Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top Bristol based Founder operating in the Semiconductor space. If you think a Founder is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Simon Knowles
CTO & Founder of Graphcore
Vice President Strategy & DXP® Technology and Founder Simon is responsible for Icera’s corporate strategy and product roadmap. For the first 7 years of Icera’s evolution Simon served as Vice President Silicon Engineering, delivering Icera’s first two generations of cellular chipsets. Simon is the architect of Icera’s unique DXP® processor technology and continues to direct the evolution of DXP® architecture. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a founder of the company. Prior to Icera, Simon co-founded ADSL chip company Element 14, where he served as Vice President Silicon. Element 14 was acquired by Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM) for $640M in 2000. Simon established Element 14’s design centre in Bristol, UK, and was responsible for the development of Element 14’s digital chips. Simon co-architected the FirePath processor which today enables Broadcom’s unique soft DSL modem technology. Prior to Element 14, Simon led the custom processor design group of STMicroelectronics (NASDAQ: STM), formerly the design team of processor pioneer Inmos in Bristol, UK. Simon started his career at the UK’s Defence Electronics Research Agency, after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in Electrical Science.
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About Graphcore, Icera: Graphcore develops a microprocessor designed for AI and machine learning applications.
Ray McConnell
Founder/CTO of Blu Wireless
Ray brings over 25 years of experience with high performance, low power parallel processor technology. Starting his career with INMOS, he went on to found his first in a series of startups, Division plc, 20 years ago. At his second startup, Ray architected a multi-threaded graphics GP-GPU processor and has developed low-power, scaled heterogeneous maths accelerator SoCs and large imaging supercomputers. He has extensive knowledge of heterogeneous acceleration, compilers and software architectures and their applicability to the ‘difficult’ processing challenges in gigabit signal processing. He brings a broad range entrepreneurial startup experience, taking Division, PixelFusion and Clearspeed to IPO. Ray has 26 US and UK patents granted or filed and holds a computer science and cybernetics degree from the University of Kent.
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About Blu Wireless: Blu Wireless Technology is a silicon IP company developing wireless technology with a faster transmission rate.
Huw Davies
CEO, Founder, Director of Trameto
Huw Davies is a technology business leader with general management, founder roles, product marketing, business development and sales. He has worked in both start-ups and multi-national corporate organisations. His experience spans global business development, operational and financial management, licensing technology transfer, and collaborative research/commercial partnering. Huw’s background is in semiconductors and consumer electronics and he has extensive experience of working in Silicon Valley. He holds a BSc and PhD from Cardiff University and an Executive MBA from the University of Bath.
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About Trameto: Trameto is developing energy management devices for micro energy harvesting technologies enabling the elimination of batteries in the IoT.
Laurence Strong
Founder, COO, Director of Trameto
Laurence Strong is an experienced technical marketer with an electronic engineering background in the semiconductor and consumer electronics industries. He navigates the space between engineering development and customer sales by representing the voice of the customer to ensure a product is fit for market, managing resources to ensure timely delivery and developing partnerships to accelerate development and shorten time to revenues. Laurence has experience working at early stage start-up companies through to global corporations. Laurence has a 1st class BEng degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham.
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About Trameto: Trameto is developing energy management devices for micro energy harvesting technologies enabling the elimination of batteries in the IoT.
Carl Shaw
Founder of Cerberus Security Laboratories
Carl has over 25 years experience of designing, developing, analysing and securing embedded system hardware and software for military and consumer electronics. An experienced entrepreneur, he was co-founder of MathEmbedded Ltd., a well-respected company providing advanced embedded software development services globally in which he also built a software security capability and analysed the security vulnerabilities of a wide range of products. Prior to that, Carl was Technical Leader of the Linux OS team at STMicroelectronics, a global silicon manufacturer. In that role he ran a multinational team that supported customers with complex issues and developed the Linux OS on embedded and proprietary chip architectures. He also developed low-level security software and worked alongside the hardware security architects to ensure that next generation hardware security features could work effectively with complex operating systems. In the past he has also designed embedded system PCBs, programmed too many CPUs of all shapes and sizes to remember, worked in big-data analysis and signal processing and gained a Ph.D. in astrophysics. A regular speaker at events, he is particularly interested in security vulnerabilities at the hardware / software boundary.
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About Cerberus Security Laboratories: Cerberus Security Laboratories is a business that is focused on delivering leading edge embedded system security for connected IoT devices.
