2012. During his tenure at Mentor Graphics, revenue has more than doubled, growth rate since 1999 has been number one among the “Big 3” EDA companies, and Mentor has grown the industry’s number one market share solutions in physical verification, design concept-through-functional verification, and printed circuit board design. Prior to joining Mentor Graphics, Rhines was Executive Vice President of Texas Instruments’ Semiconductor Group, sharing responsibility for TI’s Components Sector, and having direct responsibility for the entire semiconductor business with more than $5 billion of revenue and more than 30,000 people. During his 21 years at TI, Rhines managed TI’s thrust into digital signal processing and supervised that business from inception with the TMS 320 family of DSPs through growth to become the cornerstone of TI’s semiconductor technology. He was also responsible for development of the first TI speech synthesis devices (used in “Speak & Spell”) and is co-inventor of the GaN blue-violet light emitting diode (now important for DVD players). He was President of TI’s Data Systems Group and held numerous other semiconductor executive management positions. Rhines is currently in his fourth term as Chairman of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium. He is also a board member of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, Lewis and Clark College, and the Portland Classic Wines Auction. He has previously served as chairman of the Semiconductor Technical Advisory Committee of the Department of Commerce, as an executive committee member of the board of directors of the Corporation for Open Systems, and as a board member of the Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers' Association (CBEMA), SEMI-Sematech/SISA, Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC), University of Michigan National Advisory Council, and Sematech. Dr. Rhines holds a bachelor of science degree in metallurgical engineering from the University of Michigan, a master of science and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, a master of business administration from Southern Methodist University, and an Honorary Doctor of Technology degree from Nottingham Trent University.

• Meeting the Challenge of Developing the ‘More Electric’ Aircraft Abstract

  KEYNOTE As electronic content increases dramatically in aerospace design, aircraft are evolving into sophisticated networked computing platforms. Unfortunately, there has not been a corresponding evolution in electronic design tools and methodologies, even as the industry moves towards a ‘more electric’ aircraft. To bridge this design gap, model-driven development is emerging as the best way to manage this complex process.
  
  Dr. Rhines will provide examples and an assessment of where aviation leaders are in the process of implementing model driven design to meet ever more demanding program requirements and functional specifications. He then will outline what needs to be done, both now and in the future, to eventually realize the goals of the all-electric airplane: including architecting and optimizing designs, and implementing subsystems across organizational, geographic, and supply-chain boundaries.