Management Team

Charlie Hauck
Chief Executive Officer

Hauck has more than 25 years experience in research and development, engineering, marketing and management from within the semiconductor industry. Most recently, he was USA General Manager for Faraday Technology, a fabless ASIC vendor and silicon intellectual property (SIP) provider. From 1998-2003, he served as Vice President of Engineering at Lexra Inc., a microprocessor SIP company. From 1994 to 1998, Hauck was director of application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) development at LSI Logic, responsible for advanced ASIC technology and library development. From 1987 to 1994, he was Director of IC Development at Kendall Square Research, managing the very large scale integration (VLSI) design team responsible for delivering working silicon for its custom chips. Hauck began his career at Commodore, where he completed several VLSI chips and boards for consumer electronics and DSP systems.  Hauck holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rishiyur S. Nikhil, Ph.D.
Chief Technical Officer

Nikhil has spent over 20 years in advanced technical pursuits in industry and academia. Since 2000 he led the Bluespec technology team at Sandburst Corp. For the previous 9 years he was at Cambridge Research Laboratory (DEC/Compaq), including over a year as Acting Director. Earlier, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. He has led research teams, published widely, and holds several patents in functional programming, dataflow and multithreaded architectures, parallel processing and compiling. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, and IFIP WG 2.8 on Functional Programming. He received his Ph.D. and M.S.E.E. in Computer and Information Sciences from the Univ. of Pennsylvania, and his B.Tech in EE from IIT Kanpur.

Bob Votapka
Vice President, Sales

Responsible for sales in US and Asia, Votapka brings over 25 years of successful sales and marketing leadership including senior positions with Cadence, Valid Logic and Telesis Systems.  Votapka was most recently Worldwide Program Director for Enterprise Accounts at Cadence.  Previously at Cadence, he held VP positions in services management, practice development and marketing.  Votapka has built and grown sales, marketing and support teams throughout his career.

George Harper
Vice President, Marketing

Harper brings over 15 years of marketing and engineering experience from the semiconductor, communications, and storage industries. He has overall responsibility for Bluespec's product planning and marketing initiatives. Previously, Harper was Director of Marketing at Trebia Networks where he managed the product planning and marketing initiatives for a storage network processor family. Prior to that, he held senior marketing positions at Conexant Systems (formerly Maker Communications) and Shiva Corporation and engineering positions at LSI Logic, in both California and Massachusetts, specifically in the areas of chip design and microprocessor sales. Harper has a BSEE and MSEE in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard University.