Chekib Akrout, Ph.D. - COO
Dr. Chekib Akrout is a respected industry veteran and leader focused on ensuring that customers benefit from Motivo’s amazing technologies and helping Motivo scale to the next level by delivering a paradigm change that is transforming how chips are designed and built. Chekib has had a long and illustrious career in the industry with many leadership positions, including VP at IBM, VP & GM at Freescale, SVP at AMD, and most recently as SVP, Customer Excellence at Synopsys. His experience includes cutting-edge microprocessor design, IP & design flow development, global operations, business development, customer success, and general management experience.
He began his career at IBM, where he rose to VP of Engineering, with earlier roles as VP of Entertainment and Embedded Processor Development and VP of Cell Chip Development. He managed the development of a wide range of products, including microprocessors, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and mixed signals. His work included development of PowerPC processors used in Apple Macintosh and Nintendo Game Cube platforms, and he led the Cell Project developed through a Sony/Toshiba/IBM partnership, as well as Xbox 360 processor development for Microsoft and embedded PowerPC processors cores for SoC.
At Freescale, Chekib served as VP & GM of the Networking System Division and drove that $1.5B profitable business. Prior to that, he was responsible for defining and supporting the entire company’s design methodologies and flows, developing differentiated tools and IP, providing common engineering compute systems and computer-aided design (CAD) IT support, and maintaining the CodeWarrior line of embedded development tools.
During his tenure at AMD, where he eventually served as SVP of the Technology Group, Chekib managed leading edge microprocessors, the research group, design engineering, business transformation, and infrastructure and engineering. He also had global operations responsibility for all products, including design engineering, production, quality, and test operations.
As SVP of Customer Excellence at Synopsys, Chekib was responsible for business development of the EDA tools business group and customer engineering support. Prior to that, he was Corporate VP, responsible for AI projects and planning across all businesses in the company.
Chekib has a B.S. in physics and Ph.D. in electronics and physics from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI). He was named a Top 25 Technology Thought Leader and holds multiple patents, including ones covering processors with redundant logic, reprogrammable logic fuse based on a 6-device SRAM cell for logic arrays, double stage sense amplifier for random access memories, and reference voltage generator for CMOS memories. He has been a frequent industry keynote speaker and is the author or co-author of multiple technical articles, including presentations and/or articles on industry productization and innovation and the role of research, experiential computing and the PC of the future, CPU/GPU industry dynamics and technologies, selecting a successful design flow strategy in an evolving semiconductor industry, and next generation network processors and trends toward non-specific architectures.