1. Gunnar Wetlesen: Industry Bio
Gunnar Wetlesen was an early entrant into the IC industry with pioneer American Micro-
Systems who went on to co-found two companies which designed and fabricated integrated
circuits in silicon, the namesake of the famed silicon valley.
The first of the start-ups, Synertek, provided chips to two legendary companies in their earliest
days, Apple and Atari. Gunnar was the chief technologist for the company leading and directing
the technology development efforts and later also memory product development, the “driver”
for manufacturing technology. Funded by companies wishing design and manufacturing of
custom circuits, including Bullova, the company was among the first to offer (now ubiquitous)
CMOS circuits in an era when NMOS was the basis for microprocessors and memory. Synertek
competed directly with Intel for several years in RAMs
In an era without a robust IPO environment, Synertek was acquired by Honeywell which led to
Gunnar and two other founders to co-found a new company, VLSI Technology, Inc. (or VTI ).
Funded by VCs led by Hambrecht and Quist, VTI was the first to aim at commercializing the
vision of “System on a Chip”. It recruited a team to develop computerized design tools and
automatically configurable circuit elements to allow logic level designers to implement new
system elements directly in integrated circuit form. Gunnar served as the CTO and also sat on
the company’s board. The company had a fast start, initially subcontracting manufacturing of
its leading ROM products to Ricoh while building its own factory. This enabled the company to
show substantial sales and raise capital for growth through an early IPO which also brought
about a CEO/management change. VTI grew to almost a billion dollars in revenue before being
acquired by North American Phillips. VTI’s original “silicon foundry” business model is the one
used by TSMC and others supporting so-called “fabless” IC companies today.
Gunnar subsequently took on a long term role as consultant, evaluating and sometimes
investing in early-stage semiconductor related companies. He later co-founded a third
company (Maginet) which had licensed technology from On Command Video for Asia.
Gunnar’s fourth start-up, together with two PhD colleagues, aimed to use the processing power
of mobile phones to aid the hearing impaired. Digitally processing speech sounds can provide
benefits similar to expensive hearing aids at low, app cost. It also can provide pitch shifting and
other advances to help those who have trouble understanding rapid higher frequency, female
speech. At a “proof of principal” (demo app) stage it requires both financial and human capital.
Gunnar has re-focused on the semiconductor industry, recently joining the advisory board of
CRC Inc., an innovative manufacturer of ceramic wafer pedestals for semiconductor capital
equipment. He is currently investigating independent opportunities for improving fab
processing controls, e.g. by more granular instrumentation at the wafer level.
Gunnar holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics.