Dr. Naveed Sherwani

Dr. Naveed Sherwani is a world renowned chip expert, researcher, author of several books, serial entrepreneur and academician. He is most well known as a serial entrepreneur and his story is about forming and building companies.

He graduated from NED university in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1983. After NED, he got PhD from university of Nebraska-Lincoln in computer engineering in 1988. And served as a professor at Western Michigan University for six years before joining Intel in 1994. At Intel his worked was focused on design automation of some of the complex chips of that era. He left intel in 2003 and subsequently dedicated his career to entrepreneurship.

He started early and his first company at 18 years of age in Karachi, while he was student at NED, called simply The Coaching Center, went on to become a Technical training college with 225 students and 11 employees within three years. He went on to found several companies including: CSTI, Intel Micro-electronics, Open-Silicon, Brite semiconductors, Anasage, HighSilicon, HighBitCoin, PeerNova, StarFive. LeapFive, ChinaFive, SemiFive, Lampro Mellon, Global Semiconductor Group, GS Microelectronics and Rapid silicon.

He founded Intel Microelectronics Services, in 1999, raising funding from intel capital, where he pioneered Open methodology for EDA.

Later on he founded Open Silicon in 2003 and raised funding from leading VCs including Sequoia, Norwest and Interwest. It went to become a leader in chip Design services and sold it to PE in 2008.

He then founded Brite Semiconductor in China, in 2008, a leading solution provider in China / APAC where money was raised from leading VCs in China including Gobi ventures. It was sold to SMIC in 2012.

Subsequently in 2013, He started three companies: Anasage, an enterprise sales analytics company, Hisilicon, a Serdes Company and PeerNova, a blockchain based financial services company. In 2016, he raised funding for PeerNova from leading VCs include IVP, mosaic ventures among others.

For SiFive, he raised multiple rounds of funding from leading VCs including, Sutterhill, Osage, Spark, and strategics including Intel, Samsung, Hynix, Western Digital, and Xiomen. SiFive become a tech unicorn.

During 2018-2019, he has cofounded four new RISC-V related companies in China, Korea and Pakistan: StarFive, LeapFive and ChinaFive in China, SemiFive in South Korea, and Lampro Mellon in Lahore, Pakistan.

More recently, he has founded Global Semiconductor Group , GS Microelectronics (an OSAT company) and Rapid silicon ( a FPGA company).

Earlier in his career, as a researcher and academic, his area of Research include VLSI, EDA, combinatorics, graph theory and parallel computation. He published several books including the text book on chip Design called “Algorithms for VLSI Physicsl Design Automation”. This book is a standard textbook in graduate classes in most leading universities in the world. He also published over 125 refereed Technical articles in leading publications, and conferences, several of them have received best paper awards.

He also graduated several masters and PhD students over the years. Many of his students, went on to become famous on their Accord, and have gone to found many companies and serve in major international companies.

For his services for Pakistan, Dr. Naveed Sherwani was awarded Sitara-e-Quaidazam in 2019, by President Arif Alvi.