Chris Rowen

Dr. Chris Rowen is the creator and principal of Cognite Ventures.   Chris is a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technologist. He has served as CTO for Cadence’s IP Group, where he and his team develop new processor and memory for advanced applications in mobile, automotive, infrastructure, deep learning and IoT systems.  The team has become one of the leading innovators in automated neural network optimization and ultra-efficient neural network processing engines for embedded systems.  Chris joined Cadence after its acquisition of Tensilica, the company he founded to develop extensible processors. He led Tensilica as CEO and later, CTO, to become one of the leading embedded architectures, with  more than 225 chip and system company licensees, who together ship more than 4 billion cores per year. Before founding Tensilica in 1997, he was VP and GM of the Design Reuse Group at Synopsys. Chris also was a pioneer in developing RISC architecture and helped found MIPS Computer Systems, where he was VP of Microprocessor Development. He holds an MSEE and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford and a BA in physics from Harvard.  He holds more than 40 US and international patents.  He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2015 for his work in development of microprocessor technology.  He continues to serve as a strategic advisor to Cadence while developing new entrepreneurial ventures in cognitive computing.